Possibly OT :-) New Canadian Voice in Digital Rights Issues

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 06:45:40PM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote

> First of all, on an IP-related issue France can't do something that
> is out of step with the EU, which while not itself completely open
> source friendly has refused to allow (or honour) US-type software
> patents. Most of the EU has already adopted many of the measures
> being debated.

  The sad fact is that the defeat of the EU patent directive is being
undermined one country at a time by national patent offices issuing
software patents.  Consider Inpro's suit against RIM in Europe.  If the
patent directive defeat can be ignored, anything can be ignored.

> Secondly, the French public sector is a large user of open source; the 
> country has been one of the more Linux-friendly in Europe and is the 
> home to the largest distribution vendor outside the US, Mandriva. It is 
> highly unlikely that the French government would do anything that would 
> legally curtail the use of open source; it is not a coincidence that 
> France is one of the last two countries in the EU to implement the DRM 
> directive.

  You're assuming that Steve Balmer can't twist France's arm the way he
could twist Massachusetts'.  I hope you're right.  But France's proposed
legislation is essentially the software half of Fritz Hollings' SSSCA.
If I understand it, even "Hello World" would require DRM libs to be
included.

> Lastly, in any context I would caution that "is considering" is a very 
> far cry from "has enacted". The article pointed to above explicitly 
> states that there is no plan to attack FOSS...

  I also pointed out that it wasn't officially a head-on attack against
FOSS.  But the side-effects are just as deadly.

> ...so I would be careful about being needlessly alarmist.

  I used to laugh at the tin-foil brigade members who predicted that
Microsoft would use its cash on "the best legislators that money can
buy" to have linux outlawed.  Then along came Fritz Hollings and his
SSSCA.  A bit of history for you...
  - In the 1920's hemp was a widely used agricultural product whose
    fibres produced strong rope, cloth, and paper.  99% of the
    American public had never heard of the word "marihuana".
  - Hemp was so much better and cheaper that it threatened the fiscal
    viability of du Pont's new "miracle fibre", i.e. nylon, in the early
    1930's.  It also threatened to render valueless the large stands of
    timber that the Hearst newspaper chain owned for supplying its own
    newsprint.
  - A few campaign contributions, and a bunch of "Reefer Madness"
    propaganda, and suddenly hemp was 100% associated with crime

  Disney, and various other interests would love to see the personal
computer as we know it outlawed, or at least castrated to being nothing
more than a WEB-TV dumb terminal.  Seeing the success that du Pont and
Hearst had with outlawing hemp in the 1930's, I am fearful of the same
happening to linux today.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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