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

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

Tuesday's terrible happenings give another reason why this is a particular
current danger. The obvious need to defend society against terrorism is
typically used as a defense for surveillance, censorship, and
intimidation. I, like us all, are concerned about possible future attacks,
but I am also, I hope like us all, even more concerned with what our
society might become like in response to them.

It will make it much harder to fight against measure like this, however
destructive they may be both to our basic liberties and to practical work.

It makes it all the more urgent that we ensure that our contracts and
policies permit all individuals to access specific library material,
printed or electronic, without the need to identify themselves in any
fashion, and that libraries permit for everyone to have unhampered,
uncensored, and unmonitored access to all legally available material.

David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library				
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235


> ---------- 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?