<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On May 5, 2008, at 2:10 PM, Anthony R. Baker wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div bgcolor="#ffffff"><div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font></div><div><font face="Arial" size="2"> What I understand is that their "counsel" told them to claim infringement under the DMCA or risk weakening their claim of ownership of the code and/or copyrighted material .They now see this is wrong. Hence the line</font></div><div><font face="Arial" size="2">"<font face="Times New Roman" size="3">The DMCA does allow for reverse engineering for compatibility purposes and hence in the end no matter what the 'other points' are the DMCA takedown request was wrongly sent."</font></font></div><div><font face="Arial" size="2"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Arial" size="2"> Since they realized their mistake they are now assisting the CoreAVC forLinux developer bring his code up to date with their newest release. At least thats what I got out of it. But if I were perfect I wouldn't need to be on any mailing lists and multi core processors would grow on trees.</font></font></font></div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font></div></span></blockquote><br></div><div>One probable result of this sort of silliness is that more projects will start to be hosted by non-USA based sites operated by outfits that do not care about the DMCA.</div><div><br></div><div>Thus Google, which has done some good things for FOSS, will become less of a factor in FOSS development.</div><div><br></div><div>In the name of "enforcement" of the DMCA the transaction logs of US-based hosts might be subject to seizure, and lists of people who downloaded the code might be turned over to the complainers. If you don't think this is possible just look at what happened with telephone records of the major operators in the USA, and the current attempt by the government to grant ex post facto immunity to those operators for what was clearly a violation of the law (else why would they need immunity?).</div><div><br></div><div>Google is already hosting a lot of mail, and this will probably be reduced, or at least its growth slowed, as people begin to realize that their logs are subject to seizure by US authorities armed with the ability to grant retroactive immunity to service providers. </div><div><br></div><div>Whether any of this is good or bad I'm not sure.</div><div><br></div><div>beww</div><div><br></div></body></html>