DCMA Rant...
Jul. 25th, 2001 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strredwolfIf you haven't heard, here's the scoop: Adobe Systems (makers of Photoshop, PageMaker, Acrobat, and the PDF file format) filed a complaint with the FBI over programmer Dimitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer who cracked Adobe's ebook encryption (one of the features being a straight rotation cipher, called ROT-13, used on Usenet). The kick is that Dimitry was in Russia when he the cracking, as is the company he is employed to (which also sells the software to crack the ebooks to the FBI!). None the less, after some research by the FBI, Dimitry was arrested durring this year's Defcon for violating the Digital Media Copyright Act (the DMCA), which was enacted into law while Pres. Clinton was in office. (Slashdot articles: Dmitry Protests Running, Alan Cox resigns, Dimitry's company sold password crackers to FBI, Free Sklyarov Protests Scheduled, Sklyarov Arrest Followup, Fallout From DefCon)
A little bit of info about the DMCA: It forbids under penalty of law any reverse engineering or cracking of computer products for any reason, including research and product development, even if it would benifit the product's maker financially (by giving other folks access on other platforms such as Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS X, BeOS, etc). This also includes publication of the cracking (Felten v. RIAA for a case on that). Talk about stifiling your competition, and using propetary incompatible formats!!!
Thus, I'm not going to use Adobe's products in the creation of Stalag '99. I'm using GIMP, ImageMagick, SANE, and Slackware 8. I'm glad that I'm not. I have also (digitally) signed the DMCA Community Declaration, saying that we are dropping a digitalIron Curtan between large companies and small developers.
This is the best time to switch away from Photoshop and use Gimp!
A little bit of info about the DMCA: It forbids under penalty of law any reverse engineering or cracking of computer products for any reason, including research and product development, even if it would benifit the product's maker financially (by giving other folks access on other platforms such as Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS X, BeOS, etc). This also includes publication of the cracking (Felten v. RIAA for a case on that). Talk about stifiling your competition, and using propetary incompatible formats!!!
Thus, I'm not going to use Adobe's products in the creation of Stalag '99. I'm using GIMP, ImageMagick, SANE, and Slackware 8. I'm glad that I'm not. I have also (digitally) signed the DMCA Community Declaration, saying that we are dropping a digitalIron Curtan between large companies and small developers.
This is the best time to switch away from Photoshop and use Gimp!
