DMCA about to become even bigger bogeyman?

Attention, fellow criminals. Under proposed revisions to the DMCA, the following activities could soon find you with a newly expanded federal prison sentence: ripping a copy-protected CD (that you own) to your computer; removing a from your PC; or reading, presumably, almost any of the O'Reilly Hacks books. Per News.com today, the Bush administration's proposed legislation would dramatically expand the powers of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, particularly the part about attempting to circumvent copyright. Right now, you can't distribute any hardware or software that can be used to get around copyright protections--and that little statute already kept a Princeton professor from publishing the fact that he'd found a potentially dangerous copyright-protecting rootkit hidden inside Sony BMG CDs, for fear of going to jail. Well, according to the proposed revision, you also can't really know or talk about anticircumvention tools, either. Oh, well, alrighty, then. I'm sure there will be absolutely no way that will go horribly wrong.