Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 23:36:11 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), j_mckitrick@bigfoot.com (J McKitrick), brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <200003212336.QAA12853@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0003220142350.1180-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Mar 22, 2000 02:20:30 AM
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> > > The current situation, of further and stricter controls on digital > > > copying being introduced every year, will work only in a police > > > state. > > > > This is more a RIA thing than anything else. It's driven by the > > recording industry, who have little understanding for technology > > (witness the fact that an image copy of any "encrypted" DVD will > > work just as well as the original). > > > Exactly. But who's making these points out loud? All of the MP3 folks. The Video game console emulation software companies. Some of the home-grown DVD software folks, though no one have been brave (stupid?) enough to volunteer as a lightning rod by integrating a complete and usable package, at least that I know of. > I see hardly any mention of the case at all in the general press, > and most of that is either RIAA/MPAA sympathetic or grossly > misinformed; Well, Time-Warner and the othr media giants believe that they have a lot to lose. The point of the DVD encryption was really to enforce region encoding and to balkanize the market so that the Taiwan/Hong Kong/etc. piracy rings would have to do a bit of work in order to damage the profitability, and that is really more of a time-to-market latency than it is a sinecure. As far as RIA(A) is concerned, the issue is whether recording artists or the recording industry is going to control the sale and distribution of recordings. You could argue that every band releasing MP3s is making a statement. You could also argue for publishing that Stephan King's latest venture is making a statement. > and the few intelligent comments generally come from the "linux > community". The BSD crowd may be "balanced" but change requires > some level of activism, which I feel RMS, ESR et al are much > better at doing. No; they just have the spotlight for the moment, and their 18 minutes may be coming to a close (see the recent ZDNN article, entitled "Linux vs. Linux"). > In fact, if anyone in the general public is > aware of free software as an option, it is because of these > loudmouths; and if sufficient informed opinion is to be built > that the MPAA, RIAA etc start to see reality, or > copyright/patent/IP laws get to be reconsidered, much more work > is needed. MPAA and RIAA have already won, if you look at it this way: you have allowed them to subborn the idea that their product is "software". This is tantamount to seeing a tabloid claiming "Bill Clinton meets with space aliens!"; the gut reaction is to deny the meeting, with an implied acceptance of the idea that "there are space aliens, they're just not interested in talking to Bill". > I really don't see the more mature and seasoned BSD > crowd talking about it at all. But perhaps it's just that they > don't manage to get quoted in the mainstream media. MPAA and RIAA _are_ the mainstream media, and software, at least how computer people define it, needs to be seperately recategorized. Maybe it's time for a new license, which people can get behind, and which can serve as a model for new law. One of the problems with dropping code into the public domain after an escrow period is there needs to be some tort reform along the lines of the public indemnifying the author against causes of action. The GPL people wouldn't get behind this because there's not an escrow repository for the code, and because public domain code is not "protected" from being "enslaved" by "greedy capitolists". Without such a model, I don't see things changing for software any time soon. The problem is that the most vocal advocates of free software don't want it truly free: they want it to have liberty, but not freedom. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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