Ronald Bultje writes: > When they see that European laws don't work that way, they'll learn. Or > not, and then they'll just go broke and these companies will stop > existing. Hitachi? Toshiba? Intel? Sony? Matsushita? Apple? IBM? Sorry, this isn't some tiny startup with a crackpot technology idea. Most of the companies in these meetings are in the Fortune 1000. The lawyers working on this stuff are veterans of successful legislative efforts like the Audio Home Recording Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- these are people who have repeatedly gotten legislation through the U.S. Congress in the past. Sure, some of the legislation they worked on was seriously flawed, and much of it doesn't exist outside the U.S. But it should be clear that copyright and patent interests in the U.S. are having a powerful effect on legislation in Europe. None of this appears to have hurt the profits of any of these companies at all. Anyway, I'm here trying to draw attention to this because I really think things like this are going to be bad for free software, not only in the U.S., but eventually everywhere. -- Seth Schoen Staff Technologist schoen@xxxxxxx Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org/ 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 1 415 436 9333 x107
