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Copyright Reform Process
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Submission from Ed Tomlinson received on August 6, 2001 6:19 PM via e-mail
Subject: Copyright
Please be very very carefull reforming this legislation.
Consider what is happening now in the US. Basicly they have arrested and charged a person for making a speach. In this speach he exposed the weakness of a couple of 'ebook' products.
I for one, am _glad_ he did so. The companies producing these programs made claims that their products were safe. They were not. The encription schemes used were so basic that using the word encription is misleading.
This exposes a large flaw in the ideas behind the US's DCMA legislation. In this case It encouraged companies to claim to protect data when they, in fact, have not done so.
Outlawing reverse engineering allows companies to do shoddy work.
On the other hand consider one of the best email signing & encription products released, PGP. It was produced in an open environment with lots of peer review. Its effective, actually does encript, and does what it claims to do.
I suggest that if you really want to protect copyright in digitial form, DCMA type legislation, will not work. Legislating the use of open standards and open peer review will be much more effective.
Thanks.
Ed Tomlinson
(Address removed)
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