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.

Comments

Re:Are you trolling?

[corebreech]

Dude, I've read through all of Schneier's "Applied Cryptography", First Edition, and spent many an hour comparing his Second Edition with his first.

Read "Secrets and Lies" too.

I've implemented in C any number of encryption algorithms, have invented a few of my own too actually (yes I know, LOL.) I got OpenSSL to compile and work the way I wanted in both Linux and Windows environments, um, OpenSSH too. PAM. Etc.

I'm no super-duper-math-genius or anything, but then, clearly, neither are you.

I think you're just having a bad day. A lot of people here don't get the pussy they need, and I'm thinking we should elect you as our leader... you've got all the symptoms and you don't seem to mind showing it. I salute you.

But if anybody is trolling here, it is you.