The Censorware Companies Strike Back
I'm undecided whether or not I should write blog entries ripping apart the DMCA reply of censorware companies opposing the censorware DMCA exemption. The argument for, is that it would be good practice and useful writing. The argument against, is that it would show my hand - after all, David Burt (who wrote it) sure didn't send me a pre-release review copy to analyze!
But to give a sense of how honest is that reply comment, note Matthew Skala, one of the programmers who got sued for publishing reverse-engineering of Cyberpatrol, has the following reaction in his blog:
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in censorware , dmca | on March 03, 2003 08:56 PM (Infothought permalink) | FollowupsN2H2 has its say
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lw/?id=2003022802This is one of the DMCA exemption reply comments, from David Burt of N2H2, which makes the Bess censorware package. He appears to be speaking on behalf of several other censorware vendors too. It turns out that xpdf will read the file even though my konqueror Web browser won't. The comment argues that it's not necessary to reverse engineer censorware to test it, and has an entire section about what an evil person I am, calling Eddy Jansson and myself "two teen age hackers". Conveniently neglecting to mention that at the time of the Cyber Patrol break three years ago, we were both in our twenties, and I was already a university graduate; also denying, in the face of many counterexamples, that anyone who was anyone thought our work was valuable to the debate. Well, I (unfortunately) have much worse things to worry about at the moment than that kind of insult.
