Red Hat puts out Legislation Alert on the SSSCA

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

Comments

Re:Get behind this!

[tim_maroney]

According to this bill the TELNET protocol would be ILLIGAL to use, same with SMTP, any protocol which used plain text transfers would be ILLIGAL:...

Not even remotely true. First off, try the very second paragraph:

Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of (a) or 103(a).

In addition, this bill only applies when private sector representatives have achieved consensus on a security standard for a particular technology. Can you imagine that the Internet standard bodies would create standards that ban all the previous standards on which the Internet is founded and by which it runs?

It's not a good bill, but let's not lie about what it actually is. Sheesh. I mean, the first time this bill was mentioned here, some geek at a Linux zine was claiming it banned all open source software.

Tim

You would be supprised at what people think.

[twitter]

The issues have been confused beyond recognition by the popular media. Those who have little real use for computers also have little or no interest in them or what makes them go. The publishing industry has a much easier time reaching these folks than we do, and a much easier time convincing them that the people who entertain them have some kind of "right to proffit". By the time you finish describing what source code is, your friend will have lost focus. They think you are a pervert for going to the lenghts you might just to avoid comercial software in the first place. It's not easy. People without a real use for a computer constitute the vast majority of the US population. Sure, they may be forced to look at one at work, but they hate it to death and don't recognize the one in their cell phone or VCR.

Try to keep the message simple. The Free Software Foundation still has the best philosophy pages and it's good to memorize the fundamental software freedoms, but don't expect most people to really care. This is a free speach issue and people do understand that. Tell them that it is fundamentally UnAmerican to limit what people do with their own property in their own homes, and that such arbitrary extention of copyright franchises will bite them in the ass later.
Someone pinch me.

Re:You would be supprised at what people think.

[mttlg]

Tell them that it is fundamentally UnAmerican to limit what people do with their own property in their own homes

Unfortunately, laws of this type are nothing new. The earliest law limiting the use of electronic equipment in private that I am aware of dates back to 1934. In this case, the law states that "no one may receive, or assist in receiving, any radio communication to which they are not entitled and use that information for their own benefit," and also outlawed "the manufacture, assembly, possession, and sale of any device primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of such radio transmissions." Sound familiar?

It isn't too big a jump from limiting the private use of radio signals broadcasted in the clear to limiting the private use of locally stored data (any "collateral damage" like the death of free software is just the price for worry-free "copyright protection," or at least that's what the masses will be told). The descrambling of scrambled cable television stations is widely accepted as a criminal act, so that too lends itself to extension to data - you are given the content in a very specific form and are not allowed to do anything that would allow you to gain additional benefit from it.

The only difference in these cases is that you pay for most of the content that would be limited by the SSSCA (in the other cases, the law limits what people who don't pay for the content can do with it), but with SSSCA "protected" content, you aren't paying for the right to use it, you're paying to have the content providers tell you how to use it. You pay for cable, but only the channels the cable company wants you to see for the amount you pay; you pay for a DVD, but only for the use of it on an authorized player and without the ability to make direct digital audio clips or screen captures. History has shown that people will allow the government to tell them how they can use someone else's content, even in their own homes. The purpose of our representative government is to prevent the uninformed masses from making stupid decisions, so the problem here isn't with the people, but instead with the motivations of elected representatives.