DRM will not be legislated
jamesd at echeque.com
jamesd at echeque.com
Thu Jul 18 19:00:31 PDT 2002
--
> 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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