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anti-piracy as a tool |
2007-10-02
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I'm at the EBU Open Source conference, in a presentation on Campcaster. The speaker raised a great point that I had never thought about before.
We all know lots of people use cracked proprietary software. Campware is creating tools for media producers in emergent democracies. Apparently, sometimes local police uses anti-piracy as a tool to be able to raid these media producers and shut them down when they need to. Obviously it makes perfect sense for the police to use this avenue to get their way, but I'd never thought about software licensing being used as a tool to quell free speech.
Another reason to contribute to Free Software, I guess.
More information about the Open Source Seminar in Geneva at the European Broadcasting Union centre, hold on 1 and 2 October 2007 is available by these links
http://www.ebu.ch/en/union/under_banners/Open_source.php?display=EN
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/opensource/demos.php
Comment by Frans van Berckel — 2007-10-04 @ 10:32
Hi Thomas,
It was a pleasure to meet you at the EBU Open Source conference this week.
The incidents I referred to in my talk were in Samara, Russia, in May of this year. Here is the report from the Committee to Protect Journalists:
http://www.cpj.org/news/2007/europe/russia11may07na.html
Our interest is in the safety and unhindered operation of independent media; obviously legality plays a crucial role in that. So it was an easy step for us to promote Free Software as a potential workaround.
Unfortunately, I fear that there will be far more of these incidents as governments become aware of this pretext to shut down those who are “uncomfortable” to them.
Comment by Douglas Arellanes — 2007-10-04 @ 12:35