DMCA 2, Freedom 0

Politech is featuring this press release from EFF stating Judge Garrett Brown of the Federal District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, threw out the EFF-Felten case challenging the DMCA after less than 25 minutes of debate. DoJ and RIAA both made motions to dismiss the case, which the court granted. We'll have a story about what occurred at the hearing tomorrow. EFF plans to appeal. In addition, 2600 is reporting that they've lost their Appeal in the 2nd Circuit court.

Comments

Time to stop the madness

[Walter Bell]

This entire DMCA debacle makes me physically ill. I find it hard to believe that in America, the land of the "free", the courts and the legislature uphold laws that obviously fly in the face of free speech and everything that the Bill of Rights stands for.

The only way to fight this very disturbing trend is to grow up and stop hacking. Our programmers need to concentrate on good old fashioned programming projects: improving KDE and Mozilla. Adding more big iron support, filesystems, and other features to the Linux kernel. Making the system more user-friendly. Improving security. These things help everybody and will allow us to overthrow the Microsoft monopoly.

What we don't need right now is more hacking software. We don't need new versions of nmap and SATAN every week. We don't need any more 'sploits published on BUGTRAQ and we don't need any more software to remove content protection. We don't need any new PTP clients. We need to stop the government from passing these Draconian laws and the only way they're going to listen to us is if we can show them that we can behave without regulation.

Face it folks - we are a bunch of powerless individuals, not a large corporation. The EFF's budget is about 1/100th of the smallest RIAA member's lobbying budget. We can't fight them on their own terms so the only way we have to preserve our freedoms is to stop abusing them.

~wally

Re:I guess...

[webword]

You're right. I wan't even close. I was 3rd or 4th. Thanks for taking the bait!

By the way, I really like your use of bold. It is an excellent contrast to the white background. Normally, such high contrast makes reading easier. The human eye is very adapted to contrast, especially white on black and black on white. However, when too much bold is used, it tends to bleed on screens. Also, the very use of bold indicates emphasis. When you use too much of it, it tends to lose its effect. That's a shame because your message is very important.

How do you think we should continue this flame war? We could probably make this really interesting! Do you have any ideas?