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    SubjectRe: Linux 2.2.20pre10
    There have been a lot of messages from a number of different people
    about this "censored changelogs" issue. Rather than reply to various
    points separately, I just want to sum up my views in one message.

    I simply don't believe that Alan Cox is at any risk of prosecution, and
    what's more, I don't believe that he believes it. He's just making a
    dramatic political statement that will have no effect on the law, will
    never even be noticed by American legislators, and serves only to annoy
    US-based Linux users.

    The words "Felten" and "Sklyarov" keep coming up in this discussion. The
    parallel between Alan Cox's situation and those cases are simply not
    valid.

    Felten conducted research on how to break DRM systems that were being
    considered for commercial use (the proposed SDMI standards).

    Sklyarov developed (or helped develop) a product that breaks Adobe's
    commercial DRM scheme for PDF files.

    Note that both Felten and Skyarov developed and publicized (or announced
    an intent to publicize, in Felten's case) ways of compromising
    commercial, third-party DRM systems, thus embarrassing and antagonizing
    the wealthy corporations that had invested time, money, and prestige in
    those DRM systems. This has no real similarity with Alan Cox's kernel
    work. All Alan is doing is fixing bugs in a system that he has every
    right to work on, and has a long history of contributing to. He is _not_
    reverse-engineering someone else's copyright-protection scheme and
    publicizing how to circumvent it. And anyone who's ever actually _read_
    his changelogs should know that they do not in any way amount to attack
    recipes.

    What's more, nobody sued or prosecuted Felten. The RIAA made threatening
    noises, but backed off the instant they were called on it, insisting
    that they had never had any intention of suing anybody, and they fully
    supported Felten's rights as an academic researcher, blah blah blah.
    (No, I don't really believe them, but the fact is, ultimately, they
    didn't sue.) Felten elected not to present his paper mostly because it
    gave him and the EFF a stronger case for his suit against the RIAA; he
    couldn't very well present the paper and then sue them for preventing
    him from doing so, and he obviously wants to be the Constitutional test
    case or he wouldn't have bothered suing them at all after they publicly
    backed down.

    Alan Cox claims to have legal advice, but has said nothing about who
    gave it to him, or what their qualifications are regarding US copyright
    law and the DMCA, or even exactly what their reasoning was; all we know
    is that the end result is that he's decided not to distribute complete
    changelogs. I find it hard to take this sort of nebulous claim of "legal
    advice" seriously when the advice seems nonsensical on its face.

    Craig
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