DRM will not be legislated

[jamesd at echeque.com]

    --
> extremist consumer activists are hurting their cause by  
> conjuring up farfetched scenarios that expose them as kooks.  
> (That last point certainly applies to those here who continue to 
> predict that the government will take away general purpose  
> computing capabilities, allow only "approved" software to run,  
> and ban the use of Perl and Python without a license.  Try  
> visiting the real world sometime!)

Jack Valenti, President and CEO of the MPAA predicts the U.S. 
government will ban technologies that permit unrestricted copying. 
This of course would include such piracy tools as "cp", let alone 
such dangerously powerful hacker tools as Perl.  If we are going 
to have life in prison for hackers, we certainly need to do 
something about Perl.

Here in the real world, someone has done jail time for the  
heinious act of breaking rot 13,  (actually xor with a short  
constant string, which is a slight generalization of the rot 13  
algorithm) and anti terrorist legislation has just been passed  
that would have given him life, supposing that some actual harm  
had supposedly resulted from this major breakthrough.

If our masters propose to put someone in jail for life for  
breaking rot 13, why not life for unauthorized possession of tools 
capable of writing programs that could break rot 13?  

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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