The recent history of US law is in the opposite direction. Under the DMCA, if you reverse engineer Microsoft's DumptruckBrakesXP, you are committing a federal crime. Furthermore, if you attempt any certification on a Microsoft software product, and publish any non-flattering results of the certification, you are a felon and can be sent to a federal prison for 10 years or fined $500,000 or both.
The legal tendency is to block anything that could lead to certification that software does what it is advertised to do.
The proposed SSSCA carries this a huge step forward. Under this bill, reverse engineering and publicising bugs will be classified as acts of terrorism.
I've had a hotmail account that I don't much give
out, but use mostly for testing email software. I
decided to check it out and see how it behaved. My
browser is Mozilla 0.9.5
What I found is that, first, I couldn't log in. It
just said "login failure" and gave me a few links to
pages that might help. When I followed a number of
these links, I got a lot of copies of pages that
said:
Browser Not Supported
Unfortunately, Microsoft®.NET Passport does not support the Web browsing software you are using. Please use supported browsing software such as Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later, or Netscape Navigator versions 4.08-4.82.
If you use Netscape Navigator 6.1: due to possible data security issues, you cannot currently access.NET Passport using Netscape Navigator 6.1. We take security seriously and are working with Netscape to resolve these issues as soon as possible so that.NET Passport can support Netscape Navigator 6.1. Until that time, please use supported browsing software. We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
He/she may end up in jail, but probably not for
cracking the "security". Lots of lawyers have
already commented that the DMCA doesn't actually
outlaw writing or using such code. What it makes
illegal is publicising the fact that you've broken
the encryption. What's illegal is telling the
world that a corporate product is shoddy and
doesn't do the job that it's advertised to do.
Various commentators have pointed this out in the
stories about Dmitry Sklyarov. His crime wasn't
cracking the protection code; what he did illegal
was telling the world that the code was breakable.
It's OK to know that a company is selling shoddy
products; it's just illegal to tell other marks,
uh, I mean customers, about the shoddiness.
This distinction may be a bit too subtle for your
typical media person, I suppose.
No; I haven't had that problem at all. Perl is a
good language for writing understandable code.
I was recently contacted by some people about a
web site full of cgi scripts that I wrote several
years ago. They sorta apoligized for not getting
back in touch, explaining that the code was so easy
to understand and modify that they just did it and
didn't need to contact me. But now they had some
more sophisticated needs that they weren't sure they
could program, so they thought they'd call back an
expert.
So maybe the lesson here is that I should learn to
write less readable code. Then people won't be able
to modify it themselves, and they'll have to hire
me to make trivial changes.
If MSN gets away with this, we can see it used as
a legal precedent in interesting ways.
For example, you know those highway signs saying
that X miles are supported by company Y? We'll
soon find that, say, General Motors has purchased
the support rights for all the major highways in
the metro area, and all non-GM cars will be stopped
and not allowed on the road.
You'd think that the anti-trust laws would prevent
this sort of vertical-market monopoly. But that's
not likely with the current gang in power.
While it may be true that most people on the Net
get their news from commercial (TV) news sites,
the Net doesn't force you to do it this way.
One good use of the Net is to visit the various
search sites and type in the keywords from news
stories. You can rapidly find all sorts of good
background information that isn't on the news
web sites.
This is especially useful now that Condoleeza Rice
seems to have persuaded the major news sources to
suppress the Other Side's public comments. It's
very easy to find them on the Net, as well as lots
of analyses and history from all sorts of points
of view.
The major importance of the Net is that a lot of
information is Out There, and it can be found. You
aren't at the mercy of the major commercial news
organizations.
Another weakness in the "web server model" is that
most users of the Internet can't run a web server
at all. At least they can't on their own machine.
They must rent space on a commercial machine, and
thus are at the mercy of the ISPs.
Here and on a lot of the Internet, the ISPs are
mostly blocking port 80, so those of us who know
how to run our own web servers can't put one on
the standard port. Some ISPs do port scand of
user machines and block anything that acts like
a web server.
The intent is obvious: The commercial interests
have little or no interest in supporting people's
ability to be on the Internet. Many of them are
actively blocking such attempts, and have the
attitude that the Internet is only for commercial
interests to supply "content" which we mere humans
are allowed to download.
Most of the comments about the Internet as a new
form of interpersonal communication will only be
true when there are strict rules saying that all
users have free speech and the right to run their
own servers that supply their own information to
the rest of the Net.
Schacker's comments are pretty much made bogus when he says "...imagine a court case some day that determines that all of the software you've developed falls under the GPL, and is now in the public domain?"
He is clearly advancing the standard anti-GPL FUD concept that the GPL is the same as Public Domain. This is is nowhere near the truth, and the suggestion that some court will say this is pretty much nil. Plenty of lawyers have agreed that the GPL is a form of copyright, one which was explicitly designed to prevent corporations from taking someone's work and claiming it as theirs.
I'd wonder whether Schacker's comments were in ignorance, or were an intentional part of the general attempt to discredit the GPL and Open Source by confusing them with Public Domain?
Slashdot Mirror
The recent history of US law is in the opposite direction. Under the DMCA, if you reverse engineer Microsoft's DumptruckBrakesXP, you are committing a federal crime. Furthermore, if you attempt any certification on a Microsoft software product, and publish any non-flattering results of the certification, you are a felon and can be sent to a federal prison for 10 years or fined $500,000 or both.
The legal tendency is to block anything that could lead to certification that software does what it is advertised to do.
The proposed SSSCA carries this a huge step forward. Under this bill, reverse engineering and publicising bugs will be classified as acts of terrorism.
out, but use mostly for testing email software. I
decided to check it out and see how it behaved. My
browser is Mozilla 0.9.5
What I found is that, first, I couldn't log in. It
just said "login failure" and gave me a few links to
pages that might help. When I followed a number of
these links, I got a lot of copies of pages that
said:
They block lynx, too. I just tried.
...
Since a fair number of the web tools for the
visually impaired are based on lynx, all those
people are being blocked out.
Let's see; I think I noticed somewhere that lynx
had a way of setting the browser id string
He/she may end up in jail, but probably not for
cracking the "security". Lots of lawyers have
already commented that the DMCA doesn't actually
outlaw writing or using such code. What it makes
illegal is publicising the fact that you've broken
the encryption. What's illegal is telling the
world that a corporate product is shoddy and
doesn't do the job that it's advertised to do.
Various commentators have pointed this out in the
stories about Dmitry Sklyarov. His crime wasn't
cracking the protection code; what he did illegal
was telling the world that the code was breakable.
It's OK to know that a company is selling shoddy
products; it's just illegal to tell other marks,
uh, I mean customers, about the shoddiness.
This distinction may be a bit too subtle for your
typical media person, I suppose.
No; I haven't had that problem at all. Perl is a
good language for writing understandable code.
I was recently contacted by some people about a
web site full of cgi scripts that I wrote several
years ago. They sorta apoligized for not getting
back in touch, explaining that the code was so easy
to understand and modify that they just did it and
didn't need to contact me. But now they had some
more sophisticated needs that they weren't sure they
could program, so they thought they'd call back an
expert.
So maybe the lesson here is that I should learn to
write less readable code. Then people won't be able
to modify it themselves, and they'll have to hire
me to make trivial changes.
If MSN gets away with this, we can see it used as
a legal precedent in interesting ways.
For example, you know those highway signs saying
that X miles are supported by company Y? We'll
soon find that, say, General Motors has purchased
the support rights for all the major highways in
the metro area, and all non-GM cars will be stopped
and not allowed on the road.
You'd think that the anti-trust laws would prevent
this sort of vertical-market monopoly. But that's
not likely with the current gang in power.
While it may be true that most people on the Net
get their news from commercial (TV) news sites,
the Net doesn't force you to do it this way.
One good use of the Net is to visit the various
search sites and type in the keywords from news
stories. You can rapidly find all sorts of good
background information that isn't on the news
web sites.
This is especially useful now that Condoleeza Rice
seems to have persuaded the major news sources to
suppress the Other Side's public comments. It's
very easy to find them on the Net, as well as lots
of analyses and history from all sorts of points
of view.
The major importance of the Net is that a lot of
information is Out There, and it can be found. You
aren't at the mercy of the major commercial news
organizations.
Another weakness in the "web server model" is that
most users of the Internet can't run a web server
at all. At least they can't on their own machine.
They must rent space on a commercial machine, and
thus are at the mercy of the ISPs.
Here and on a lot of the Internet, the ISPs are
mostly blocking port 80, so those of us who know
how to run our own web servers can't put one on
the standard port. Some ISPs do port scand of
user machines and block anything that acts like
a web server.
The intent is obvious: The commercial interests
have little or no interest in supporting people's
ability to be on the Internet. Many of them are
actively blocking such attempts, and have the
attitude that the Internet is only for commercial
interests to supply "content" which we mere humans
are allowed to download.
Most of the comments about the Internet as a new
form of interpersonal communication will only be
true when there are strict rules saying that all
users have free speech and the right to run their
own servers that supply their own information to
the rest of the Net.
Schacker's comments are pretty much made bogus when he says "...imagine a court case some day that determines that all of the software you've developed falls under the GPL, and is now in the public domain?" He is clearly advancing the standard anti-GPL FUD concept that the GPL is the same as Public Domain. This is is nowhere near the truth, and the suggestion that some court will say this is pretty much nil. Plenty of lawyers have agreed that the GPL is a form of copyright, one which was explicitly designed to prevent corporations from taking someone's work and claiming it as theirs. I'd wonder whether Schacker's comments were in ignorance, or were an intentional part of the general attempt to discredit the GPL and Open Source by confusing them with Public Domain?