They will damn well try to legislate DRM

[jamesd at echeque.com]

    --
The camel's nose is already in the tent.

With the Dmitri Sklyarov case, and the DeCSS case, we already have 
bit crimes, where possession of certain software capabilities is 
an illegal act.

Of course, each software capability that is criminalized requires 
other software capabilities to be criminalized.  In the end the 
law has to legalize them all, or else criminalize them all.

In the end, the camel has to be wholly in the tent, with 
programmer licensing, a ban on the sale of new general purpose 
computers to unauthorized people, (expect a spate of television
shows with demonic computer salemen whose lust for profit empowers
international terrorists) and a ban on unauthorized possession of
programming tools, or else the camel has to be wholly out of the
tent, meaning a free hand to break such inconveniences as regional
encoding on DVDs.

The natural instinct of businessmen is to do a deal, and the 
natural instinct of politicians is to compromise and build a 
coalition, but the nature of the beast does not permit compromise. 
In the end, it has to be all illegal, or all legal.  There is no 
alternative to confrontation.  The MPAA already sees this. 
Everyone else has to see it also.   Anyone who tries to compromise 
will find that each compromise requires another, considerably 
greater compromise, in order to make the first compromise 
workable.

With Palladium, Microsoft is promising that they are in favor of 
it all being legal -- but they are building a tool that would be 
mighty handy in making it all illegal. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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