On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 16:27 +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > The amendment 2nd part seems to criminalise failure to add > Digital Restriction Measures when told that the software you > publish or distribute is being used to help break DRMs. I don't > remember that in EUCD. I thought EUCD forbids one telling others > how to break DRMs, and publishing software specifically to break > DRMs: did it also criminalise programmers who merely ignored DRMs?
Well, here's the thing - when I said "ignored", I generally mean "can't access" rather than "software bypasses the 'do not view' flag". As an example, I have a lovely PDF viewer in Gnome which allows me to cut'n'paste text out of PDFs, which is nifty. However, it does respect the awful PDF "don't print this", "don't save this" rubbish (as well as the slightly more respectable "don't view this" rc4 encryption, which it could hardly ignore). Now, if evince didn't support those PDF flags, as simple and as trivial it would be to bypass I'm pretty sure that it would be illegal under the EUCD. And, I don't know of any examples of software on my system which does ignore DRMs (well... maybe: perhaps Firefox ignoring javascript to disable right-clicks, etc. counts?) and effectively bypasses them. So, I don't see that on the face of it, the French proposal makes much difference, unless what they're somehow trying to do is prevent people from distributing the source to (say) evince, because a hacker could get in there and remove all the code that respects those silly PDF flags? If that is an example of how the French proposal is different to EUCD as you suggest it might be, I would say that would be *extremely* serious for free software. Perhaps an apt analogy would be to outlaw handyman joiners, because burglars can use crowbars too. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
