Re: Text of SSSCA, Anti-SSSCA petition asks Congress not to passdraft bill

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Further to this topic, a re-post from cni-copyright list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 10:28:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bryan Taylor <bryan_w_taylor@yahoo.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cni-copyright@cni.org>
Subject: Re: Text of SSSCA,
      Anti-SSSCA petition asks Congress not to pass draft bill

The purpose of this bill is to let the copyright industry and the hardware
industry jointly choose a standard for digital rights managment. It will
then be illegal to sell any media device, including computers, that does
not comply with the standard. Existing computers will be exempted.

Digital rights management will fail in the marketplace without this bill,
so this bill is a battle for the future of the concept.

Reasons to oppose this bill:

1) It is fascist.

2) It will direct all computer security functions to a single point of
failure

3) It will hurt already weak PC sales -- who wants a crippled PC?

4) Kiss fair use goodbye, unless you are willing to break the law

5) The technical implications of supporting hardware with areas protected
from administrator control are unknown, and most likely very, very bad.
For example, you will not be able to de-frag drives with such copy
protection.

6) This is fundamentally incompatible with open source software, which is
currently is 27% of server deployments and 2% desktops, and an unknown but
solid percentage of the embedded market

7) This technology, no matter how good, will be cracked immediately.
Trusted client systems are provably insecure.

This is another escalation beyond the DMCA by the Copyright Industry. The
courts have a little more time to fix the situation before it gets really
ugly. I've said before that I don't think the combined forces of the
Copyright Industry and the government have any chance at all to stop file
sharing. I'm just fascinated that they actually think they can be
successful by trying.

By the way, recent surveys show that the number of people trading mp3s
online and the number of files traded have increased substantially since
Napster was shut down. What does it mean when 70 million people break the
law in spite of a Court ruling?