Re: Abolishing the DMCA

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com>]

On Dec 14, 2006, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de> wrote:

> I think you missed the point that my patch prevents valid usages of
> non-GPL modules from happening, which is not acceptable.

What if you changed your patch so as to only permit loading of
possibly-infringing drivers after some flag in /proc is set, and
logging to the console a message explaining (i) why such drivers might
be infringing and how to contact the copyright holders to get the
infringement stopped, and (ii) how to get it loaded if you believe
it's ok.

Then the patch would change from a probably-harmful DRM technique to
an educational tool, that wouldn't impose any major inconvenience to
those who are entitled to use the combination of code that can't be
distributed.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}