Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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Well, "The Right to Read" was published in February of 1997 in "Communications of the ACM".

So, it was enough of a problem that a mainstream computer research publication (which normally has a lag of 6-12 months) published it. In early 1997.

Please do remember that you cannot rely on Google for history prior to about 1998. (Try hunting for information about VB6 programming for a concrete non-controversial example).

Also, please do remember that we were fighting things on multiple fronts. Encryption was still a munition. The web was still in its infancy. DVD's had just come out in 1995 and file sharing was just reaching critical mass. Many of us were coordinating by email and Usenet(gasp) and long-distance phone(GASP!).

In addition, many people had an attitude that we didn't need to fight since it was impossible for the law to touch the Internet (damage and routing around it and all that hooey). Boy were they wrong.

To top it off, a bunch of companies that were the DotCom sweethearts were happy to sell out our rights in order to help their bottom lines. They were quite happy to support the DMCA, and many are now successful venture capitalists (they learned from Steve Jackson to sell out to the government). These folks are quite happy to whitewash their involvement in lobbying for the DMCA.

So we were there. And we were fighting against it. We were just heavily outgunned.

We're talking about two different things, really: You're saying that RMS was concerned about copy protection and locked-down devices in general back in 1997. That's true, and nobody has said anything to the contrary.

But RMS and the FSF didn't, as far as I remember, oppose the DMCA! It's not because they were in favor of it, but because few people in the tech community outside of the DFC were paying attention.

If you look at the FSF's web site a few weeks after the DMCA became law, it talks about the fixing the (bad) Communications Decency Act, fixing (bad) software patents, and fixing (bad) crypto laws, but it doesn't even mention the DMCA: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206082742/http://www.fsf.or...

BTW, late 1998 wasn't exactly exclusively Usenet/phone coordination days. Slashdot with its Your Rights Online section had launched a year before, and Wired had already been publishing its Netizen section, including my contributions, for about three years. EFF had been around for almost 10 years, and there was VTW, CDT, EPIC, ACLU, etc. also in the mix. Even my Politech mailing list.

We were there. I was there. We were indeed outgunned. But also the politicians voting for the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" language never intended it to be wielded against farmers with John Deere tractors.

Well, I suspect that you have a better feel for general sentiment given that you ran Politech.

I was sitting with folks that had been making chips and systems which were compatible with other systems. They pretty much all recoiled in horror at the implications the moment they found out about the DMCA. It was clear that anybody who made a computer system was going to wield this to prevent compatible competition (our own management even proposed it for our systems, too...) irrespective of how big or small that computer system was.

As for coordination, I was thinking more along the lines of 1996 rather than 1998. In 1996, broadband communication was just starting to hit general availability (1996 Telecom Act) when the WIPO treaties originally were signed (late 1996).

The big problem was just that there was so much money being thrown against so few who actually understood the implications.

20 years later and we still haven't unwound all the damage. :(

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