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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Click to Agree? (was Re: the ultimate IF archive)
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Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 20:08:58 GMT
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Matthew Russotto <russotto@grace.speakeasy.net> wrote:
>In article <a3abgl$n8m$2@news.fsf.net>, Adam Thornton <adam@fsf.net> wrote:
>>In article <u5gvfr82qi5gda@corp.supernews.com>, Kodrik  <kodrik@zc8.net> wrote:
>>>Heres' the reply from the EFF.
>>>"Once you make things available to upload you have to count on peoples good
>>>nature unless you have an airtight DRM (digital rights management) system
>>>included with your software."
>>
>>And the EFF knows as well as I do that there's no such thing as an
>>airtight DRM.
>
>Doesn't matter.  All you need to do is make the attempt, and your DRM is
>covered by the DMCA and people who break it get 5 years.

Yes. DMCA = evil. Not a problem.

The point is that if you actually look at the thread
and contribute to *it*, instead of just grinding your
axe, it's fairly obvious that there's only one thing
the EFF lawyer could have meant by this: "this is how
you absolutely utterly truely guarantee that nobody
'abuses' your work: either trust them not to, or add
totally airtight DRM".

Insufficiently airtight DRM doesn't prevent people from
misusing a work; but as you say, it allows content owners
to beat up those abusers.

But sticking to the thread, this would basically mean
that the EFF lawyer was answering an irrelevant question:
a question of how to achieve a particular distribution
of intellectual property in practice, rather than a question
of what we have to do to make sure it's not *legal* for
someone to abuse the works on our archive.

Given that it's pretty clear that the EFF lawyer was
answering a basically-irrelevant question which is not
the question Kodrik claims he asked the lawyer, and
given that Kodrik is now all full of implicit license
talk as if he had been there all along, I have to wonder
whether Kodrik is really as clueless as he seems or
simply a troll.

SeanB
