Licence text and fabs [LWN.net]

Licence text and fabs

Posted Oct 5, 2006 9:37 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: Licence text and fabs by nim-nim
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

The GPLv3 is a very clear way to show MPs blanket legal DRM protection/mandate hurts someone.

How would that happen in practice? Lets take Tivo, an FSF-selected example (presumably because it's the best example of harmful DRM they could find), ok? How does the GPLv3 show that blanket legal DRM protection hurts someone, in the Tivo example? Lets assume the kernel goes GPLv3. Please outline the scenario of likely action that would/could happen in your opinion.

The only way i could theoretically imagine would be for a large non-DRM hardware base with GPLv3 kernel+userspace to be built up right now, which industry would complain loudly if a change in laws would made their product illegal to distribute under the GPLv3. Given that essentially every medial player and every mobile phone on the market includes some form of DRM currently, as per the wishes of the content industry (whose content consumers actually want to enjoy), how do you see the likelyhood of that happening in practice, /without/ a huge body of free content that consumers would be equally crazy about?

Please outline the scenario that you think would/could happen.

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Licence text and fabs

Posted Oct 5, 2006 10:51 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> How would that happen in practice?

Very easily.

Mr V. goes to his local MP to make DRM mandatory and protected by law on all media processing boxes. The MP asks if it will hurt someone. Mr V says "of course not, it will only catch evil pirates".

Mr F can then come saying "But this will ban use of FLOSSTV, which is licensed under the GPLvx which is uncompatible with the proposal" competition and free market is good, you can't do that. This is a strong argument.

Right now M F can only say "But this will harm FLOSSTV, which is licensed under the GPLvx which intent/spirit is uncompatible with the proposal" competition and free market is good, you can't do that. This is a weak argument, spirit and intent count for zip.

In case you think I'm making all this up, I'm only repeating from memory some of the arguments used in the French Parliament when the EUCD directive was translated in local law this year.

Some of the articles proposed by the majors were clearly uncompatible with existing Free Software license terms and could be amended. For others the uncompatibility was not so clear cut and unfortunately opposing them proved impossible.

The harm BTW was not only FLOSS-side. The law hurt numerous actors, but they all found out nothing but the most blatant problems (such as law/license uncompatibilities) had any weight against the majors' money.