The Open Source Forum on anti-circumvention was AWESOME. It didn’t draw the crowds we expected, however I put that down to most people not understanding why it is relevant to them. The DVD story is great to initially explain how it affects you as a user, but those of us who can say “bugger it, I’ll play my DVDs no matter what”, and don’t see that processes such as legitimate reverse-engineering for interoperability are being directly threatened. Anyway, I’ll have the talk slides up on the OSF webpage in a few days and you’ll see what I mean. Vendors have the opportunity to use unclear precedents to create artificial technology monopolies. Copyright owners (and not just the big bad movie companies 😉 are desperately trying to protect their works, and sometimes unwittingly creating situations where, for instance, only Windows users can access their works legitimately, which obviously means they then lose the rest of the market. There are ways we can work together to find a clear line between copyright holders and users/developers rights. While the line isn’t clear, copyright will continue to be used as a tool to restrict interoperability. Anyway, it concerns me greatly – check out the Lexmark and Blizzard cases to see how relevant they really are, and check out the slides when they’re up.
Now for something a little different, Jeff and I are taking a whole TWO days off everything work related to take a brief rest. Honeymoon late July, and then we’ll be sweet. It has been an amazing but tiring and stressful few months.