Subject: interesting article

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 16:35:48 +0200

I just saw John Gilmore's article "What's Wrong With Copy Protection" from
two weeks ago, in

	http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html

This is probably the best-written article I've read on this subject, and
shows how in the last few years several huge hardware and content companies
have been trying very hard (and when you read his examples, you'll see how
well they succeeded!) in limiting basic rights that we all enjoyed for several
decades.
After reading his article, whatever Microsoft is doing to monopolize its
market looks nothing compares to what the content industry is currently doing.

If this continues, it appears that Richard Stallman's pesimistic vision of
2047 (see http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) will be here
in 2020, if not earlier...

Anyway, it looks like I'm not going to buy a DVD player any time soon... This
whole industry makes me sick. And when I get a decent connection for my home
computer, I'll install a freenet node (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/),
hoping it would be just one nail in coffin of the evil schemes described by
John Gilmore.

P.S. John Gilmore is one of the founders of Cygnus solutions (now part of
Redhat) and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and did some other
important stuff like starting the "alt.*" newsgroups, starting gnu tar,
and was involved in other gnu programs (uucp, make, gdb, bind, etc.). But
he also has very unorthodox opinions on politics and especially drug-
legalization, so take his opinions with a grain of salt :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Monday, Mar 5 2001, 10 Adar 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |The socks in my drawer are like
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |snowflakes: No two are alike.