Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:53:36 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Copyright law, again... Message-ID: <15116.1840.41725.498698@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010523121004.050bea20@localhost> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010523114809.050d03e0@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20010523121004.050bea20@localhost>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> types: > At 12:02 PM 5/23/2001, James Howard wrote: > >The DCMA is simply a corporate power grab. It would have happened with or > >without the Free Software Foundation. > I do not believe that it would have happened, or contained the provisions > it did, were it not for Napster, Stallman, Barlow, and others who rallied > consumers to use the Internet to grab content without paying. The same > is true of UCITA. The war was escalated, and both sides took extreme > positions. Typical glass pucky. The DMCA is a response to people simply hacking around the previous copyright protection technologies in order to retain their fair use rights. If you believe that there isn't a way to keep people from defeating those technologies, making trying to defeat them illegal is an obvious next step. The only thing that would have prevented the DMCA - or something very like it - from coming into being would have been if people didn't trivial defeat things like SMCS. What the people behind DMCA are using it for is an excellent indication of what caused it to be crafted. It's being used to try and prevent people from telling others how to play DVDs on their computers, to keep researchers from publishing their research, and by CRQ to threaten people publishing cuecat decoding algorithms. None of these things involve copying content over the internet. For a quick overview of UCITA - and why Librarians are worried about it - see the American Library Association page on it at <URL: http://www.ala.org/washoff/ucita.html >. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?15116.1840.41725.498698>