SPAM: Important Legislative Alert (fwd)

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl at switchboard.net
Wed Jun 24 18:47:40 GMT 1998


On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> > this has serious ramifications for the "nt domains for unix" project.
> > luke.
> > 
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 13:25:57 -0500
> > From: Simple Nomad <thegnome at NMRC.ORG>
> > To: NTBUGTRAQ at LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM
> > Subject: SPAM: Important Legislative Alert
> > 
> > June 23rd, 1998 - The World Intellectual Property Organization treaty has
> > already passed the US Senate and is close to passing in the House. The
> > treaty would make it illegal, with extremely stiff penalties, to break
> > security schemes without the permission of the company that makes the
> > product.
> 
> How would this affect products written and maintained outside of the US?
> Its a US law, but what are its international remifaications?


i imagine that a number of things may potentially occur, which means that
we are ahead of the game and can deal with them (or get this law stopped).


1) people in the u.s who want to use samba won't, because despite a
possible misunderstanding of this law and its implications, the fact that
there's anything at all going "wrong" may discourage them from using
samba.  "dang, one of the people that wrote samba is a law-breaker: i'm
not having anything to do with it".


2) mirror sites inside the u.s may be requested to remove their copies of
samba, as it contains "illegal" code.

this is not insurmountable: a separate library, like the libdes one, could
be stored on a server which does not have this law.


3) people wishing to work on samba (e.g me) will not be able to go to the
states, for fear of being arrested if i set foot inside the u.s.  anyone
wishing to improve samba will not be able to either work from or live in
the u.s.

hm.

luke



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