On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 03:53:18AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote: > On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 01:39:13AM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 11:00:30AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > > > Your complaint, then, is against those who use the law to restrict your > > > use of your legally-acquired DVD or Blu-Ray disc and disingenuously call > > > it “protection”. It is misdirected against the Debian project. > > > > In other words, until non-US comes back, d-m.o can't go away. > > I think this demonstrates a lack of understanding about non-US. non-US > was for things that could be legally used everywhere, but could not be > *exported* from the US without serious hassle. non-US was *not* for > things which could not legally be used in the US.
Old non-US did, yeah. The new need for geographically limited distribution has different rules. > And I would like to point out, for the record, that it is not only the > US that has stupid laws. Yes, we certainly have more than our share, > but, for example, Germany has stupid laws that prevent certain video > games from being played, Yet I don't see [Free]Doom excluded from Debian while decss is. That's the big difference here. > and Australia also has stupid video game laws that could be interpreted as > being binding against Debian. And Debian carries, say, Nethack, which has a sex scene (several lines of text, but still...). > I'm sure that every country has laws which are problematic; don't blame it > all on the US. When the totem law of Kbanga declares that displaying any words with two consonant clusters is illegal on Fridays, the rest of the world doesn't suffer. Being able to pop in a DVD and play it is something an average person takes for granted. If oppressive laws in a single country stop a good part of multimedia functionality, why should that functionality be taken away from everyone else? Meow! -- // If you believe in so-called "intellectual property", please immediately // cease using counterfeit alphabets. Instead, contact the nearest temple // of Amon, whose priests will provide you with scribal services for all // your writing needs, for Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory prices.
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