At 6:27 PM -0700 7/21/01, David Honig wrote:
At 01:47 PM 7/21/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
As Declan and others have said, this may be the last time a DefCon is held in the U.S. (Not that other countries are necessarily better. Attendees in Canada may face arrest by the Mounties for hate crimes, for violating the Teale-Homulka censorship, for working for a magazine which has broken Canadian laws, etc. And as the Henson case showed, the Canadian SWAT ninjas are perfectly willing to do a "take down" when their bosses to the south order it.)
--Tim May
All this argues for anonymously coded projects, etc. But that means you can't get credit for novel research. This is one of the ways that the DCMA is counter to historically unimpeded research & innovation ---Its not rational for profs sans tenure to work without credit.
DCMA, it seems to me, has always been about "freezing things in place." Large corporations like nothing more than having a powerful central government freeze the status quo. As I have written about several times, large chip companies _say_ they dislike the bureaucratic hoops they are forced to jump through, with OSHA and Labor and Justice and EPA and all the rest. But the fact is that a big chip company can easily hire the floors of people it takes to satisfy the bureaucrats, but a small upstart competitor cannot handle the blizzard of papers. And big companies love it when little competitors are frozen out. The DCMA is just another way to freeze out innovation. Those who try to do nearly any research on copy protection, crypto, locks, software tools face the likelihood that they are violating the DCMA in various ways. Hey, even *I* am in violation of the DCMA. Had the DCMA been in effect in the 1950s, the Xerox Corporation and its execs and engineers probably would have faced charges for producing a "circumvention device" for enabling copyright violators. What, really, is the difference between a Xerox machine and something that allows copies of electronic text? (Both have alternate uses besides pirating. Backups, for example.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns