[vorbis] Re: CBDTPA (moved to [advocacy])

[Moritz Grimm]

> > who cares what the Americans do in their country ? The Chinese and many
> > other dont care at all, and we Europeans will start to do so very soon....
> > at least if this shit would ever pass US Senate.
> Don't count on it. Europe becomes more USA-ish every day and USA clobber
> every state who don't "respect" their business model. I hope not, but I

Hm, this is getting way off-topic. This act is no law, so it's not too
late yet. The link to the article has a good rant already, so there's no
need to repeat everything in there. We also don't need that "my country
leet, USA suxx" crap, which appears to be trendy among some people these
days. Apart from that, this is more of an advocacy issue, so please
reply on the advocacy list.

I hoped that someone, who understands American law better than I do,
could tie the connection to Ogg Vorbis and explain what would have to be
done to be able to continue developement the way the developers wish.

I've been phantasizing a bit about a worst case scenario, where Xiph (as
a corporation, not necessarily Monty and/or Jack personally) could
officially move to Canada or the Netherlands to Segher or whatever, so
Ogg Vorbis is not an American product anymore ... tricks like that might
work. Doing so would be annoying, but little more, I guess.

But what will happen afterwards ... may no American use Ogg Vorbis
anymore then? What about the hardware support, where Ogg still needs to
improve a lot? Btw, what's up with MP3? The format itself also has no
copyprotection scheme. Wouldn't that Act break all MP3 consumer
electronics that were built until now? What will happen to mp3.com? Will
they rename themselves to lqa.com (surely not, because MP3 is their
business and identity - they can't even switch to, or support Ogg)? 

Obtw, here's a link for the lazy:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=CBDTPA&btnG=Google+Search
Interesting, the SSSCA and the CBDTPA are the same, except that the
CBDTPA is no draft anymore.

Regarding Ogg, the FUD involved with this Act hurts the most. Not only
that all, who have the power (all American citizens), should actively do
something against this bill, we should also think of being able to
explain the usefulness and legality of Ogg Vorbis, should this bill
become a law.

All competition of Ogg Vorbis has more financial power to deal with the
CBDTPA, be it lobbying against it or simply paying for incorporating
these hilarious copyprotection mechanisms. The open source community has
to deal with it in different ways - it can't bribe politicians with
donations for their election campaigns like the big companies, it/we
need good arguments and the ability to adapt if things go the bad way.

One last thing about Europe, i.e. Germany - our government will run
Linux on all its servers, beginning this year. This gives quite some
security, since they wouldn't make the stuff on their own servers
illegal. We'd also vote against any EU law that'd try to be like the
CBDTPA. I also heard that the army in the Netherlands uses Linux and
propably a lot more official institutions in other countries. So, fellow
Europeans, no need to panic - but we SHOULD care anyways, since our
favorite audio codec might be strongly affected by this madness.

<p>Moritz

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