Help the blind, go to jail

[Warren Togami]

I don't know about you folks, but I am completely disgusted by this
situation.  The DMCA took its first victim, and the public is completely
ignorant to the travesty that is the DMCA.  Completely unconstitutional, and
unfairly favoring the corporate interests that paid for its passing as law.

Under the DMCA a corporation can merely hint that you are violating the law,
and ISP's are required to pull your plug without an investigation.  Guilty
until proven innocent?

In the case of the DeCSS vs 2600, the circumvention of the SDMI watermark
protection and Adobe's pitifully secured ROT13 encrypted EBook's, these
corporate interests can cite the DMCA to cover up their own poor engineering
with laws.  In the process they can arrest or sue any legitimate academic
research that offends their business (Professor Felton and SDMI), arrest
foreigners only because they made software that is legal in his home country
in order to enable fair use of Adobe's EBook that is ILLEGAL in Russia.

This is only the beginning of the DMCA born abuses of corporate power.  We
must alert the public to this problem, and demand a repeal of this
unconstitutional law.

I for one am writing letters to our representatives in Washington D.C.  I'd
like to stage a protest too, but I doubt anyone would show up.

----- Original Message -----
From: "joel" <jijoel at lava.net>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 5:48 PM
Subject: [luau] Help the blind, go to jail


> FYI, Dmitry Sklyarov has just been indicted on five counts of
circumventing
> copyright control. I'm sending this to a lot of people I know:
>
> Hi,
>
> You know I normally don't send these things, but I think this one is
> extremely important, if we want to live in a free country.
>