Re: [Fsfe-uk] Trying to pull a fast one in the Office

[Simon Waters]

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Robert J Munro wrote:
>
> I'm sure the DRM, at the very least, will be cracked soon enough. The
> ability to clean out the junk is a hack. They really should stop it
> saving the junk in the first place.

That was the point of the European Copyright directive and the DMCA,
there are "NO EFFECTIVE" technical measures, in the sense you can't make
a program display information and make it technically impossible to copy
the information so displayed.

You can make it legally difficult, and use obscurity to make it
technically awkward.

The EU copyright directive was enacted into UK law with effect from the
31st October 2003.

This would make it illegal to own or distribute a program that defeats
the DRM software in the next Office version. However if this program
were incorporated into a competitive product on a OS MS don't support
(say) this presumably would be legal as it's sole purpose would not be
the circumvention of Digital rights.

Kind of analogous to being able to own OpenSSH, but making OpenSSL
illegal to own or distribute.

This is the kind of bizarre legal situation we advised the drafters into
UK law to avoid, as far as I can establish they didn't even try.

The pragmatic course of action is of course to carry on as if the new
law didn't exist, and demonstrate it's absurdity if and when a rights
holder sues you.

> It occurs to me that the facility to display a document, but not allow
> copy and paste without a password cannot be achieved except by keeping
> the source code secret. This would seem to clash with Microsoft's
> "Shared Source" program.

As I said, no effective technical measures exist, that is why the
proponents of the technology want a law to prevent people cracking
everything openly left, right, and centre.

Strangely I think you are wrong on the "junk" question, some of the
"junk" is useful when you write the document. You just want to remove it
before publishing it, the problem is that users aren't aware of the junk
or how to go about removing it. Lack of clear division between authoring
and publishing.

Perhaps it should be saved in a seperate log file? A vim "undo" which
works between saves would have saved me a good few minutes today, I
realy ought to read the manual and see if it has one.

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