I agree. The verdict of the lower court was very well reasoned. Also, since the law will change anyway (for the worse) in less than a year, it is very, very hard to understand why they do this.
There's only one thing in the verdict that was not completely clear, and that would be the conclusion if the prosecutors had tried to prove that DeCSS had been used for unauthorized copying. They didn't try to prove that, and that was noted in the verdict. That might be one thing they will try to work on I guess.
Right now, there is no news, really, other than "yeah, we'll appeal". They have to come up with the documents by tomorrow, that is when the interesting things happen.
Another thing I can't understand that there are somebody who would want to put their career on the line for this case. The reaction after the acquittal was pretty clear among computer professionals and the press, it was a win for consumers and a big loss for Økokrim.
On one hand, I really hope they get another big loss, OTOH, it is hardly something to cheer for that we do not have a working computer crime unit. If somebody breaks into my box, I want them spanked, but I really can't report any such breakin to a police unit as corrupt as ours, as that would lend their objectionable political agenda some legitimity. I think many if not most of Norway's computer professionals feel the same.
I've got my parents over on Linux, but what I find painful is configuring all the MIME-types. It's just two users, but still it is painful.... They keep calling and asking what they do wrong every time they bump into a new MIME type...
They're using KDE, and KDE allready has a pretty good idea what to do, so the ideal solution would be to use the KDE file associations in Mozilla.
I've had that question in my journal for a while and eventually I asked on kde-linux. Nobody had anything.
Anybody have any better solutions here?
The obvious thing to do is to write a script to parse KDE's config and create Mozilla's mimeTypes.rdf, but I haven't time to do that...
Tim Berners-Lee has a very clear opinion on this matter, have a look at the "Hall of Flame" in his Links and Law: Myths-page:
In 2002, A Danish court made an injunction preventing a Danish news filtering service (effectively a sort of search engine) from linking to pages of a Danish newspaper. See the slashdot article. I assume that the appeals process will clear up this after this time of writing (2002/07). If such decisions are accepted, the whole working of the web would break down.
I haven't been able to dig up more on the story. How are the appeals going, for example? I'm not sure it is a good idea to route around the court before you have gone through all possible appeals, especially since they've got TimBL on their side.
Well, if you get thrown in jail for not letting it take control over you, then it is not so much a matter of individual choices anymore.
Of course, we can always try to destroy what you are creating, illegal or not, if it gets out of hand. Would you want that? If it did get out of hand, and it would need to be destroyed, then what would you say?
You have a huge responsibility for the things that you develop, Brian, are you ready to assume that responsibility?
Parts of the interview was very nice indeed, and it would certainly be cool to see what a dedicated processor for crypto can do for us.
Yet, I do not feel very confident, after reading how he tries to avoid question concerning the newspeak on what "trust" is supposed to mean. OK, so any technology can be used for good and bad, that is clear.
It is my firm belief that technologists have a great responsibility for the things that they make, because no one is better suited to understand the consequences of the tech that they develop than the techie himself.
So, just referring to TCPA and what they say, what their goals are, and so on, it doesn't cut it. Brian has a moral duty to try to understand what motives drive the stuff that he is doing, and if he thinks that these motives are bad, he has a moral duty to speak up about it.
I really haven't seen anything non-fuzzy from TCPA about what their real motives are, but one thing I know: If the real goal is to take away the control of the technology each individual uses away from the individiual, it will be the most drastic step towards an authoritarian society.
Few are better suited than Brian to examine these issues, and with that comes a huge responsibility to make sure that the technology he is developing does not move society in that direction.
After reading this interview, I do not feel confident that Brian takes this responsibility seriously enough.
Actually, that's (one of the reasons) why I argue that having liability for the software you sell would be a Good Thing[tm] for Free Software.
First, I said "for software you sell", which means, it is not the individual developers who are liable, liability follows the money. Distro-makers would be liable for the product they sell. As well, of course, as vendors of proprietary software.
Liability would mean that the distro-makers actually get a product, they sell a warranty, and that warranty would mean that they would have to more carefully audit the code of the software they sell. Thus, they could ask higher prizes, then they could afford to employ more hackers to audit the code. Net result, we all gain, because the code that makes it into commercial distros gets more professional attention.
Also, since we all know that Free Software is better from the outset than proprietary counterparts, we would get a head start, and M$ would spiral down as they get hit with big law-suits...;-)
Well, in Norway, it would be illegal anyway. Sending advertisments require explicit consent around here, and this requirement implies that any such checkboxes must be unchecked by default.
Which is a default that any marketer with respect for his customers would use, but alas, there are so few of them.
I just posted this comment to his comments section:
I think that what you completely fail to think about is that the only thing that is changing, is that publishers do not anymore have a veto.
Certainly, literary critics will become more important in the future. Those people adding value by aiding people in finding the gems and improving writing of the writers are not going to disappear. No, they will obviously become more important as the amount of stuff increases.
But they do not anymore have a veto, as publishers had before. That's the only real difference.
I agree with most of your points. I think we are about to see that "Open Source" was a big mistake. It is going to be very hard to argue that when MS opens the source code for certain parts of their products, the restrictions will not matter, very few will understand that it isn't like what we are providing.
I acknowledge, however, that "Free Software" is not a good term either. But for those of us who speak Real Languages[tm], lets make sure that we use terms like "software libre", "fri programvare", etc.
I think this is going to be of great strategic importance.
IANAL, but the funny thing about criminal charges is that usually, you can't get convicted unless the law specifically states that what you did was illegal. That's how it is around here, anyway.
So, basically, if somebody cracks your box, and runs away with something valuable in there, well, you might call it stealing, but the defence will argue that "no, it isn't stealing, because the cracker didn't delete the valuables, so you still have it, no theft."
The courts should go, "uh, ok", because it is not up to the courts to stretch the laws to fit this scenario, it is up to the politicians. They should have made it specifically clear that this behaviour is undesirable. That's their job. That's why you have this separation of powers.
OK, this was perhaps a rather lame example, so if you haven't got my drift, let us take the opposite example: The Jon Johansen case.
The prosecutor had after a couple of years of digging come up with an indictment that had to do with a law that originally prohibited opening other people's letters and go nosing around in their hiding places.
Because Norway's politicians had not (yet anyway) been paid off to prohibit breaking those "technical measures", the prosecutor stretched this law to also include "technical measures". The court simply didn't accept that, and threw the case out.
You don't want to have laws that can be stretched to include every possible future scenario, you want laws that are specific, so that you can't be convicted for a crime you had no way of knowing was a crime.
In fact, you have an excellent point, but you probably don't understand what it means.
Yes, it is very simple to build many forms of WMD.
I can definately build a nuke, if you give me enough weapon-grade uranium. Have you noted one of the chief arguments for going to war, well, it was the International Institute for Strategic Studies that said Saddam can build nukes within six months if he obtained weapon-grade uranium. Oh, and every physicist, and every kid with plans to build a breeder reactor goes "oh, so what, so can I", well what does that mean? It doesn't mean that Iraq has nukes. It means that there is something you haven't grasped here, and there is some political agenda they're not telling you about.
Well, basically, the thing is that while it is easy to build nukes, it isn't that easy to survive making them... The weird thing about WMDs is that they are pretty dangerous... They are very, very difficult to control. To use them in combat, you got to know exactly what you're doing, otherwise, you'll probably end up killing more of your own forces than the enemy. Iraq clearly has a lot of experience with chemical weapons, they could use that, so chemical weapons should be the main focus of the inspections. But for nukes to be useful in combat, you would have to have tests, and we would know about those.
Iraq is pretty much locked in among other arab nations, the only real target for big WMDs, nukes, for example, are Isreal, but there are lots of Palestinians there. It is very hard to see what incentive Saddam would have for making large WMDs. North-Korea OTOH is a different matter alltogether, they have a very strong incentive for building nukes.
If I were in the US, I would be a lot more concerned about nuclear terrorism than of Saddam possessing nukes. It is far more likely that a group of suicide bombers would lock themselves in a container in a ship going to a US port, assemble the nuke inside the container and set it off in port. No testing, no problems concerning damage on friendly forces, and so on.
Yup,/. should be more careful with the "slippery slope" argument, that's for sure.
Nowadays, I'm more concerned about Donald Rumsfeld's use of the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Makes me think "oh, so that's the level your evidence is on".
Then it is not DRM, it is normal use of encryption. DRM is about trying to keep a secret between you and someone who has no interest in keeping the secret. That's obviously flawed.
Using encryption to share data between people who have an interest in keeping the secret between them is perfectly legitimite and a different matter alltogether.
This new sensor only affects the way an image is captured, not how it is displayed.
Sure, my point was merely that as long as you have classical pixels on the screen, you can't tell that the image was captured with this new technology...
So, it effectively makes no difference...
On a related note, check out Shouldexist.org. It is too intended to be a reposity of ideas. He hasn't been very successful, I think, perhaps Ben could be more successful with his initiative, because I think it is a good thing to exchange ideas like this.
While I'm here, let me plug my Shouldexist postings:
No, the verdicts just cites those things, goes on to say that the court cannot take them too seriously, as they are humorous and indicates irony (basically, the judge understood what;) means, the prosecutor did not). The court didn't find that it was conclusively proved that DeCSS was mainly for Linux, but it also found that the prosecution had not given any proof to the contrary, which is their job.
As for that quote, it was something Jon uttered after having been seriously flamed for having stolen Fawkus code, which Fawkus later said he had not.
Well, most of my spam comes from US sources, quite a lot of it comes from Korea and China too, even in charsets and languages I can't read. I am myself Norwegian. But you're right, if US spam would stop, it would fix the problem because I, and many with me, would block Korea into oblivion untill they acquire a clue. They probably don't want to be shut out of the world.
But this is not going to work. For one thing, I can't collect the bounty. Two, spam will only stop if spammers realize that nobody is reading it. So, you can filter on whatever label US spammers will be required to use, but there will be hundreds of other jurisdictions that each will have a label.
It's not going to put a significant dent in spam counts, I think.
I have a deep respect for Larry Lessig in many things he do, and I would hate to see him waste his job on something like this.
This is all fine, and I really think micropayments is something good for the future, and in fact, we really need to implement micropayments and make it successful, it is the only way we can deal with the entertainment industry.
But, this article basically skips over the most fundamental point.
We've got to have the financial institutions, people's banks, in on this. And they have costs because of transactions too, so they need to cover those costs too. Right now, it seems that they have rather large costs for each transaction. One transaction costs about as much as an average micropayment, it really doesn't scale well, that's a problem that needs addressing.
A micropayment should be as cheap as a simple database transaction, that's what it is really. I don't know why it isn't that cheap, but you can't propose a viable system for micropayments without addressing this issue.
Another fundamental point is that we need good, open standards, and implementation of the standards natively in browsers.
KOffice and OO are probably geared towards different markets, KOffice is intended to be a relatively light suit, whereas OO is intended to be complete. I think KOffice had relatively complete translations in previous versions of KDE.
The project to translate OO to Norwegian is here. OO is allready available for nb, my parents are running it, and the first beta of the nn version was made available just before xmas, it turns out.
Hehe, that's true. But this is nothing like Spanish... Spanish is a world language. It's one of the biggest languages on earth. There are only 4.5 million Norwegians. And what's more, only a small minority of them write Nynorsk (the majority writes a variant called "bokmål").
The reason why their doing this is that they're scared of loosing market share to free software. What we've proven is that the cost of translating free software to Nynorsk is a lot smaller, and it has been done. So, while it has not been economically feasable to translate proprietary software to minority languages, it is economically feasible with free software.
Having worked with many Scandanavians, I am truly impressed by their command of English
Thanks!:-) (I'm Norwegian)
But in any case, not having Norwegian Office is not as a big of a cripple to productivity as the article may lead you to think.
Actually, this is bigger or smaller than that, depending on how you think about it.
Norway has two official written languages "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk" (nb and nn in iso639 (?)). I would say that neither of them are spoken, we have an incredible richness of dialects here. A huge majority of the population writes nb. Office, and the rest of Windows has always been translated and been available for nb upon launch.
nn and nb are almost identical. nb was highly influenced by Danish, as Norway was pretty much a colony under Denmark for a few hundred years, and the official language among the elites where Danish. So, I guy named Ivar Aasen collected dialects from certain parts of the country which he believed was less influenced by Danish and constructed a written language from it. This became the foundation for nn. The controversy over these two languages where high, I can tell you, but currently there are laws that keeps nn alive. For example, all books in public schools must be available in both languages, if you write a letter to a public office, that public office must respond in the same language.
That may sound reasonable, but these two languages are so similar, that while high-school-students bitch and moan about how difficult the other is to learn, nobody with a minimum of intelligence can honestly claim to have difficulties reading the other.
But MS have never found it commercially viable to translate Office to nn. That is quite understandable; my father is an author, and one of his books where translated to nn, that costed NOK 100000 (that's about $16000), and it sold two copies... (he wasn't the one who lost all this money, it was a public office to had to obey this law).
So while I think that this law causes huge wastes of money, we free software geeks have been very happy about the events so far. We can point out that KDE and Mozilla have been available for nn before nb, I believe, because there are many good developers who write nn. So, it has given us a lot of good publicity, and some regional governmental offices has funded translation of OpenOffice to nn, and hopefully, the translation will be available before MS Office, again a big win.
I think it is a part of the story that MS was becoming quite scared of the prospect of OO eating quite a lot of marketshare because of this. They have to keep a tight grip on the market, because if they loose some of the market to OO, and reports are positive, they will loose a lot more.
Also, the figures quoted by MS for the cost of translating Office to nn has been huge. This has also given us some good publicity, because the funds we require to translate free software is far from that big. For one thing, this has illustrated that it is free as in speech that is the important aspect of free software, but experience has shown that usually, free as in speech software is cheeper to work with. Once people get experience with alternatives, things are sliding our way.
To avoid flames by the Norwegian nn crowd, let me say that I have nothing against nn myself. I don't write it, but I appreciate reading it and I acknowledge that much of the finest Norwegian literature is written in nn. I'm opposed to laws that require people to write either of the languages however, but I think that if you write a letter in the language of your choice, you are entitled to expect the receiver to be so well educated that he can understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
There's only one thing in the verdict that was not completely clear, and that would be the conclusion if the prosecutors had tried to prove that DeCSS had been used for unauthorized copying. They didn't try to prove that, and that was noted in the verdict. That might be one thing they will try to work on I guess.
Right now, there is no news, really, other than "yeah, we'll appeal". They have to come up with the documents by tomorrow, that is when the interesting things happen.
Another thing I can't understand that there are somebody who would want to put their career on the line for this case. The reaction after the acquittal was pretty clear among computer professionals and the press, it was a win for consumers and a big loss for Økokrim.
On one hand, I really hope they get another big loss, OTOH, it is hardly something to cheer for that we do not have a working computer crime unit. If somebody breaks into my box, I want them spanked, but I really can't report any such breakin to a police unit as corrupt as ours, as that would lend their objectionable political agenda some legitimity. I think many if not most of Norway's computer professionals feel the same.
They're using KDE, and KDE allready has a pretty good idea what to do, so the ideal solution would be to use the KDE file associations in Mozilla.
I've had that question in my journal for a while and eventually I asked on kde-linux. Nobody had anything.
Anybody have any better solutions here?
The obvious thing to do is to write a script to parse KDE's config and create Mozilla's mimeTypes.rdf, but I haven't time to do that...
Anybody else done that?
I haven't been able to dig up more on the story. How are the appeals going, for example? I'm not sure it is a good idea to route around the court before you have gone through all possible appeals, especially since they've got TimBL on their side.
Of course, we can always try to destroy what you are creating, illegal or not, if it gets out of hand. Would you want that? If it did get out of hand, and it would need to be destroyed, then what would you say?
You have a huge responsibility for the things that you develop, Brian, are you ready to assume that responsibility?
Yet, I do not feel very confident, after reading how he tries to avoid question concerning the newspeak on what "trust" is supposed to mean. OK, so any technology can be used for good and bad, that is clear.
It is my firm belief that technologists have a great responsibility for the things that they make, because no one is better suited to understand the consequences of the tech that they develop than the techie himself.
So, just referring to TCPA and what they say, what their goals are, and so on, it doesn't cut it. Brian has a moral duty to try to understand what motives drive the stuff that he is doing, and if he thinks that these motives are bad, he has a moral duty to speak up about it.
I really haven't seen anything non-fuzzy from TCPA about what their real motives are, but one thing I know: If the real goal is to take away the control of the technology each individual uses away from the individiual, it will be the most drastic step towards an authoritarian society.
Few are better suited than Brian to examine these issues, and with that comes a huge responsibility to make sure that the technology he is developing does not move society in that direction.
After reading this interview, I do not feel confident that Brian takes this responsibility seriously enough.
First, I said "for software you sell", which means, it is not the individual developers who are liable, liability follows the money. Distro-makers would be liable for the product they sell. As well, of course, as vendors of proprietary software.
Liability would mean that the distro-makers actually get a product, they sell a warranty, and that warranty would mean that they would have to more carefully audit the code of the software they sell. Thus, they could ask higher prizes, then they could afford to employ more hackers to audit the code. Net result, we all gain, because the code that makes it into commercial distros gets more professional attention.
Also, since we all know that Free Software is better from the outset than proprietary counterparts, we would get a head start, and M$ would spiral down as they get hit with big law-suits... ;-)
Which is a default that any marketer with respect for his customers would use, but alas, there are so few of them.
Certainly, literary critics will become more important in the future. Those people adding value by aiding people in finding the gems and improving writing of the writers are not going to disappear. No, they will obviously become more important as the amount of stuff increases.
But they do not anymore have a veto, as publishers had before. That's the only real difference.
I acknowledge, however, that "Free Software" is not a good term either. But for those of us who speak Real Languages[tm], lets make sure that we use terms like "software libre", "fri programvare", etc.
I think this is going to be of great strategic importance.
I have quite a few friends working on the Rosetta project. I'm glad I'm not in their shoes right now... Hope they find a launch window soon...
So, basically, if somebody cracks your box, and runs away with something valuable in there, well, you might call it stealing, but the defence will argue that "no, it isn't stealing, because the cracker didn't delete the valuables, so you still have it, no theft."
The courts should go, "uh, ok", because it is not up to the courts to stretch the laws to fit this scenario, it is up to the politicians. They should have made it specifically clear that this behaviour is undesirable. That's their job. That's why you have this separation of powers.
OK, this was perhaps a rather lame example, so if you haven't got my drift, let us take the opposite example: The Jon Johansen case.
The prosecutor had after a couple of years of digging come up with an indictment that had to do with a law that originally prohibited opening other people's letters and go nosing around in their hiding places.
Because Norway's politicians had not (yet anyway) been paid off to prohibit breaking those "technical measures", the prosecutor stretched this law to also include "technical measures". The court simply didn't accept that, and threw the case out.
You don't want to have laws that can be stretched to include every possible future scenario, you want laws that are specific, so that you can't be convicted for a crime you had no way of knowing was a crime.
Yes, it is very simple to build many forms of WMD. I can definately build a nuke, if you give me enough weapon-grade uranium. Have you noted one of the chief arguments for going to war, well, it was the International Institute for Strategic Studies that said Saddam can build nukes within six months if he obtained weapon-grade uranium. Oh, and every physicist, and every kid with plans to build a breeder reactor goes "oh, so what, so can I", well what does that mean? It doesn't mean that Iraq has nukes. It means that there is something you haven't grasped here, and there is some political agenda they're not telling you about.
Well, basically, the thing is that while it is easy to build nukes, it isn't that easy to survive making them... The weird thing about WMDs is that they are pretty dangerous... They are very, very difficult to control. To use them in combat, you got to know exactly what you're doing, otherwise, you'll probably end up killing more of your own forces than the enemy. Iraq clearly has a lot of experience with chemical weapons, they could use that, so chemical weapons should be the main focus of the inspections. But for nukes to be useful in combat, you would have to have tests, and we would know about those. Iraq is pretty much locked in among other arab nations, the only real target for big WMDs, nukes, for example, are Isreal, but there are lots of Palestinians there. It is very hard to see what incentive Saddam would have for making large WMDs. North-Korea OTOH is a different matter alltogether, they have a very strong incentive for building nukes.
If I were in the US, I would be a lot more concerned about nuclear terrorism than of Saddam possessing nukes. It is far more likely that a group of suicide bombers would lock themselves in a container in a ship going to a US port, assemble the nuke inside the container and set it off in port. No testing, no problems concerning damage on friendly forces, and so on.
Nowadays, I'm more concerned about Donald Rumsfeld's use of the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Makes me think "oh, so that's the level your evidence is on".
Using encryption to share data between people who have an interest in keeping the secret between them is perfectly legitimite and a different matter alltogether.
Sure, my point was merely that as long as you have classical pixels on the screen, you can't tell that the image was captured with this new technology... So, it effectively makes no difference...
Or am I totally off here...?
Can anybody provide some insight about that?
While I'm here, let me plug my Shouldexist postings:
As for that quote, it was something Jon uttered after having been seriously flamed for having stolen Fawkus code, which Fawkus later said he had not.
Actually, it was the MPA that filed the complaint, not MPAA. MPA is the global organization.
He never claimed to have written anything but a GUI. Police didn't believe him, but the court did.
But this is not going to work. For one thing, I can't collect the bounty. Two, spam will only stop if spammers realize that nobody is reading it. So, you can filter on whatever label US spammers will be required to use, but there will be hundreds of other jurisdictions that each will have a label. It's not going to put a significant dent in spam counts, I think.
I have a deep respect for Larry Lessig in many things he do, and I would hate to see him waste his job on something like this.
But, this article basically skips over the most fundamental point.
We've got to have the financial institutions, people's banks, in on this. And they have costs because of transactions too, so they need to cover those costs too. Right now, it seems that they have rather large costs for each transaction. One transaction costs about as much as an average micropayment, it really doesn't scale well, that's a problem that needs addressing.
A micropayment should be as cheap as a simple database transaction, that's what it is really. I don't know why it isn't that cheap, but you can't propose a viable system for micropayments without addressing this issue.
Another fundamental point is that we need good, open standards, and implementation of the standards natively in browsers.
The project to translate OO to Norwegian is here. OO is allready available for nb, my parents are running it, and the first beta of the nn version was made available just before xmas, it turns out.
The reason why their doing this is that they're scared of loosing market share to free software. What we've proven is that the cost of translating free software to Nynorsk is a lot smaller, and it has been done. So, while it has not been economically feasable to translate proprietary software to minority languages, it is economically feasible with free software.
Thanks! :-) (I'm Norwegian)
Actually, this is bigger or smaller than that, depending on how you think about it.
Norway has two official written languages "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk" (nb and nn in iso639 (?)). I would say that neither of them are spoken, we have an incredible richness of dialects here. A huge majority of the population writes nb. Office, and the rest of Windows has always been translated and been available for nb upon launch.
nn and nb are almost identical. nb was highly influenced by Danish, as Norway was pretty much a colony under Denmark for a few hundred years, and the official language among the elites where Danish. So, I guy named Ivar Aasen collected dialects from certain parts of the country which he believed was less influenced by Danish and constructed a written language from it. This became the foundation for nn. The controversy over these two languages where high, I can tell you, but currently there are laws that keeps nn alive. For example, all books in public schools must be available in both languages, if you write a letter to a public office, that public office must respond in the same language.
That may sound reasonable, but these two languages are so similar, that while high-school-students bitch and moan about how difficult the other is to learn, nobody with a minimum of intelligence can honestly claim to have difficulties reading the other.
But MS have never found it commercially viable to translate Office to nn. That is quite understandable; my father is an author, and one of his books where translated to nn, that costed NOK 100000 (that's about $16000), and it sold two copies... (he wasn't the one who lost all this money, it was a public office to had to obey this law).
So while I think that this law causes huge wastes of money, we free software geeks have been very happy about the events so far. We can point out that KDE and Mozilla have been available for nn before nb, I believe, because there are many good developers who write nn. So, it has given us a lot of good publicity, and some regional governmental offices has funded translation of OpenOffice to nn, and hopefully, the translation will be available before MS Office, again a big win.
I think it is a part of the story that MS was becoming quite scared of the prospect of OO eating quite a lot of marketshare because of this. They have to keep a tight grip on the market, because if they loose some of the market to OO, and reports are positive, they will loose a lot more.
Also, the figures quoted by MS for the cost of translating Office to nn has been huge. This has also given us some good publicity, because the funds we require to translate free software is far from that big. For one thing, this has illustrated that it is free as in speech that is the important aspect of free software, but experience has shown that usually, free as in speech software is cheeper to work with. Once people get experience with alternatives, things are sliding our way.
To avoid flames by the Norwegian nn crowd, let me say that I have nothing against nn myself. I don't write it, but I appreciate reading it and I acknowledge that much of the finest Norwegian literature is written in nn. I'm opposed to laws that require people to write either of the languages however, but I think that if you write a letter in the language of your choice, you are entitled to expect the receiver to be so well educated that he can understand it.