[free-sklyarov] Congress says: Keep Dmitry in jail! Washington loves DMCA...

[Julian T. J. Midgley]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Jon Bober wrote:

> this is a thought that also occurred to me this morning on the train.
>
> i wonder just what it would take to take the internet down for a day.

That's very difficult indeed.  If you wanted to do it, you would need to
secure the cooperation of thousands of people working for those who
control the backbone bandwidth, all of whom would almost certainly stand
to lose their jobs if they switched off the requisite pieces of kit for
any length of time, let alone a day.  I can't see us getting the necessary
support from the Worldcoms and Sprints of the world to do this without
people getting sacked.  (It's just possible you could cause significant
disruption by writing a virus/worm with a sufficiently nasty payload, but
I really wouldn't recommend this).

One of the most serious aspects of this case is that foreign nationals now
have every reason to think twice before visiting the States, particularly
if they are involved in software development or academic research in
Computer Science (as Alan Cox pointed out by his resignation from Usenix).

The best way to bring this matter to Congress's attention may well be to
persuade them that far from being seen as a haven for Free Speech, the USA
is now seen by foreigners as a place where you are likely to get sued or
imprisoned for indulging in research and other activities which are
considered perfectly acceptable in the rest of the Western World (and much
of the East, for that matter).

A sensible next approach, therefore, is to garner support amongst non-US
academics and computer professionals and ask them to boycott all
conferences and meetings in the US, since it is no longer a safe place for
them to visit.  Similarly, contact the organisers of major conferences,
conventions, and technology fairs, and request that they hold their events
outside the US, so that foreign nationals can visit without fear of being
stung by the DMCA.

Simultaneously, persuade academics within the US to protest vigorously
against the DMCA and the curtailment of their intellectual freedoms that
it implies, by writing to congressmen, etc.  Ideally, it would be good to
see letters coming from the entire computer science departments of major
universities such as MIT.

Start holding regular protests against the DMCA- the idea being to get
these to snowball over time (as discussed in another thread).

If possible, find some big players in the industry, and persuade them to
publically oppose the offensive parts of the DMCA (it's just possible that
the IBMs and Suns of this world, who don't have a big personal interest in
copyright protection can be persuaded to do this (this one will be, I
guess, very hard to achieve)).

On the smaller scale, write letters to Congressmen and Senators pointing
out the fact that copyright infringement itself is a crime, and that
little is gained (and much is lost) if you unnecessarily also make
circumventing copyright protection mechanisms a crime.

To be truly effective, such an plan of action will need to be coordinated
and organised, with a web site offering information on everything from the
DMCA itself to the arguments against it, to how to organise protests,
sample form letters and petitions, etc.

There's no doubt that the effort required to overturn the DMCA will be
worthwhile.

Julian

-- 
Julian T. J. Midgley                    http://www.xenoclast.org
Cambridge, England.                       PGP Key ID: 0xBCC7863F