Date: 24 Dec 2000 02:26:35 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ . . . ]
Getting around the license stuff will always be trivial, however, in
spite of the pipe dreams of fools. If the software can be read by the
user's computer, it can be copied. If it can be copied, automated
tools will be developed to permit it.
Fake "cryptography", hardware "keys", hardware modifications and all
the other garbage people try are at best ways to slow down duplication
and to annoy legitimate users. None of it works in the end. The sick
thing is, all of it has been tried before, over and over, and yet new
companies constantly appear promising new holy grails for the copy
protection crowd.
But the world is -different- now.
The DMCA exists, and its anticircumvention language will be used as
a bludgeon to sue and perhaps even lock up people who do anything to
bypass the crypto in the disk. Thus, a purely technical solution
can't be deployed in any way that really helps a large number of
people---it can't be put into Linux, for example, if the CSS cases
are won by the DVDCCA, and no commercial vendor will risk it, either.
Remember also that in the case of DeCSS, the original creator wasn't
even in a region that is subject to US law! At least, in theory...
So -if-, by some happenstance, commercial vendors somehow manage to
convince themselves and their customers that this is somehow a better
world, and their customers fail to vote with their feet (perhaps
because they are given no choice? there aren't -that- many hard disk
vendors these days), technical workarounds will be litigation targets.
