COPYCENSE

“Provisions against digital rights management in a draft update to the General Public License could undermine computer security, Linus Torvalds said this week in e-mails reflecting the Linux leader’s pragmatic philosophy.

“The Free Software Foundation is in the process of revising the GPL, a seminal document that not only governs thousands of open-source projects but also functions as the constitution of the free software movement. One of the major new provisions in the proposed GPL version 3 is designed to prevent use of GPL software in conjunction with digital rights management. DRM technology does everything from encrypting movies and music to permitting only a digitally signed software to run on a specific computing device.

“Torvalds gave some examples of areas where he believes it’s appropriate for secret digital keys to be used to sign software, or for a computer to run only software versions that have this digital signature to assure they’re authorized.”

Stephen Shankland. Torvalds Says DRM Isn’t Necessarily Bad. News.com. Feb. 3, 2006.

See also:

Joe Barr. Torvalds Versus GPLv3 DRM Restrictions. News Forge. Feb. 2, 2006.

Stephen Shankland. Torvalds: No GPL 3 for Linux. News.com. Jan. 26, 2006.

Martin LaMonica. New Open-Source License Targets DRM, Hollywood. News.com. Jan. 18, 2006.

Updates:

Daniel Lyons. Linux Licensing. Forbes.com. March 9, 2006. (“That first draft of GPL v. 3 is unacceptable to me,” said Linus Torvalds, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t come to some agreement. Now, the FSF and I tend to have very different priorities, so such an agreement is not guaranteed. But it’s definitely not out of the question either.”)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.