"If someone breaks into my house and steals my CDs, who calls the cops, me or the music industry?" Safir asked. "If it's me, then that's my property." Copyright 2002

If children must grow able to leverage computers to meet their own goals as free citizens, that's not possible with commercial software, period. -- Ruben Safir Copyright 1999 - Said at DECSS Trail in NYC

DRM is Theft Copyrighted 2002

"Jack Valanti is to Private Ownership and Property as the Boston Strangler to the VCR" Copyrighted August 2002

"I completely agree with Jack Valenti. Congress has to step in and protect our private property from theft. It's my damn disk, my damn computer. If someone breaks into my home and steals my computer and my DVD's, who calls the cops and files the police report?

Me or Universal Pictures?

DRM is Theft. Congress must pass a law which will protect the property of every owner of a computer and purchaser of Digital Information by outlawing anything which prevents the full enjoyment of their property. We don't need prior aproval of Warner Brothers, Jack Valenti, or Barry Sorkin to use our computers to augment our enjoyment of our property. There is no forced contract to a cash sale. Forcing a contract on the public which they didn't negotiate as equal partners is a form of slavery no free citizen can put up with.

That's why we propose a New Fair Use Bill, one which guarantees that Copyright is secondary to the Constitutional Right of Security in ones Home and with one's pocessions. Because Copyright is secondary to my property rights in my home and Congress has to make it clear.

If anyone should be forced into a license, then Bertleson should be forced to License to Listen.com. That's why we gave them the limited exclussive Monopoly in the first place, to make sure the material is published. If they don't want to publish, too bad, make them do it anyway or strip them of their Monopoly.

How can we can we continue to expect to maintain a free society if we can't accumulate, copy and archive on our digital systems and information. How are we expected to be able to publish from annotated facts, with references to the original works when everything on the internet can expire or disapear. We have to be able to copy to archive. It's essential to our politcal speech, or for that matter our abilty to have party music mixed to our own enjoyment on Saturday Night." Copyright 2002

We decided, after much discussion and after considering many opinions on the mailing lists, to attempt to drive into the public lexicon the phrases, "DRM is Theft" and "We are the Stakeholders". We carefully chose these expressions to counter the rhetoric coming out of the copyright monopoly content industry, especially the claim by Senator Hollings that he had assembled all the "stakeholders" to write his CBDTPA bill and Jack Valenti's rhetoric that the simple act of listening to a DVD on a GNU/Linux operating system is stealing property from the motion picture industry.Copyrgiht August 2001

"I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned."
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attacted at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt. I guess you missed that one."

Fair Use - because it's either fair use or useless....

"The reason [health care] costs are so high is that health care is not tethered to any economic reality." - Ruben Safir

> You have this exactly backwards, imo.  Neither my daughter nor I are
> under any particular _personal_ threat from tracking.
  
Yes - you are actually.  And being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and
and extermination camps, but incompatible with living as a free human
being.