Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: EU Communication on the Management of Copyright and Related Rights

[MJ Ray]

Philip,

In general, your email seems a succinct summary of what your concerns 
are. In fact, the only improvement suggestion I have is one point of 
terminology. The end of your opening paragraph also made me think of 
another potential concern:

On 2004-06-16 23:25:34 +0100 Philip Hunt <address@hidden> wrote:

> is with copyright law as it relates to digital rights management (DRM)
> systems.

I'm not comfortable calling it DRM too often in the longer reply I'm 
writing. "DRM systems can be used to clear rights, to secure payment, 
to trace behaviour and to enforce rights." I guess we should narrow 
which of those are problems for each thing. I guess "enforce rights" 
is nearly always the source of problems. Is there a potential privacy 
problem too with this?

[...]
> of DRM being used to forbid compatibility are particularly severe
> with regard to open source software. My employers use open source
> software extensively, and any legal climate that restricts it would
> harm us.

I think the EU has called it "Free/Libre Open Source Software" in the 
past, so we should encourage them to use that term for now.

I hope these comments are useful to you,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
Help hack the EuroParl! http://mjr.towers.org.uk/proj/eurovote/