I simply don't believe that Alan Cox is at any risk of prosecution, and
what's more, I don't believe that he believes it. He's just making a
dramatic political statement that will have no effect on the law, will
never even be noticed by American legislators, and serves only to annoy
US-based Linux users.
The words "Felten" and "Sklyarov" keep coming up in this discussion. The
parallel between Alan Cox's situation and those cases are simply not
valid.
Felten conducted research on how to break DRM systems that were being
considered for commercial use (the proposed SDMI standards).
Sklyarov developed (or helped develop) a product that breaks Adobe's
commercial DRM scheme for PDF files.
Note that both Felten and Skyarov developed and publicized (or announced
an intent to publicize, in Felten's case) ways of compromising
commercial, third-party DRM systems, thus embarrassing and antagonizing
the wealthy corporations that had invested time, money, and prestige in
those DRM systems. This has no real similarity with Alan Cox's kernel
work. All Alan is doing is fixing bugs in a system that he has every
right to work on, and has a long history of contributing to. He is _not_
reverse-engineering someone else's copyright-protection scheme and
publicizing how to circumvent it. And anyone who's ever actually _read_
his changelogs should know that they do not in any way amount to attack
recipes.
What's more, nobody sued or prosecuted Felten. The RIAA made threatening
noises, but backed off the instant they were called on it, insisting
that they had never had any intention of suing anybody, and they fully
supported Felten's rights as an academic researcher, blah blah blah.
(No, I don't really believe them, but the fact is, ultimately, they
didn't sue.) Felten elected not to present his paper mostly because it
gave him and the EFF a stronger case for his suit against the RIAA; he
couldn't very well present the paper and then sue them for preventing
him from doing so, and he obviously wants to be the Constitutional test
case or he wouldn't have bothered suing them at all after they publicly
backed down.
Alan Cox claims to have legal advice, but has said nothing about who
gave it to him, or what their qualifications are regarding US copyright
law and the DMCA, or even exactly what their reasoning was; all we know
is that the end result is that he's decided not to distribute complete
changelogs. I find it hard to take this sort of nebulous claim of "legal
advice" seriously when the advice seems nonsensical on its face.
Craig
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