RedHat forks OpenSSH?

[Iago Rubio]

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 11:27, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 10:54:04AM +0100, Iago Rubio wrote:
> > With the new - 1 Oct - copyright law in spain you could face a 2 year
> > term at state jail, just for posession of a tool capable to decode the
> > ACSS algorithm.
> 
> Remember to hand in your DVD player then  8)
:)

I know it's weird, and nobody - even judges - know how the hell this law
will be applied, but well, it's how things are going in Spain right now.

A lot of pressure on legislators was done by author's and editor's
societies - mostly by SGAE - and, with those new laws, if someone post
in a web site how to bypass DVD's protection using the OpenSSH included
algorithm - even ripping it out of OpenSSH - SGAE can fill a criminal
lawsuit against the site's owner, the tool's authors, the tool's
distributors, and anyone with this tool in his hard drive.

Just to draw a big picture about how copyright laws are hiting Spain, if
you buy a blank CD you must pay a fee - almost equal to the CD's price -
to be payed to singers affiliated to the SGAE, just for the shake you
have with this CD the posibility of copying a music CD.

I've just payed a fee of 1,50 euros to burn the fedore Core 3 release,
that will be payed to *some* singers affiliated to the SGAE. Weird,
isn't it ?

With this I mean, all those legal issues regarding copyrights, patents
and such, must be taken into account because laws are getting worst for
freedom - at least in US and Europe - and those laws can forbide the
distribution of the whole distro, and/or criminalize it's users.

--

NOTE: For those interested, the SGAE - a society of authors and editors
- have a lot of power here in Spain. Unfortunately they thing and
publicly stated  in mouth of it's president, that copyleft supporters
are "pendejos electronicos", what could be freely translated to
"electronic morons" or literaly as "electronic female pubic hair".

You can reach their page using the spanish search term "ladrones" -
burglars - in Google.

As they have high influence on legislators, I expect things going worst
here for Open Souce development regarding encoding/decoding algorithms,
copyright issues and software patents. 

-- 
Iago Rubio