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Of course, it is always easier to whine... Goodness knows we prove that on Pigdog-l every Goddamn Day.
-- Johnnie Royale
DMCA Protest At Stanford
2000-05-17 11:50:54
Get up, get up, get busy, people now! It's time once again to don your freedom-loving apparel and head out to the latest coolio INTERNET PROTEST. Do it! Get ready! Get out there! Get funky now!
All right, so here's the deal: you've heard of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right? It's the new (1998) law that was rammed through YOUR Congress by media-mogul heavyweight lawyers to try and keep the Internet genie in the bottle and protect their middleman interests. Two egregious clauses of the Act include making it illegal to subvert copyright protection, making it illegal to aid in illegal distribution of copyrighted materials, and making it illegal to reverse engineer software.
If this was just a case about Chinese software pirating factories owned by the People's Army, well, that'd be all well and good. I've got no problem with SPA goons running down Third-World alleys trying to catch street-market disk sellers. The BIG problem is that the DMCA has been used VICIOUSLY by corporate attack lawyers to limit YOUR FREEDOM in cyberspace.
For example: it's been used to sue various John Does in the DeCSS case. It's been used to ream Napster. The threat of DMCA suits is probably what got the AOL weenies shut down Gnutella. Jon Johanson, Emmanuel Goldstein: there are literally hundreds of people in courts TODAY fighting DMCA charges. It's time that this has to STOP.
There's an opportunity now to give the DMCA a good KICK in the PANTS. The US Copyright Office is holding hearings at Stanford University on May 18th to make some decisions about enforcement of DMCA issues. This is an EXCELLENT opportunity for freedom-lovers like you and I to make our voices known. The EFF, SVLUG and 2600 Mag are sponsoring a big ol' picketing, chanting, brick-throwing, bomb-tossing PROTEST right outside the hearing rooms of the USCO. You should be there, now, shouldn't you?
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