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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 purchased several copies of NAI's PGP for Unix version 5. The CD had a standard license agreement with it. Two years later, I receive a letter from NAI telling me that my license was revoked and I could no longer use the software.
Somehow, I do not think I received my $1500 worth.
I should have known, I asked NAI's sales department for a price quote on NAI virus protection products for the "enterprise" and I never did receive a straight answer.
Thank God for GPG! Works with NAI's PGP plug-ins and it's truly free.
it's too bad that people don't pay more attention to rms when he talks about freedom.
and it's also too bad that people kept doing dev on possibly not free pgp versions instead on truly free implementations of pgp (ie gnupg).
how many times are we going to learn this lesson?
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We tried to buy a site license at work. We needed something that would plug into Outlook Exchange and work with everyone inside and outside the company. But after NAI killed PGP, we tried GPG but there was no plugin for Outlook Exchange (client).
Good product, lots of people wanting to buy it, and no alternative program. If someone came out with a windows office plugin, maybe they could make/start a software company.