Fundamentalist Software Foundation in the making

From the article:

"Therefore, there’s all the more reason to be disappointed by the FSF’s recent and regrettable spiral into misplaced neopolitical activism. In particular, its moralistic opposition to DRM (digital rights management) technologies, which first manifested itself in early drafts of Version 3 of the GPL (Gnu General Public Licence), now seems to have been an evangelical dogma."

Digital Restrictions Mania is a direct assault on fair use rights ("fair dealing", in the UK, IIUC). It is used to usurp more power over the users of software than any law grants. If GPLv3 did not address the issue of the use of GPL software for DRM, the freedoms the GPL is intended to protect would be subject to the whims of the DRM instigators. This would render the GPL useless.

P.S.: I think dcparris meant "subjugation" instead of "subjection" in his editorial comment in the story lead, but I may be wrong.

grouch: like all geeks, you're hooking onto logic when you ought to be talking interests and motives.

So what if consumers will gladly let businesses rob them of their freedoms? DRM is a slippery slope, which indeed leads from Managing the Digital Rights of Producers to Restricting the Digital Rights of Consumers/Hackers.

Region coding on DVDs is a perfect example of the sort of insanity we are headed for in a DRM world.

DRM+DMCA = Death to Homebrew