Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 02:30:04 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
To: janelle@salon.com
Subject: Is the SDMI boycott backfiring?

I'm writing in response to your story "Is the SDMI boycott backfiring?" at

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/10/03/hacksdmi_fallout/

As one of the hacker-community spokespeople who came out in support of
Don Marti's proposal for a hack-SDMI boycott, I have to say that I
think your article missed one of the most important tactical points of
the action.

As defenders of consumers' rights to fair-use copying and
technologists' rights to reverse-engineer, we in the hacker community
want to teach the record companies a lesson about the futility of
attempting to "secure" data that is to be interpreted by a consumer's
general-purpose computer -- a lesson also relevant to the DVDCCA lawsuit.

We've noticed that huge, stupid collective organisms like the record
and media industries seem to learn best from pain.  Therefore, to make
the lesson as effective as possible, it is in our interest (and in the
interest of music consumers) that it be as painful to the media
industry as possible.

Accordingly, we actually *want* the inevitable failure of SDMI to ruin
careers, bankrupt companies, and leave as large and livid a scar in
the collective memory of the media industry as possible. That will
make it a much more effective object lesson -- with any luck, one we
will never have to repeat again against son-of-SDMI or son-of-CSS.

So sure, we'll crack SDMI.  *After* the record companies and any
consumer-electronics companies gullible enough to do their bidding
have sunk billions of dollars into hardware and business plans based
on it.  Hasta la vista, idiots!

We sympathize with the weary technologists at the hardware companies.
They're right; the whole concept behind SDMI is so bogus it can be 
seen through by an average sophomore CS student. But there's an easy
way for those technologists and those companies to avoid being burnt;
simply refuse to play.  Leave your stupider competitors holding the bag.

Think of it as evolution in action...
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation,
that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence?  Where is the
difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our
own direction, and having them under the management of Congress?  If
our defence be the *real* object of having those arms, in whose hands
can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in
our own hands?
        -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 9 1788