GNU/Linux & the new battles of the Free Software movement Since 1983, the goal of the GNU project has been to develop enough Free Software such that proprietary software becomes obsolete. With the availability of the GNU/Linux operating system, the first big step toward that goal has been achieved, but today, free software faces increasing competition, not just from the software developers of proprietary software companies, but also from the political lobbyists of these companies. In this talk, Ciaran O'Riordan, Chairperson of Irish Free Software Organisation, discusses the history of the GNU project and the current focuses of the Free Software movement such as the battle to prevent new EU directives from making all software ideas ownable through patents, and to revert recent extensions of copyright which prohibit the development of software for certain tasks. ================================================================= to cover: fs -define fs -why 0&2 fs -why 1&3 gnu copyleft gpl gnu/linux oss patents eucd/dmca disney/broadcast flag next? ================================================================== I'm going to talk about what I think is one of the greatest projects that no one knows about. The phrase "no good deed goes unpunished" seems to fit, but this good deed managed to drag on for 15 years before anyone realised they had to start punishing the people behind it. The thing I'm going to talk about is the the GNU project. The GNU project was started in 1983, but I'll go back a bit further to give some setting. In the sixties and seventies, software was written by universities and computer manufacturers - they wrote it to make their computers work, and they gave it away with their hardware. And when people gave software to each other, they would give the machine readable version and they would also give the source code - the human readable version which allowed the recipient to make changes to their copy of the software - and if the recipient made any substantial changes, they would often send a copy to the author of the original program, and so on. In one way the software could be considered to be free - the software was paid for at the same time as the hardware, but once a person got a copy of the software, they weren't restricted in what they could do with it. This all began to change in the late seventies. Companies stopped sharing software with their customers and began to license it. They stopped giving out their source code, and just gave out the machine readable binaries instead. What's more, they also prohibited distributing copies of their software. They figured out that if they prohibit copying, they can sell every copy of the software that gets used. This had two effects. The first was that the users lost their freedom to cooperate and help eachother, and the other was that - to keep the code a secret, the programmers working for the hardware companies had to sign non-disclosure agreements which prohibited the software developers from helping other developers by sharing the source code. So the users were promising not to help other users, and the programmers were prominising not to help other programmers. The software the was distributed by these companies was called proprietary software - since the company treated the software like property - and this new era of proprietary software slowly crept in and became the norm. The university programmers continued to share their source code as they always had, but the number of programmers in the universities was decreasing as software became more mainstream and companies started hiring away most of the university programmers. The way it crept in was that, back in the seventies, software was designed to run on one machine, and one machine only. Every few years, or maybe every decade, the university would upgrade it's hardware, and that would mean writing new software for it because the old software wouldn't work on the new system. But as the number of programmers in universities decreased, each university got to a point where new hardware was bought, but there weren't enough programmers to write all the new software for it - so they bought proprietary software from the companies. The new era crept in one programmer at a time, as each programmer asked "since everyone else is signing non-disclosure agreements, there's not much point in me rejecting them". This is where Richard Stallman comes in. Stallman was a programmer at the artificial intelligence lab at MIT in Boston - in that lab, the ethic of sharing software was particularly strong, but in time, it too had most of it's programmers hired away, and in 1981 it also didn't have enough programmers left to write a new system for the latest hardware upgrade. As the only person who refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement, Stallman was the only old-style programmer left in the AI lab. Even if he wrote a system for the new hardware, it wouldn't be certain he could do it, but even if he did, who what happen next time the hardware was being upgraded? and what's the point in having sharable software if your working on your own. Stallman decided that computer users should have the freedom to cooperate as a community, but instead of complaining or writing letters - which is sometimes all you can do - he decided to give people a path to freedom by creating enough free software to make a computer useable. After two years of thinking about these things he announced that he was starting the GNU project. He was going to develop a new system, but not for the new hardware in MIT, he decided to develop a clone of the Unix operating system. When he started in 1984, he knew it would take 8 or 9 years, so he had to model it after a system that could be ported to other hardware - since he couldn't know what hardware would be popular in 8 or 9 years. The end goal of project GNU is to make all non-free software obsolete, but the first thing he needed was an operating system - and it had to be made of completely free software, so he would have to write most of it from scratch. In 1985, Stallman launched Free Software Foundation, which is a nonprofit to support the GNU project and provide legal and organisational infrastructure to the growing free software community. So Stallman set out on his own to write this replacement operating system which he would call GNU, and he asked people to help along the way, which they did. And he wrote a text editor, then a C compiler, then a debugger, a tar, some shell utils, and as people started using this software, companies started paying him to add certain features. So Stallman made a living from Free Software, and other companies donated money to FSF so that they could hire staff programmers to work on a C library, more shell utilsities, and all the other components necessary to have a complete POSIX compliant operating system. Now, he needed to figure out the terms under which he would distribute it, so he looked at xfree86 and did better: copyleft then GNU GPL In 1991, the GNU project was almost finished. There was just one piece missing from the operating system and that was a piece called the kernel. Some GNU programmers were working on a kernel called HURD, but they had chosen a bad design gamble had made their work very slow. But by chance, a programmer in Finland - Linus Torvalds - had begun writing a POSIX compliant kernel in 1991 called "Linux". Initially it wasn't free software, but in 1992 he changed the license to the GNU GPL. When Linux was working, people started to look for software they could add to it. A kernel doesn't do anything useful on it's own, they needed a proper operating environment, so they looked around for software they could add to Linux, and they found pieces of the GNU system, so they kept adding bits of GNU to Linux, but the whole time they called it Linux. So most of the first users of the GNU + Linux system called the whole OS "Linux". The problem with this was that the developers of Linux didn't have the same philosophy as the GNU project. Linus Torvalds doesn't agree that people should have the freedom to modify and share software, in fact he writes and uses proprietary software himself. So after 8 years of programming, starting with one person in 1984, all the way up to 15 full-time programmers working for Free Software Foundation in the early nineties, after all that work, people were calling the operating system "Linux", and users weren't getting to hear about all the work of the GNU project. This was the first blow to the GNU project, but it was accidental rather than malicious, many free software advocates, and particularly the GNU developers ask people to call the operating system GNU-slash-Linux, or GNU-plus-Linux, or just GNU Linux. And since I'm both a free software advocated and a GNU developer, I'm going to ask you too. Please call the system GNU-slash-Linux. The GNU project deserves some credit, but it's much more important than credit, the important thing is the link to the free software philosophy. When I say I'm one of the developers of GNU, I'm probably misleading most people. I'm not a big contributor, I've contributed 70 lines of code. One day I was using a program that automatically generates HTML, and I thought it would be good if it could also generate a format called Texinfo - so I downloaded the source and saw that this would be quite easy to do. I made the change and sent my code which was about 50 lines, to the programs maintainer and it was accepted. Another time I found a bug and I had a hunch as to what was causing it, so I got the code and made the fix and that was about 20 lines. Y'see, this is why free software is often very reliable. In proprietary software development, the number of contributors is equal to the number of programmers a company can afford to hire - but in free software the number of contributors grows as the number of users grow. This kind of development can only happen with free software because there are no resources or material costs involved in the production. Meanwhile, the proprietary software world is trying to pretend that it is a manufacturing industry. If you ask Bill Gates what he makes, he'll tell you he makes "little boxes that help you get things done". He wouldn't want people to think of software as simply a set of instructions which can be copied infinitely at zero cost. Anyway... In 1998, two things were happening: the first was the dot-com boom, and the second was that free software was getting a really good reputation for being reliable. So there were plenty of venture capitalists plunging money into companies, but some members of the free software community were getting worried that they weren't getting as much funding as they could be getting - and they thought maybe it was because the word "free" and the talk of freedom was scaring business away from GNU/Linux. So they came up with the term "open source" which they said would be a marketing arm for free software and a movement formed around this new term and they succeeded in getting a lot of venture capital and they got funding to develop some more free software. Of course, they call the software "open source software" instead of "free software", but it's the same thing. But this caused a new problem. In hiding the push for freedom, and trying to be business friendly, the open source movement attracted a lot of companies that didn't understand the point of the operating system. And these companies plastered "open source" all over the place like a buzzword, even when they weren't developing free software. This was the second blow to the GNU project. Now, it sounds like when ever people try to help the GNU project, they do the opposite, but that's not the case. The people who started the open source movement had good intentions, but they weakened the movement when they splintered off seperately. When software forks into two competing versions, that's often a good thing because the users get to choose which fork they prefer - but when a movement forks, that's a bad thing because our enemies can choose which group to target with their counter-marketing campaigns. This new weakness in the movement had particularly bad timing because microsoft and other large sellers of proprietary software had begun to realise that we were becoming a serious threat. There are two problems with the term "open source". The first is that it's unclear , between control and freedom, but many people don't know that it's happening. Some people know that it's happening, but they think they can be neutral. They can't. This is the politics of the Information Society. You can leave politics alone, but it won't leave you alone. Most programmers don't want to think about politics, they wish we could have less politics, but politics is attacking us. The only way we can have less politics, is to tell the politicians to stop causing problems for us. When you use or develop software, you make choices, and your choices decide which side of the tug-of-war you are on. Most people who think they are being "neutral" are simply joining the bigger side of the tug-of-war, and unfortunately the control side is the bigger side at the moment. I'm going to tell you about the other side, and why software freedom is important. Talk about the copyright trade off. We trade I'll start with the history. Computers took off in the sixties and seventies. For a computer to be useful, people needed software, so they wrote software to make computers useful. Why am I talking to you about politics? You can leave politics alone, but it won't leave you alone. Free Software & copyleft. The first thing I will explain is what Free Software is. Copyleft BSD developers don't believe in copyleft, they let everyone use the code without requiring that they give back. This would be nice in an ideal world, but we don't live there. In this world, when Microsoft wanted to add TCP/IP to Windows, they just took the code from FreeBSD, stuck their own license on it, and sold it. They did the exact same when they wanted to add an ftp client and the kerberos security protocol. The the BSD guys write the code, and Microsoft sells it without passing back their improvements. FIXME:confirm this: Apple to this to the BSD people too. They took FreeBSD, modified it and used it as the base of MacOSX. Apple have been nicer than Microsoft. Apple still release the code as Free Software, but they use an incompatible license, so the BSD folk still can benefit from Apples work. This is why copyleft exists. You can use our code, and you can modify it, but if you release a modified version, you must release the code to your version under the same terms as the code you received from us. This has worked out very well. We now have companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Apple, HP, all releasing code under the GPL. I can only guess that this is because the GPL protects them from getting screwed like what happens to the BSD guys. Some people ask: Why would competing companies want to contribute if they can't keep the code as a secret? Secrets have always been a problem in the Unix world. In the 80's, Microsofts operating systems were gaining popularity and much of the reason was that they had a graphical interface. So the big Unix vendors realised that they would have to work together to beat Microsoft. They all had a meeting and they started working on the "Common Desktop Environment". They all agreed that instead of taking on Microsoft individually, they would make the battle "Unix Vs. Microsoft". It was a great idea, and they all shook hands and smiled at eachother, but the minute they left the meeting, they began working on individual extentions to CDE which they could use to compete against the other Unices. In trying to screw eachother, they ended up screwing themselves. No two versions of CDE were compatible, developers could not develop for one version, and Microsoft won. I don't know if the Unix vendors ever learned from this, but if they did, then that could explain why they all feel comfortable contributing to copylefted software. Project GNU Software Patents private groups can use government power to forbid you to use programming techniques you already know. open source was created as a marketing term for free software, but I'm going to ask that you use the term free software. In creating the marketing term, some people of the free software movement decided it would be more business friendly if they avoid the word free for two reasons. The first is that "free" is ambiguous, the second is that businesses don't always like users have freedom. Businesses like to control the after market by locking users into getting their technical support and their upgrades from one place. MS recently bought N unix licenses (SCO) - so it's not even good enough for them Disney want computers to be classed as digital TVss. we say to IBM: "you should play nice because if you don't, the next person won't either - and you'll lose more" fair use: unregulated use like a network, with central control, bandwidth goes down because each packet has to ... - more users = less distance between users = less power to move from one to another = less bandwidth required. This is a talk, that I'm giving to YOU. - because it's you who can help us make what we're making. (YOU can understand this. Many can't.) You, in your choices of what software to work on, can make it easier or harder for the free software movement. Most established people don't believe in Free Software - they think there's a catch, they're sceptical and with good reason - marketing is big business and advertising should be ignored. I'm giving this talk because, hopefully you'll support the Free Software movement, but most importantly, I hope you can believe it when you hear about it. Some people don't want to see the ethical issues. They love java - for instance - and they've spent time learning SUN's java tools and they don't want to use anything else. This is a talk I'm giving in various universities, to college students because you are the people who can choose what software to learn without having to to cast aside years of experience. So I want you to be aware of the situation so you can make your decision, now. finally, something moved faster than the large corporations. - the internet bill gates - open letter to hobbyists "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" =================================== =================================== Right, I'm going to talk today about the current legal threats to Free Software. These issues will affect all types of software devlepment but I'm going to focus on free software because free software will be the worst affected. When you offer to give a legal talk to techs, it's hard to guess how many will turn up. Most techs like to ignore these issues, they don't want to work on politics, they want to work on tech stuff. You can leave politics alone, but it won't leave you alone. Most european countries have national free software organisations or digital rights groups. Only two countries in europe don't have either free software or digital rights campaign, they are Ireland and Luxembourg. Luxembourg is about the size and population of Cork, so they generally band together with Belgium. So that just leaves Ireland as the only european country where the people are doing nothing at all. So in July, I got the free software foundation europe to set up a mailing list for ireland, thinking it would be good to get a bit organised, maybe start an organisation sometime and suddenly the EP declared it would vote on whether to allow software patents in ireland or not. No one was working on this in Ireland, so I decided I better do it. So I've been working on this with the folk on the fsfeurope-ie list. In the back of my mind I knew there was something going on with copyright too, so a few weeks ago I looked around and again no one was working on it. hmmm, I guess it's me again. So, this isn't what I want to do, I want to be programming, but someone has to do it, or we won't be able to program in a few years time. So, I Am Not A Lawyer, and I'm not even an expert, but unfortunatly I might be the closest thing Ireland has to an expert, and if anyones interested, I could do with some help. There are many legal threats to free software, I'll mainly focus on two of them because the others are not real threats. The SCO case is something I will ignore, because it's dispute between two companies, it's making a lot of news, and big numbers are being thrown around, but it doesn't affect software development as a whole. I'll use SCO as an example later on, but the case itself isn't relevant. The other topic I'm going to ignore is the enforcability of the GNU GPL. This appeared on slashdot three times this year and some people read the headline and nothing else. The three storys were really two because one was a duplicate where slashdot posted a 10 month old article as current news. But both of the stories were duds, they had absolutely no legal grounding. Both came from germany for some reason. One story was about a legal analysis of the GNU GPL funded by microsoft where the conclusion was the the GNU GPL was not enforcable because it disclaimed warranty. If disclaiming warranty made a license invalid, micrsoft would be in a lot of trouble, but the GNU GPL doesn't even disclaim warranty, it only says "NO WARRANTY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW". So that was a no brainer. The other story was even sillier. A lawyer said that the GPL claims to cover files that don't contain the GPL. His problem was what if someone removed the GPL before passing the copy on to someone else? How could the GPL possibly be enforceable then? Of course the answer is that it wouldn't be enforceable, but without a license, the recipient has no permission to copy the software, so the problem stops there. So this has nothing to do with the GNU GPL, it's just a general copyright question that has a standard answer. SCO also made a claim that the GPL was invalid, but in typical SCO style, they woudln't say why. But these issues are just distractions. There are two real legal threats to FS, and both are coming from the European Parialment. The biggest one is the software patents directive, the next is the European Union Copyright Direcitive, the EUCD which is our version of Americas laughable DMCA. 04:17 PATENTS ======= What caused all this? The European Patent Convention specifically marks "programs for computers" as being exempt from the patent system, but the European Patent Office has handed out over 30,000 software patents anyway. So germany got scared. If a software patent system was implemented in the EU, we would be 30 years behind America. So despite software patents not being enforceable, the german companies pressured the german patent office to accept such application. When France realised that Germany had them, it got scared and started handing them out too. The worst offender today, is the UK patent office who are might as well fly an American flag over their patent office, they'll patent anything. The problem is that a patent system doesn't fit the software development model. The work of a software developer is already protected by copyright, and it's working quite well. Copyright is instant, it costs nothing, and it doesn't affect other peoples work, so everyone can protect their work with copyright, and it scales well. If software becomes patentable, it will be the first type of work ever covered by both copyright and patents. Pantent are the complete opposite. It's worth noting that The term "software patents" is often used but it must be noted that the type of patents created by this directive do not cover complete pieces of software or specific implementations of an idea but ideas implementable through software. Business and teaching methods involving software will be included. They don't cover a complete library or plug-in. When you file for a patent, you make certain claims that cover your invention. To give the patenter a period of privacy, these claims are kept secret for 18 months. This doesn't cause many problems in most industries, where years are spent working on new products, but in software, 18 months is long enough for a complete development, test, and release cycle. So a company could have a new product out on the market installed on tens of thousands of computers before it is even possible for them to check if it infringes a patent. The complexity of software is also an issues. I read somewhere that modern cars contain approx 7,000 mechanical innovations. Not a lot really for something that has been 200 years in the making. On the other hand, software is easy to develop, no resources are needed and the problems of the physical world don't affect us, so in a few decades we've come to make pacakges that contain tens of thousands of components. The criteria for a patent requires that it must be new, but software as whole is new, so the vast majority of software innovations are still lockable via the patent system. Another big problem is the incremental development of software. Most patentable inventions can be manufactured in isolation, but this isn't true for algorithims. An innovative spell checking algorithim is no good with out an interface or a plug-in architecture, and as we've recently seen plug-in architectures are patented in some fields such as for use in a web browser. With so many components going into a software package, it's hard to avoid infringeing a few patents. In america, IBM have a patent on the nested menu structure, so that makes all GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, and Mozilla applications infringers. Another company have patented the blinking cursor. It's easy to make a trivial innovatoin sound complex when it's implemented in software. The blinking cursor is called a : "Cursor Position Indication System for those having Vison Difficulties" But that's America, we won't be that bad, will we? When we point out these silly patents to our MEPs they laugh because they think Europe would never allow such stupid patents, but the problem is that patent systems grow. Patent offices make money from the patents they accept, not the ones they reject, so individual patent offices are encouraged to hand out patents as often as possible, and no one is regulating them. Also, because patents are an asset created from thin air, if a country can find an excuse to hand out patents, they will do so. Whoever hands out the most patents wins. Patents caused a lot of problems in America in the 80's, companies realised that they couldn't move without infringing a patent. So the large patent holders made truces. They cross-license on a massive scale, Sun can use Microsoft patents if Microsoft lets Sun use it's patents. Of course, this only solved the problem for the large companies. Small businesses still found themselves locked out. So the software industry formed into legal cartels. Unless you can gain protection for one of the big companies, you can't compete in a realistic sense. This is a big problem for innovation and employment, but America can live with it. Partly because they have to, reversing a patent system would be very hard with so much monetary interests. But they can also tolerate it because they own the software industry. It's an annoyance to them, but it's domination of the European software industry. I think SAP is the biggest european software company. We have multinational offices of Microsoft and IBM, but the profits are all being shipped back to america. So now America has a new problem. Zombie companies called "IP Law Firms" are entering the software industry. Every software company in america has defensive patents, but they're not enforced. So these law firms are approaching them and buying their patents, with the promise that they won't be used against the previous owner and an offer of a few grand, they buy as many patents as they can and start looking for infringers. So you have a patent system, designed to promote the publication of ideas and protect software innovation, and it's being used by companies that develop no software, and make innovation harder. These companies have nothing to lose, nothing they can be counter-sued for, and everything to gain. When thinking about this issue, we have to think of it in terms of the software *using* community, not the small few software development companies. Patents cover *use* of an idea, so if a program infringes a patent, the users of that program are infringers. In practice, users never get sued, but when a patent holder tells a company that they will sue it's users, the company has to listen. Of course, they could take it to court, but the average cost of a patent lititgation case in the EU is E300,000. So most companies can't take this gamble. Collaboration is another problem. Take MySQL AB for instance, they make a complete Free Software database and make their money by selling licensed version to companies that want to integrate their back end without using the GPL. The MySQL guys have no practical way to check if their software infringes a patent, so when a company wants to integrate the MySQL backend, they have to think about whethere this will end up with them in court. This situation causes real problems for small businesses looking for funding. The standard way for a software company to grow is for them to find initial capital, make something innovate, and look for an investor so that they can hire more staff etc. Very small comanies are generally exempt from the problems of the patents system, they have nothing worth sueing for. But if a venture capitalist injects a million euros into this company, all of a sudden they become a target. So their money gets taken away, and the venture capitalist never makes a return, so they'll be slow to invest in the next start-up. The Sun story. Regulating ideas is like regulating fire. One flame can light 100 lanterns without being diminished. So we have a new era of knowledge and our reaction is to lock it down, and put costs on sharing it. Progress is the goal. We have something that can be copied infinitely, enriching millions, but instead we create an artificial shortage by saying that if an idea is truly innovative, it's illegal to pass it on. WTO trips not a problem. china and russia insignificant. Telecoms say innovation will end. So I'll talk about the EUCD for a bit. EUCD ==== This is a bit of an obituary really. A few weeks ago I realised that no-one in Ireland was working on the EUCD, so I started reading up about it and found that it's actually alread been ratified. It seems most of the good lobbying work on this issue was done by various groups of librarians. I wouldn't have expected it, but librarians are also responsible for a lot of the campaigning against the Patriot Act in America. The good news is that the Irish govt isn't very good at keeping it's promises. We agreed to implement this by December 2002 but we haven't done so. Appearantly Ireland has a reputation for always being 18 months to 3 years late when it comes to implementing EU policy, so it will come in, but we have some extra time. The reason for the lateness may be because certain politicians want to wait until election time so they can bee seen doing something. The reason this is good is that the EUCD has 15 optional provisions, that state governments can decide to turn on or off. 15 options may seem silly when the legislation was proposed on the grounds that it would unify and harmonise EU law. But that's what we have. These options are generally exemptions for libraries or personal use etc. Some are worth asking for, but most are effectively meaningless. I've even heard that there are spelling mistakes in the final directive. So this is our DMCA. The role of our law makers is to trade certain freedoms for other benefits. We trade the freedom to kill eachother, and in return we get a safer society. That's a good trade. When a freedom is not of much use, we tend to trade it easily. Copyright law was invented as an industrial regulation, it was created in the time of the printing press, when a factory was needed to create a book. The freedom to copy a book wasn't much use to individuals, so they traded away this freedom in return for more books. But today we all have these factories in our homes, computers let individuals copy books. Really we should renegotiate the trade we made, since we are now giving away a valuable freedom, we should expect to give less or get more. Instead the length (time), breadth (what it covers), and scope (the actions it covers) are being increased, and our return is being reduced as we are no longer allowed to use legally purchased property in our choice of manner. The music industry will be the first to fall. Personal computers will be the second target, software will be easy after that. Musics future is sad. Music doesn't have many activists, and the fans have generally been convinced that activism is for hippies, they'd rather have Fun. Fun is the great excuse of the mediocre. While dramatically flailing about, complaining that the end is nigh, and pointing at the tragedy of the commons, the music industry is becoming the tragedy of the proprietised. This cartel system creates One True Industry. A musician will find it hard to get heard. Music has a bad business model. Napster was easier than purchases, internet is ever increasing, movie & music are static, very very inefficient. Videos are even worse. But the EUCD doesn't even solve this problem. The encryption only has to be broken once. Or someone has to put a video recorder infront of their TV, or a audio recorder beside a speaker, and the encryption has failed. By controlling the means of distribution, like DVD releases do, a company can control a market. More cartels, less competition, goverence by corporations, all legal, so no regulation by governments. monopoly, file formats with encryptions could require royalties. You can't play, cause we won't give you the bits. you cannot reverse engineer a file format, if it includes encryption. Forced encryption creates eternal copyright. After 100 years or so, a work is meant to enter the public domain, but what good is an ecrypted work in the public domain? Bad news for libraries and second hand shops. So now we would be renting data rathering than buying a copy. Currcumventing Copyright Enforcement. This can be necessary so that you can use what you bought without also having to buy a copy of Windows2010, or when the Win2kX player is not usable by disabled users, etc. The EUCD allows breaking the encryption to allow acces for disabled users, but only if there is no alternative format offered, and theirs not requirements about how useful or good this alternative has to be. So of course you could go to court, but the price is prohibitive to individuals and all this is doing is trying to regain some of the fair use that we are meant to be given. This has a lot of technial problems too. If a document is encrypted. How can you scan for viruses without decrypting? How do child protection filters filter for porn? ISP are now required to ship porn to schools unaltered. This is a useful rule, because ISPs in some countries had started altering the content of webpages, not in political ways, but for advertisements. They'd replace the ads on a page with ads for local industries, so people reading slashdot would see ads for their local supermarket. So this was outlawed, adding many new problems. books, or ebooks could be rented only, or purchases for one read only, by only allowing one chapter to be decrypted at a time, and only allowing forward chapters to be decrypted. Poorer countries will be hit worst by this. The digital divide will become a gaping chasm. Fair use, such as copying excerpts, can be criminalised because the license is law, and it must be agreed with for you to be permitted to read/use the book. fair use was: private copying for non-commercial activity Excerpting, for proof or for critiqueing and review Certain educational uses, teachers and librarians. DRM will lock copies of programs to specific machines. It will also lock things like music and books to certain machines. No more lending, or second hand selling. And with digital watermarks, there will be sharing without getting caught. watermarking. This is how we know that it was the BSA wrote the software patent directive, because they left a watermark in the document. Privacy will die with digital tracing of everything your "enhanced" computer does. Watermarking will stop people leaking incriminating documents to journalists. encryption, again we laugh at it, big companies, like adobe, don't seem to be very good, but they will get better. patents can be very broad (nested menu structure), and part of standards, the jpeg group. Research is not excluded. So people can't study cryptography, researchers can't look for flaws to say that this encryption isn't strong enough. People in Afganistan aren't prevented from doing this, just the europeans.