Sen. Hollings plans to introduce DMCA sequel: The SSSCA

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:26 PM 09/09/2001 +0100, Carsten Kuckuk wrote:
>Am I right in that this bill would effectively outlaw all free
>open-source operating systems like Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.?

Only if the free operating system hasn't developed a
US-government-certified-copy-protection-system
and paid the US government for certification,
and the machine had a pre-Hollings OS on it.

If an older machine didn't have an approved operating system on it,
or had the copy protection built into the hardware,
you could install the free OS there, but if there's already a copy of
Monopoly-Enforcing Operating System there, you can't uninstall that,
because you'd get the $500000 fine for disabling it.
         (Boy, that's a *lot* more expensive that the $2000 fine for
         disabling smoke detectors in an airplane lavatory.
         I guess copying music is more of a threat to public safety
         than airplane fires caused by smoking in the can.)

You *probably* could use Partition Magic to let you install
the free operating system in one partition while leaving the
Monopoly-Enforcing Operating System in its original partition,
but I'm not sure if you'd be allowed to boot it after you do.
You could also install Linux using a umsdos file system,
which stores Linux as files on the Microsoft file system,
but I'm not sure if you'd be allowed to boot it or not.





---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com