On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Terry Hancock wrote: > Prohibiting TPM *distribution* is fine under DFSG.
No, it's not. Prohibiting TPM distribution is quite clearly a restriction on a field of endeavor. > This is exactly what the Aug 9 draft of CCPL3.0 says: > > """ You may not impose any technological measures on the Work that > restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise > their rights granted under the License """ The critical aspect here is that parallel distribution does not cause the rights of a recipient of the work to be restricted; they retain all abilities that they had originally and gain additional ones (namely, being able to run the work on a TPM-inflicted device.) > The requirement is needed to ensure that copyleft preserves the > freedoms granted by the content's author. No, they're not. They're a lazy means of hacking in a small bit of copyleft protection into licenses by outlawing legitimate uses. Any attempt via licensing to deal properly with TPM and or DRM must necessarily address the need for free software works to be capable of running on such a device when the end user desires it. There are two choices: You either 1) allow parallel distribution 2) require distribution of keys or information needed to deploy modified versions to the device. Whether or choosing to do 2) has the pratical effect of not allowing the use on TPM devices is a separate issue; it in itself does not outlaw their use or distribution. [It just minimizes their effectiveness.] If you're seriously interested in discussing how to do copylefted TPM and DRM properly, I strongly suggest reading my position statement from committee D on the first discussion draft of the GPL and also checking out the logs of seth schoen's conversations with the other members of Commitee D on #committeed on freenode. [Logs are available in http://svn.donarmstrong.com/don/trunk/projects/gplv3/] Don Armstrong -- If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. -- Lowery's Law http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
