On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
Deletion of first part of anti-anti-circumvention provision
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While I currently continue to feel it is worthwhile for copyleft-next
to explicitly address anti-circumvention law, I no longer consider the
first paragraph of what was GPLv3 section 3 to be desirable.
The basic idea here was the hope that courts would be influenced by a
general declaration by the licensor that covered works are, in some
sense fundamental to the license, not 'effective technological
protection measures'. There is no known history of use of this
provision by those defending against invocation of anti-circumvention law.
Which means that it has worked. Nobody has been silly enough to
attempt to implement a DRM system with GPLv3 code because they knew
the magical tech+legal combination that makes DRM so effective would
be undermined by this clause. In fact, this made them change their
minds about DRM entirely, so they didn't buy or implement proprietary
DRM either. Ok, probably not. No anecdote about anyone's decisions
being influenced as such, nor any use of the provision as defense, are
good reasons for losing the text.
Perhaps irrelevant given the above, but I don't understand the following:
This strikes me as being an inherently weak provision, but, the less
weak one assumes it is, the more problematic it becomes from a free
software perspective, since it approaches something like a field of
use restriction. That certainly is not what the FSF intended, but that
lack of intent does not make the discomfort go away.
How could it approach a field of use restriction? If completely
effective, nobody could be persecuted for circumventing a system
implemented with GPLv3 code. But it does not prevent anyone from
implementing any system they can imagine. I thought
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited expressed this
very nicely. Is that answer wrong?
The reason for effectively two (or three, depending on how you look
at
it) anti-anti-circumvention provisions had to do with concerns about
differences between US and EU approaches to anti-circumvention law.
I did not realize this. I had naively thought the first (now deleted)
provision concerned DRM implemented with the GPLv3 licensed code
(maybe thus my confusion/question above) while the second protected
users of GPLv3 licensed works from systems with those works restricted
by external DRM -- the distributor would be out of compliance they did
not permit circumvention of the external system.
Re-reading the EU and US texts cited in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention I take a guess that
the first provision intended to address the EU, and second the US?
How wrong am I?
I
consider it better to come up with one provision suitable for major
jurisdictions in which the license is likely to be granted. A
modification of the second part of what was GPLv3 section 3 is a
better basis for such a provision.
The diff is at
https://gitorious.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/commit/f9922efd0af3e203...
There aren't any textual changes to the second part. I assume the one
provision is forthcoming.
Mike