[Committee-d] GPLv3-draft1 and anti-circumvention laws

[Zak Greant]

List members might be interested in this BoingBoing post:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/10/access_to_knowledge_.html

Access to Knowledge Treaty first draft is live
Last fall, we kicked ass at the World Intellectual Property  
Organization (WIPO), a UN agency that is supposed to be a  
humanitarian body but really spends all of its time ratcheting up the  
exclusive rights of big patent, copyright and trademark holders. We  
went to WIPO and drafted the "Geneva Declaration," laying out the  
case for a WIPO that lived up to its humanitarian mission by  
promoting international development and creativity. The Declaration  
begat the Development Agenda proposal, which the delegations of  
India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and others took to the main session  
of WIPO, calling on it to reform itself. WIPO passed the Development  
Agenda, and now we're holding them to their promise.

Last winter, a group of activists, scholars, reps of commercial and  
standards bodies and practicioners of development gathered in Geneva  
to begin drafting a new treaty on Access to Knowledge (A2K), inviting  
all who couldn't be there in person to follow along on a public  
mailing list. Those two days were among the most exhilarating in my  
life: we began the process of drafting a treaty that will guarantee  
rights of archivists, educators and those who provide access to  
disabled people.

A2K is bearing fruit: the first draft of the treaty has just been  
published preparatory to a drafting summit in London this Thursday  
and Friday. I'm reading through it now and boy it's good stuff --  
just check out some of the provisions on DRM:

     legal prohibitions against anti-circumvention of DRM/TPM  
measures shall be limited, and not be enforced in the following cases:

     i. When DRM/TPM licensing terms preclude implementation in Free  
and Open Source Software (FOSS),

     ii. When DRM/TPM systems are marketed without adequate  
disclosure of their restriction modes and the terms under which they  
can be invoked, or when terms can be modified without a user's  
explicit consent,

     iii. When DRM/TPM systems do not provide mechanisms to permit  
works to be accessible by persons with visually impairments or other  
disabilities,

     iv. When DRM systems rely upon social entities that such as  
households and families in their technology more narrowly or  
restrictively than have been defined in local law,

Cheers!
--zak