Originally Posted by efc
Fair use under assault
EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow argues the case against DRM
By Steve Gillmor for InfoWorld
InfoWorld: What is the message that you feel needs to be made about DRM?
Barlow: I think that anybody who cares about the future of technology --
anybody who cares about the future, period -- ought to be awfully
concerned about this. But people who work in technology have been
agnostic on the subject so far. They need to recognize that they're
going to be faced with a fairly stark choice, which is a gradual
concentration around certain trusted platforms that cannot be broken
out of and are filled with black boxes that you can't code around and
can't see the inside of.
You have to get politically active and stop it from happening, because
Congress has been bought by the content industry. The choice is being
made at a very complex and subterranean political level. It's being
done in standard settings, with the FCC, in amendments to obscure bills
in Congress, in the closed door sessions to set the Digital Broadcast
Standard. It has very significant long-term effects [for] the technical
architecture of cyberspace, because what we're talking about embedding
into everything is a control and surveillance mechanism for the purpose
of observing copyright piracy, but [it] can be used for anything...
*Much more at the link*
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