Remember when I said that taking an afternoon off to march for Dmitri
was pissing in the wind and that to be really effective we needed
people willing to publically break the stupid laws right in the
face of the authorities?
Well it seems Bruce Perens agrees with me, only he's going one better,
instead of just mouthing off about it, he's going to do it and do it
in a big way ...
Open source campaigner to risk jail
By James Middleton [24-07-2002]
Bruce Perens plans live DVD hack
With the dust from the Elcomsoft/Sklyarov case still thick in the
air, influential open source activist Bruce Perens plans to go one
better by breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA)
during a live presentation on Friday.
Fresh from giving RealNetworks a slating for not completely
backing open source with its latest announcement, Perens said that
during a Digital Rights Management presentation to be held Friday
at the O'Reilly developer conference in San Diego, he would break
the law.
The DMCA has been a sore point in the open source community since
the outlawing of DeCSS, a tool created so that DVDs could be
played on Linux machines, and more recently since the arrest of
Dmitry Sklyarov and the criminal charges faced by his employer,
Elcomsoft.
Based on the recent history of DMCA contravention, Perens could
face imprisonment or a $500,000 fine for his actions.
According to Infoworld the demonstration is to be carried out in
protest at the regional system used by the motion picture industry
to prevent DVDs released in one country being played on machines
in another country.
During his presentation, Perens will demonstrate how to hack a DVD
player so that it can play movies from any region.
"It is a political and social statement, and the statement is that
the people do not need to have a hall monitor living in their
stereo system and should be able to play any kind of media on the
device they wish," he was quoted as saying.
But luck may be on his side, if last year is anything to go by. At
the same conference in 2001 Perens made a presentation on the
triviality of Digital Rights Management systems using exactly the
same slides that got Sklyarov arrested.
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1133862
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
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