Scientific American: To Protect and Self-Serve

[ Thanks to Paul Eggert for this link. ]

"Coming down hard and fast on any organization that threatens technological liberty is an ancient geek pastime of unusual ferocity. Last December the U.K.-based online news service The Register broke the story that a consortium of companies--Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Matsushita--were plotting to include a scheme known as content protection for recordable media (CPRM) in the next-generation standard for computer hard disks."

"Free-software guru Richard Stallman predicted in another Register story that CPRM would kill off open-source software by fragmenting it into two camps, one supporting the copy-protection regime and one not. Andre Hedrick, who represents the Linux (or GNU-Linux, as Stallman insists, because Linux incorporates aspects of GNU, a free software clone of UNIX) community on the technical committee considering the idea, proposed changes to the implementation that would make turning on the copy-protection system optional for users."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Wired: A Thorn in Hollywood's Side(Mar 21, 2001)
• John Gilmore: What's wrong with copy protection(Mar 12, 2001)
• Andre Hedrick: "I want [to] make it REAL-CLEAR, to the CPRM bone-heads!"(Mar 04, 2001)
• ComputerWorld: Committee to vote on controversial data copying standard(Mar 01, 2001)
• The Register: Gilmore, Hedrick differ on anti-CPRM gameplan(Feb 28, 2001)
• The Register: Copy protection hard drive plan nixes free software - RMS(Dec 27, 2000)
• The Register: Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive; ramifications enormous(Dec 22, 2000)