[copyleft-next] Anti-anti-circumvention

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Tue Aug 14 18:39:15 UTC 2012


On 08/14/2012 11:53 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Richard Fontana
> <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>> I replaced the anti-anti-circumvention provision with a FIXME for the
>> time being.
>>
>> What's a *real-world* scenario in which the waiver feature of the
>> earlier provision would do any good? Assume this license is likely to
>> be used primarily for software.
> 
> For reference, the last draft of the earlier provision was:
> 
> ---------------
> Each Distributor of a Covered Work (i) waives all rights to forbid	
> circumvention of technological measures achieved by exercising	
> rights under this License with respect to a Covered Work, and (ii)	
> disclaims any intention to limit operation or modification of the	
> Received Work as a means of enforcing such Upstream Distributor's	
> or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of	
> technological measures.
> --------------
> 
> Much of the impact depends on what "rights under this License" are -
> if there is a strong requirement for installation materials
> (particularly keys), then (i) has some bite for embedded/mobile
> devices. 

copyleft-next currently says nothing about 'keys'.

I think there are only two interesting possibilities:

1) Distributor of covered work A sues someone under an
anticircumvention law civil remedy for circumventing a TPM A' that
effectively controls access to its copyrighted work B, where A' is
itself either [something that includes] a Derived Work of A or both
are Derived Works of some common copyleft-next ancestor. Work B is
under some arbitrary license.

2) Distributor of work A', a Derived Work of copyleft-next work A
prepared by the Distributor, sues someone under an anticircumvention
law civil remedy for circumventing a TPM B under some arbitrary
license that effectively controls access to A'.

Maybe I'm missing something (that itself may indicate that there is
some sort of problem here), but if not I am questioning whether cases
like these are likely to arise in the real world -- likely enough to
justify making the license 9 or so lines longer than it has to be.
Particularly given that copyleft-next is GPLv3-compatible.

The effective date of the DMCA version of anticircumvention law was
October 23, 2000.

- RF





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