On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 08:07:38AM -0500, Timothy Wilson wrote:
> It occurs to me that one of the best ways to argue against the DMCA (too
> late, I know) and SSSCA is to point out past innovations that would have
> been illegal under these laws. I'm wondering if others on the list would
> have some items to suggest.
> 
> This first item I thought of is below. Can anyone add to this (or correct me
> if I'm wrong)? I'm no expert on this or any legal question so I may be
> misinterpreting the whole thing.
> 
> 1. The PC revolution (Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS would
> have been illegal)

I'm not sure that this would be illegal under either DMCA or 
SSSCA, but laws are certainly going in the direction to make 
reverse engineering more difficult and risky.  I think one of the 
best arguments in the talk last night was similar to this.  In 
the Universal vs. Betamax case, the movie studios tried to
prevent the sale for home video recorders arguing that they would
lose money due to pirating.  These days movie studios make a huge
fraction of their money off of sale of DVDs and video cassettes.

I'm sure that there are better examples.  I know that discussion
of this sort of thing hasi been on the Free-Skylarov list [1] and I
would bet it has on the anti-DMCA list[2] - you might want to
check the archives.  You also might want to ask this question on
the DMCA-minnesota list. As for sample letters, the letter that we
passed around at the talk last night is available [3] and there
are other sample letters floating around on the net.

Jim

  1. http://zork.net/pipermail/free-sklyarov/
  2. http://lists.anti-dmca.org/pipermail/dmca_discuss/
  3. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DMCA-minnesota/files/letter_to_congres_20011005/
-- 
Jim Crumley                  |Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List (TCLUG)
crumley at fields.space.umn.edu |Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota 
Ruthless Debian Zealot       |http://www.mn-linux.org 
Cookies are tasty!           |Free Dmitry Sklyarov -  http://freesklyarov.org/