TidBITS#656/18-Nov-02
=====================
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is widely regarded as
terrible legislation, but how far will its influence extend? Adam
weighs in on the DMCA's impending damage to culture and
innovation. Also in this issue, Kevin Savetz provides an update on
the state of V.92 modems, we note the releases of BBEdit 7.0 and
SpamSieve 1.2, and Microsoft surprises us with a familiar face
amid its Ms. M.o.X.i.e. contest semifinalists. Lastly, Adam turns
35 today!
Topics:
MailBITS/18-Nov-02
V.92 Picks Up Speed
The Evil That Is the DMCA
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MailBITS/18-Nov-02
------------------
**Bare Bones Releases BBEdit 7.0** -- One wouldn't expect to make
a big deal out of a text editor, yet we've run across people who
think the Finder is nothing more than an obstacle to launching
BBEdit. Bare Bones Software has updated its flagship application
to version 7.0, incorporating a number of improvements such as
making it easier to work on files from multiple Web sites, support
for editing rectangular regions of text, Quartz text smoothing,
a Paste Previous Clipboard command, and more. A full version of
BBEdit 7.0 costs $180; owners of BBEdit Lite, Adobe GoLive, or
Macromedia Dreamweaver can cross-upgrade for $120. Those upgrading
from earlier versions can pay $50 until 31-Dec-02, or $60 after
01-Jan-03 if you're running BBEdit 6.1 or earlier (BBEdit 6.5
owners retain the $50 pricing going into 2003). If you happened
to purchase and register BBEdit 6.5 on or after 01-Sep-02,
disregard the previous details and expect your free upgrade
within the next two to three weeks. [JLC]
<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit.html>
<http://store.barebones.com/bbedit-free-upgrade.html>
**SpamSieve 1.2.1 Adds Email Clients** -- Apple has made a big
deal out of the spam filtering method that its Mail program uses
to weed out unwanted email. Now, a similar technology is available
for a variety of email clients with Michael Tsai's SpamSieve
1.2.1. Put simply, SpamSieve learns to recognize the particular
spam you receive based on the spam and legitimate messages you
use to train it. What's especially nice about SpamSieve is that
all the training and dealing with spam takes place in your email
program, rather than in an unfamiliar interface. The latest
version adds support for Eudora 5.2 and Emailer (SpamSieve also
supports Entourage, Mailsmith, and PowerMail), decodes Base64
and quoted-printable text parts, and offers better logging and
manipulating of the corpus of words that it uses. SpamSieve
1.2.1 is a free upgrade for owners of previous versions; new
registrations cost $20 shareware, so you can test it before
paying. SpamSieve requires Mac OS X 10.1 or later, and is a
1.4 MB download. [JLC]
<http://www.c-command.com/spamsieve/>
**Microsoft Contest Acknowledges Women in Business** -- We make a
practice of keeping up on what's happening in the Mac world, but
some things still catch us off guard. It turns out that Microsoft
has been running a contest aimed at acknowledging and promoting
female entrepreneurs (and Microsoft Office X as well, of course).
Although we were worried about it being a thinly veiled pseudo-
beauty contest, Microsoft is pretty clear about how the point of
picking "Ms. M.o.X.i.e." is to find a businesswoman who uses Macs
and Microsoft Office in innovative ways. Encouraging women to
start and run businesses is a worthy goal. Microsoft has picked
10 semifinalists from an undisclosed number of entries and is
asking the Macintosh community to vote for three finalists until
29-Nov-02. Microsoft will then chose the eventual winner from
the finalists by 04-Dec-02. We're a little depressed there are no
minorities represented among the semifinalists; Microsoft wouldn't
reveal the number of entrants to us, but our suspicion is that
there simply weren't many applicants overall. The prize is real:
$10,000 and a new iMac with Microsoft Office X.
If we were caught off guard at not having heard of the contest
before now (it started in early October), we were shocked to
learn that our friend and colleague Toby Malina was one of the
semifinalists. We shouldn't have been surprised - Toby's a perfect
example of the kind of person Microsoft is looking for: the senior
field technician for One World Journeys (a company creating online
wilderness expeditions with digital photojournalists), a freelance
book author and editor, and co-founder and Technical Director of
Avondale Media (a software training DVD company). She's a force
of nature (and for those of you who pay attention to television,
yes, her brother Joshua has had a small role on The West Wing
recently). Although we won't say more than that we're voting for
Toby, we do encourage you to vote after reading the bios of the
semifinalists for great stories of women who have achieved success
in the business world using Macs. [ACE]
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/officex/contests/votemain.asp>
V.92 Picks Up Speed
-------------------
by Kevin Savetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back in TidBITS-580_, I wrote an article about V.92, then a new
analog modem standard that was just starting to appear on store
shelves. A year and a half later, V.92 isn't exactly a household
word, but it can make your Internet connection faster and more
pleasant.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06431>
If you use an analog modem to get on the Internet, you need all
the speed you can get. Almost 80 percent of U.S. Internet users
still use 56K modems that download 50 kilobits per second (Kbps)
on a good day. V.92 offers the hope of accelerating that slow lane
of the Internet, but Internet service providers and computer
manufacturers have been slow to adopt it.
V.92 offers four major new features: "Modem on-hold" lets you take
an incoming call when you're online, then return to the Internet
connection; "quick connect," which should cut in half the time
a modem takes to establish a connection; better compression for
faster downloads of text files and the HTML portions of Web pages;
and upload speeds of 48 Kbps, up from 33.6 Kbps in older (V.90)
modems.
<http://www.v92.com/>
But none of those features works unless your Internet service
provider upgrades its hardware. Until very recently, only
local and regional ISPs have made a point of supporting - and
promoting - V.92. United Online, the parent company of NetZero
and Juno, is the first national ISP to offer V.92 access
nationwide officially.
<http://www.irconnect.com/untd/pages/news_releases.shtml?d=31885>
<http://www.netzero.com/>
<http://www.juno.com/>
America Online, EarthLink, MSN, and AT&T WorldNet have yet to
announce V.92 support, but many users have discovered unadvertised
V.92 access numbers, as those services' backbone providers upgrade
hardware. America Online has quietly begun to note which of its
access numbers provide V.92 access. The Web site Modemsite.com
lists other Internet service providers that support V.92.
<http://access.web.aol.com/>
<http://www.modemsite.com/56k/v92isp.asp>
**Mac Support for V.92** -- If you purchased a Mac recently, you
may have a V.92 modem and not know it. Many manufacturers include
V.92 modems, but their Web sites don't always make that clear.
Apple reportedly provides V.92 modems in all currently shipping
hardware, although the iMac's technical specification page claims
it has a V.90 modem.
For users who have tried it, the favorite feature is usually modem
on-hold. Everyone wants more speed, but modem on-hold can save you
money: if you currently have a second phone line just for your
modem, you can drop back to a single line with call waiting. Mac
OS X 10.2 Jaguar is the first version of Mac OS to support modem
on-hold - when you have an incoming phone call, a window appears
to alert you. If you take the call, you can talk from 30 seconds
to 16 minutes, depending on how long your ISP lets you put it
on hold.
The other features - quick-connect and faster transfer speeds -
are invisible to the operating system, so will work with any
version of Mac OS, as long as your ISP supports those features.
I recently compared two external V.92 modems, both under $100,
to a V.90 modem. The two new modems negotiated faster connection
speeds, and V.92 seems more tolerant of phone-line eccentricities.
Large, text-heavy Web pages typically appeared a few seconds
sooner using the V.92 modems, but there was little difference
on graphics-heavy pages.
Anyone with a V.92 modem should check its manufacturer's Web site
for firmware updates, since most companies are still fine-tuning
their implementations of this protocol.
[Kevin Savetz has been a freelance computer/technology journalist
for a decade.]
<http://www.savetz.com/>
PayBITS: Did something about this article connect with you?
Consider supporting Kevin's work with a few bucks via PayPal!
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Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
The Evil That Is the DMCA
-------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Much has been written about what's wrong with the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After all, it's been used to
jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications,
and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to
the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. In
a white paper about the unintended consequences of the DMCA, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the DMCA chills free
expression and scientific research, jeopardizes fair use, and
impedes competition and innovation. In short, this is a law
that only the companies who paid for it could love.
<http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html>
<http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html>
<http://anti-dmca.org/>
Just who are we talking about here? Primarily the large movie
studios and record labels, who own the copyrights on vast
quantities of content and who have been working with one
another and via their industry associations, the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA), to control how we are allowed
to interact with that content. Their unity of purpose and storm-
trooper tactics have led some to dub them the "Content Cartel."
<http://www.riaa.org/>
<http://www.mpaa.org/>
However, the DMCA is merely one link in a chain that's being used
by the Content Cartel and many others to restrict access to the
shared cultural heritage of the world, and in the process, extract
money from our pockets, stifle innovation and competition, and
protect entrenched interests.
**DMCA and Trusted Systems** -- I recently attended a talk by
Professor Tarleton Gillespie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> of Cornell
University in which he made a compelling argument for how the
Content Cartel is using the legal force of the DMCA to direct
us down a path where content cannot exist outside of a "trusted
system," which is a set of hardware, software, and file formats
that all agree on what the user is allowed to do with a piece
of content. (The trust here is between the pieces of the system,
because the content owners don't trust their customers at all.)
The trusted system's goals are simple - to eliminate all
unauthorized uses and create a situation where we pay more
for the content we consume.
A trusted system could prevent you not only from copying a CD or
DVD, but also from listening to the CD more than a certain number
of times in a day or skipping commercials on a DVD or on broadcast
television. Along with requiring us to buy new hardware to play
such content and buy new protected versions of the content we
already own, a trusted system could have another ill effect.
That's because it could prevent us from working with content we
would create, using tools such as those Apple kindly provides
in iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto. In the worst case scenario,
Apple could lose not just the Mac's current digital media
advantage in the marketplace, but the ability to work with
digital media at all. See Cory Doctorow's article on the broadcast
flag in TidBITS-642_ for more on this disturbing possibility.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06901>
Professor Gillespie illustrated how this could happen with a
discussion of the awkwardly named Content Scramble System (CSS),
used to prevent people from copying DVDs, and the DeCSS software
created by a Norwegian teenager with help from others on the
Internet to build a Linux DVD player.
(A brief aside: DeCSS violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention
provisions, which ban devices or services that are designed
primarily to circumvent copy prevention technologies, that
have only limited commercially significant purpose other than
circumvention, or that are marketed for circumvention. The
DMCA was signed into law in large part to bring the U.S. into
compliance with a pair of World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO) treaties that require anti-circumvention protections in
the copyright law of signatory nations. You might think Norway
would be included among the nations signing these WIPO treaties,
but in fact, only 37 countries have signed on, including the U.S.
and Japan, along with the likes of Kyrgyzstan, Gabon, and
Paraguay. We're not talking about full international support here,
especially in contrast to the 149 signatories to the more general
and long-standing Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary
and Artistic Works.)
<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/wct/>
<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/berne/>
In particular, Professor Gillespie focused on three defenses used
in the court case filed against Eric Corley, publisher of the
hacker magazine 2600, by eight movie studios to prevent 2600 from
publishing the DeCSS software. Although Eric Corley didn't create
DeCSS, he made it available on the 2600 Web site. His lawyers'
defenses focused on ways DeCSS might escape the anti-circumvention
provisions in the DMCA, which was the law under which the case was
being tried.
Let's look at these defenses, all of which the court eventually
dismissed in ruling for the movie studios and enjoining 2600
magazine from posting the DeCSS code. A subsequent appeal also
failed, and the defendants chose not to appeal again to the
Supreme Court (probably a wise move - this particular case
struck me as fairly weak).
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20000830_ny_amended_opinion.pdf>
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/20011128_ny_appeal_decision.html>
**Create a Linux Player** -- The primary defense that Eric
Corley's legal team, funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF), advanced was that CSS was reverse engineered and DeCSS
written to further the development of a DVD player for Linux,
which allegedly had no way of playing DVDs at the time (four
players are available now; see the Linux Journal review linked
below for details). Unfortunately, the judge deemed the defense
utterly irrelevant because the DMCA offers no relief based on
motivation. In short, if a technology violates the DMCA's anti-
circumvention provisions, the purpose for which that technology
was created simply doesn't matter. The judge also wasn't impressed
with the fact that DeCSS is actually a Windows program, so
although it could be argued that it was a necessary step in
the creation of a Linux DVD player, it's a weak argument.
<http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5644>
The obstacle that actually lies in the way of creating a DVD
player is the lack of a key to decrypt the CSS encryption used on
DVDs. The _only_ way to come by such a key is to sign a contract
licensing CSS from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA),
a group made up of companies representing the movie studios,
consumer electronics companies, and the computer industry. At
$15,500, the licensing cost is not usurious, but the contract
effectively prevents individuals and small organizations from
licensing CSS. For instance, in the event of a material breach
of contract, the licensee is liable for $1 million, and damages
can grow to a maximum of $8 million. In addition, the contract
prevents licensees from reverse engineering CSS or working in
any way counter to the goal of CSS's protection of DVDs.
Put simply, the CSS license is the sort of thing only large
companies can reasonably sign, so it's clear that the effect of
the DVD CCA contract is to keep newcomers out of the cozy little
club. Perhaps that wasn't a likely concern before the age of the
Internet, but the rise of Linux and the open source movement shows
that small, informal groups organized over the Internet can
produce software that threatens the largest of companies.
The end result here is that innovation is stifled. Companies
that license CSS cannot, even if they wanted to, produce products
that consumers might like to buy, such as DVD recorders that
could copy a DVD. That keeps new companies, niche players, or
even independent programmers from competing with the consumer
electronics giants with innovative features that in any way run
afoul of CSS. So although the consumer electronics companies might
not have minded consumers copying DVDs, since they would sell the
equipment to make that happen, it's worthwhile for them to abide
by CSS to eliminates potential competition.
Equally as problematic is that the CSS license's numerous
requirements force the consumer electronics firms to be
technologically responsible for regulating our movie viewing
and copying behaviors _for_ the studios. Signing this draconian
contract is an all-or-nothing deal, so the movie studios have
cleverly managed to pass off the dirty work of technological
regulation on everyone else (they just produce the content; the
DVD and player manufacturers must implement CSS). It's a big step
toward a trusted system in which all the parties are bound by
the CSS contract.
(As an aside, another effect of the CSS contracts is also to move
the entire issue from the world of copyright law, where there is
at least some presumption of needing to benefit the public, into
the world of contract law, which doesn't give a damn about the
public good. If this continues to the logical extreme, the concept
of copyright, and unauthorized access to any content, could be
locked up forever in simple contracts that lie underneath a
trusted system's technologies, all backed up by the DMCA's anti-
circumvention provisions.)
**Perform Encryption Research** -- Another defense that Eric
Corley's lawyers put forth was that DeCSS was created as research
into the CSS encryption method, since the DMCA does allow copy-
prevention technologies to be circumvented for encryption
research. However, the DMCA specifically requires that the
encrypted copy be obtained lawfully and that the person performing
the research make a good faith effort to obtain authorization
in advance. In addition, the decryption tools from such research
may be shared only with collaborators for good faith research
purposes - in other words, distributing these tools publicly
isn't kosher.
Note the words "good faith" above. In determining whether
encryption research is good faith, the judge said the court must
determine whether the results are disseminated in a way that
advances the state of knowledge of encryption technology, whether
the person is engaged in legitimate study of work in encryption,
and whether the results are communicated to the copyright owner
in a timely fashion. Deciding that none of these tests were true
of Eric Corley, the judge dismissed out of hand the claims that
DeCSS had protection under the encryption research exception to
the DMCA.
Looking past the specifics of this case, consider the ways in
which encryption research is considered to be in good faith.
You must be a legitimate researcher, have a goal of advancing
the state of knowledge, and have at least made an effort to get
authorization from the copyright owner. Now think about how these
requirements completely disenfranchise the interested individuals
and the Internet technical geek community. What does it take
to be considered a legitimate researcher - a white coat, thick
glasses, and a job with a university, corporation, or government
body?
What we're seeing here is how the DMCA in essence props up the
status quo, denying that legitimate research could be done outside
the halls of academia or a company's R&D department. Left on
the outside are the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the
troublemakers... oh hell, go read the rest of "Here's to the
crazy ones" from Apple's Think Different ad campaign for yourself.
Whether we're talking about Apple's target audience or the open
source community that has had Microsoft running scared is
immaterial. The point is that the DMCA, supported by this court
ruling, prevents that sort of person from doing anything that's
not sanctioned.
<http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/>
**Report as a Journalist** -- A third defense that Eric Corley's
lawyers offered was that posting DeCSS was protected by the First
Amendment's protection of the press, and by the First Amendment
in general. It took the judge significantly longer to dispose of
this defense, since free speech issues are notoriously tricky,
but in the end, he concluded that the speech in this case is
content-neutral due to the functional nature of the DeCSS code.
He then went on to note that regulation of content-neutral speech
is acceptable if it "advances the government's interests" and
that preventing the copying of digital works is a government
interest due to the existence of the Copyright Clause in the U.S.
Constitution and the importance to the U.S. economy of exporting
copyrighted materials.
If you haven't looked at the Constitution recently, the Copyright
Clause reads, "To promote the progress of science and useful
arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Personally, I come down on the side of copyright existing to
benefit society through the progress of science and the useful
arts, and only secondarily to give authors and inventors exclusive
rights. By my reading, the government interest thus lies in
promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, and
there's no question that the DMCA eliminates progress.
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html>
But I digress. The final result of the case was that Eric Corley
and 2600 may not post DeCSS on their Web site or knowingly link
their Web site to any other site on which DeCSS is posted. The
decision was worded carefully so that linking in general would
not be affected by the DMCA, but only in cases where "those
responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the
offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is
circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and
(c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating
that technology."
In other words, it's acceptable to link to DeCSS if your intent
is not to disseminate DeCSS, but merely to report on its
availability, a fact I proved to my satisfaction with a trivial
Google search on "download DeCSS" that provided over 17,000 hits,
many of them still functional. You can verify this for yourself;
just remember that DeCSS is only for Windows.
<http://www.google.com/search?q=download+DeCSS>
Here's where Professor Gillespie's argument becomes a bit more
speculative. Although the court went no further in this case,
he suggested that in any future cases in which the legitimacy of
linking was called into question, he felt that the court would
include in its deliberation the nature of the publication in
question. For example, if the New York Times chose to link to
DeCSS or some other technology that violated the DMCA (as in fact
the San Jose Mercury News and Wired News have, in making the point
that a ban on linking is seriously problematic), he felt that the
court would have little trouble accepting the journalistic intent
of the link. On the other hand, if some silly little electronic
newsletter aimed at Macintosh and Internet users were to perform
the same action, he was concerned that it would be more difficult
to make the same defense. And if TidBITS wouldn't match up to
the journalistic level of the New York Times in the eyes of a
theoretical court, what about a blogger?
The end result would be that this court's interpretation of the
DMCA could have the same effect of stabilizing the large news
organizations in favor of the small newsletters and bloggers who
are redefining what journalism means in today's Internet-enabled
world. Speaking as someone who has done some of that redefining
over the last 12 years, that worries me.
**"Regime of Arrangement"** -- In the end, Professor Gillespie
argues that the true power of the DMCA is not so much related
to its effect on copyright but these ways it weaves established
organizations like large manufacturing corporations, research
universities, and media conglomerates into what Professor
Gillespie calls a "regime of arrangement."
Don't assume that these established institutions are necessarily
being co-opted against their will. Apple's Think Different
campaign reads like a manifesto for the very people who are
disenfranchised under this regime of arrangement, and yet Apple is
a member of the DVD CCA, and, obviously, a licensee of CSS for the
DVD hardware and software that comes with the Mac. The open source
community has proved the power of teams of independent programmers
as an alternative to the traditional software development model,
not to mention the ivory towers of research institutions. Distance
education hints at the decline of the traditional university, and
entrenched media organizations have struggled for years with the
way the Internet lets anyone be a publisher.
If there's one theme we take into the 21st century, it's
decentralization, and you can see it everywhere. The PC overtaking
the mainframe, Napster changing the face of music distribution
despite the recording industry's best efforts, DeCSS causing the
movie studios conniptions, Linux successfully challenging the
mighty Microsoft's server operating systems, even the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - all are
examples of the power of decentralization and the ever-increasing
clash between these forces of decentralization and the centralized
power structures that control everything about our world. I have
no answers here, but I'd note that despite the awesome power of
both systems, I'm seeing the forces of decentralization making
significant inroads.
**What Can We Do?** I've been attending a number of talks on
copyright and intellectual property issues at Cornell over the
last year. Almost without exception, the talks are warnings of
dark times ahead (obviously, most are slanted toward the academic
and library worlds), but at the same time, none have offered any
suggestions for how we can work to reverse the efforts on the part
of the Content Cartel to lock up our cultural heritage and stifle
innovation for the future.
At a recent talk by Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy
and Technology (CDT), I chatted with Alan afterwards about this
problem, and he agreed it was a concern, but had no silver bullet
to prevent the hordes of well-funded Content Cartel lobbyists from
having their way with our elected representatives. I, too, have
trouble knowing what will be effective, but I offer these
possibilities.
<http://www.cdt.org/>
* Spread the word to everyone you know. In most cases, the best
argument is probably that the entire situation is a move on the
part of big business to make everyone buy new consumer electronics
and new copies of all of their content. If the Content Cartel gets
their way, it _will_ cost you. In some situations, making the
intellectual commons argument - that our culture needs access
to its cultural heritage to grow - can be effective, though it's
generally too abstract. Try to avoid sounding like a zealot (I
know it's hard: every time I hear of the latest attempt on the
part of these companies to criminalize their customers, it makes
me want to spit.)
* Support civil liberties organizations like the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) and CDT that are working to protect
our rights. As you'll see in the PayBITS block at the end of
this article, I plan to donate all the proceeds from this
article to the EFF to help do my part.
<http://www.eff.org/>
* Between 19-Nov-02 and 18-Dec-02, write to the Library of
Congress with any evidence you can provide on whether non-
infringing uses of certain types of copyrighted materials are
likely to be adversely affected by the DMCA's anti-circumvention
mechanisms. To get an idea of what they're looking for, I highly
recommend reading Dan Bricklin's "Copy Protection Robs the Future"
essay, in which he talks about his efforts to post an original
copy of VisiCalc, the ground-breaking spreadsheet program he
created.
<http://www.copyright.gov/1201/comment_forms/>
<http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm>
* Express your concerns to your elected representatives whenever
appropriate. EFF maintains an "action center" that makes it
extremely easy to write your appropriate representatives. While
you're at it, you might ask how it is that an entire industry
is allowed to create a restrictive technology like CSS, require
highly limiting contracts, and influence legislation (the DMCA).
One of the industry witnesses in the Corley case testified that
this three-pronged approach was exactly what the movie studios
aimed at creating. Ironically, given that the end goal is a
"trusted system," this sounds a whole lot like the legal
definition of a trust, which is a combination of corporations
for the purpose of reducing competition and controlling prices
throughout an industry.
<http://action.eff.org/>
I have to admit, I'm worried that none of this will be enough.
The Content Cartel has the aura of celebrity on their side -
they're "protecting" the rock stars and movie stars who sit at
the pinnacle of today's society. They're the cool kids, whereas
the people who campaign for civil liberties are often considered
dull and overly earnest. My main ray of hope is that the reason
most of the software industry voluntarily gave up copy protection
technologies - primarily that consumers hated copy protection -
will rise again, but unless we speak out now, all of our content
may be locked up in a trusted system protected by the DMCA.
PayBITS: Is this is an important article on an important topic?
Adam will donate all of this article's PayBITS proceeds to the EFF!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
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