[free-sklyarov] Re: Backlash

[huaiyu_zhu at yahoo.com]

Doug noticed two articles with substantial misinformation.

One big problem with such misinformation is that there is no easy way to
talk back.  Would someone care to put up a page linking the articles to
proper rebuttals?  This could also serve as a repertoire of expositional
essays.  Yes, I know there are many existing sites, but most of the
materials there are just impenetrably difficult for casual readers.

> The worst of the two, IMO, is from Business Week Online:
> 
> http://biz.yahoo.com/bizwk/010725/u2uwdgj7_smmdbiz41ntqa.html

This one blatantly equate producing a tool to overcome usages
restriction with stealing.  My previous post "Rights vs capabilities"
was an attempt to rebut such misinformation.

> The other article, by the Patricia Seybold Group, is unfortunately 
> harder to attack, because it makes one good point.  This article is 
> available at the Planet Ebook site:
> 
> http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=196

This one has a more subtle analogy: a company sells lock picks so that
people can break into book shops to take any book they want.

This has two flaws:  

A circumvention device is not a cracking device.  It does not allow
users to break into other people's premise.  It only allows people to
break into properties they already own that resides in their own home.

Since their analogy dwells on "the fact that every customer that used
the tools to enter a shop did so illegally", it has nothing in common
with the current case in this respect.  If Elcomsoft was selling
something to break into other people's networks to steal credit card
numbers, for example, such an analogy might fit nicely.

A more fitting analogy in Sklyarov case is selling a tool to break into
your own safe, should you lose the key but still remember the number.

Secondly, it conveniently forget that reading or copying a book is quite
different from taking a physical book out of a shop.

The mentality behind their analogy highlights what is really frightening
about the future: all the digital objects within our homes might end up
being owned by someone else, and reading a book that we already own
might be equivalent to breaking into someone else's premise.  It is as
if the dire predictions in Richard Stallman's essay "Right to Read"
would become true.

Let's try to make our future brighter than such predictions.
                                                                        


Huaiyu Zhu