Stay Ahead With Linux Security News

digital rightscopyrightEFF

John Perry Barlow's Legacy with EFF in Digital Rights Advocacy

When John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor founded the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) in 1990, they envisioned a short-lived nonprofit organization. All it would take, they thought, is one court case to ensure that emerging digital media would receive the same constitutional protection of expression that's extended to traditional ink and paper works.. . .. When John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor founded the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) in 1990, they envisioned a short-lived nonprofit organization. All it would take, they thought, is one court case to ensure that emerging digital media would receive the same constitutional protection of expression that's extended to traditional ink and paper works. A dozen years later, they're still waiting. Freeware such as DeCSS-which was created to run DVDs on Linux but also cracks the CSS encryption scheme that protects them-and an academic paper on how to break digital music files' security are among recent issues that the EFF has championed-and lost-in court. The group also has supported Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer arrested last August-and recently entered into a plea-bargain agreement with prosecutors-after telling a DefCon conference audience how he broke digital protections on Adobe eBooks. Most recently, the EFF has expressed outrage at Vivendi Universal Publishing's attempt to kill a freeware program called "bnetd," which emulates Blizzard's Battle.net gaming service. The link for this article located at InfoSecurity Magazine is no longer available. . When John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor founded the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundatio. perry, barlow, mitch, kapor, founded, francisco-based, electronic, frontier, foundatio. . LinuxSecurity.com Team

Apr 09, 2002 • LinuxSecurity.com Team Privacy