European DMCA

[Nick Hockings]

> Ruben Leote Mendes skrev:
> The directive doesn't mention anything about reverse engineering, so
> it should still be legal.The way I see it you can reverse engineer, for
> instance,the Adobe e-book format and write your own program that 
> _creates_copy protected e-books (*). 
> What you cannot do is write a program to remove the copy protection.
> 
Quoting Anders Lindback <anders at igiro.se>:
> You cant make a competing product using GPL. If you make a viewer you
> are then in violation and will have to spend time in jail. The only way
> for you to view the e-book is by buying the e-book viewer. 
> 
> By controlling the format they would get a monopoly in the market.


Yes but only in the maket of "their own copyright ebooks".
Anyone reading one of these books without a license is breaking
existing copyright law. The new law makes helping somebodyelse 
to do so, an offence. 

The real solution is FDL/GPL ebooks. Thats why we have the Nupedia 
free-encyclopedia in the GNU project, see www.nupedia.com

One good starting point for free-ebooks is to get many schools 
and universities to collaborate in producing teaching notes 
under the FDL. Nupedia provides a framework and a team to help
do this. I urge those of you at universities to look for accademics
of all disciplines willing to do this. It would take a very small 
percentage of accademics in each discipline to produce a set of texts
better than could be written in any single institution.

When it comes to network communication protocols incorporating
"licence verification"/"intelectual property management"
do we want or need to help people disregard copyright?
Surely if someone wishes to use a non-free program they must 
accept the consequences of doing so. If a prorietary software 
company tries to use this as an excuse to prevent networking with
free operating systems then they are in breach of monopoly law.

Rather we should use this tightening of the copyright noose to 
emphasise the importance of freedom and copyleft for the 
general public.

Nick Hockings

Nick Hockings