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DMCA Attacks: NAI Tells Sites To Remove PGP (Updated)
daecabhir writes: "I am on Declan McCullough's excellent policy and technology mailing list, and received this article on Declan's Politech web site. Basically, Network Associates now appears to be using the DMCA to force sites that provide access to the "free" versions of PGP to cease and desist, if this is any indication. Unfortunately, I think that Network Associates may well be within their rights with regards to 'their' intellectual property, even if I disagree with the manner in which they are going about things." Update: 05/22 13:55 GMT by T : Looks like this wasn't the whole story, and in fact NAI was only objecting to a site with the commercial version of its software -- read below for more.
Grant Bayley writes: "The hype being generated by the "NAI pulls out the DMCA stick" postings and the spectre of PGP being "removed from the Internet" is entirely
bogus, and provably so with a little bit of fact checking.
Looking through the Google cache, it becomes very clear very quickly that crypto.radiusnet.net was hosting a copy of the commercial version of the software - not a copy of the PGPi (aka freeware) version of the PGP product. Given that this is the case, NAI is well within their rights to demand the removal of the files.
You can confirm this in the Google Cache.
I think we'll all find that this ends up being less of a problem than it seems to be, and certainly one unworthy of Declan's attention. The first thing to consider is that of the couple of security/crypto archives out there (Wiretapped, munitions.vipul.net, the old zedz.net site, Packetstorm), the crypto.radiusnet.net one is the only one of the group that is out of date, disorganised and discourages mirroring. Look over the site, and you'll see what I mean. The second thing to consider is that (as another poster has already mentioned) PGPi.org has the explicitly freeware versions of the software available on a number of mirrors worldwide, and does not appear to have been made a target here.
Conspiracy theories aside, if they were mirroring commercial versions of the product, NAI is well within their rights to pursue them, and I'm sure the other legitimate crypto/security archive sites will be glad to see crypto.radiusnet.net stop sullying their good names by association.
Richard Stallman was (once again) criticized by some of the slashdot crowd today in this article, about being pedantic, purist, impracticle etc. PGP/GPG is an excellent example of RMS being pedantic and purist, and rightly so.
RMS and the FSF have always been refusing to use PGP, because of its license. They have been critiziced along the same lines for this, since PGP was "free in a practical sense" i.e. free as in free beer, even though it had been written by "good guy" Phil Zimmermann. Today we may be glad that the FSF refused to use PGP, started to write GPG as soon as the RSA patent expired (i.e. as it was legally possible to write a clone without infringing on patents).