Ruben Leote Mendes skrev: The directive doesn't mention anything about reverse engineering, so it should still be legal.The way I see it you can reverse engineer, for instance,the Adobe e-book format and write your own program that _creates_copy protected e-books (*). What you cannot do is write a program to remove the copy protection.
Quoting Anders Lindback anders@igiro.se:
You cant make a competing product using GPL. If you make a viewer you are then in violation and will have to spend time in jail. The only way for you to view the e-book is by buying the e-book viewer.
By controlling the format they would get a monopoly in the market.
Yes but only in the maket of "their own copyright ebooks". Anyone reading one of these books without a license is breaking existing copyright law. The new law makes helping somebodyelse to do so, an offence.
The real solution is FDL/GPL ebooks. Thats why we have the Nupedia free-encyclopedia in the GNU project, see www.nupedia.com
One good starting point for free-ebooks is to get many schools and universities to collaborate in producing teaching notes under the FDL. Nupedia provides a framework and a team to help do this. I urge those of you at universities to look for accademics of all disciplines willing to do this. It would take a very small percentage of accademics in each discipline to produce a set of texts better than could be written in any single institution.
When it comes to network communication protocols incorporating "licence verification"/"intelectual property management" do we want or need to help people disregard copyright? Surely if someone wishes to use a non-free program they must accept the consequences of doing so. If a prorietary software company tries to use this as an excuse to prevent networking with free operating systems then they are in breach of monopoly law.
Rather we should use this tightening of the copyright noose to emphasise the importance of freedom and copyleft for the general public.
Nick Hockings
Nick Hockings