Linux going to be big in China 3743

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Ray Ingles wrote on 20 Apr 2006 11:21:26 -0400

It is almost as easy to rip a CD and distribute the resulting .wav files to millions, if one has the bandwidth (or uses a DECUS*-tree-like distribution method). How one would distinguish between an act which is probably legal (I've got a few rips myself of Quake I and Quake II music, for instance, which I personally listen to) and something which is very clearly illegal, I for one have no idea beyond a very overbearing method which would require each and every piece of technological equipment to look for signatures in the datastream and then reject the data if those signatures do not grant permission for the contemplated action of the equipment.

This could get...messy.

* Digital Equipment Corporation User's Society. They were big on "tape trees" in the early 1980's or thereabouts. (The tapes were 12" and 1-2" thick 9-track affairs, 200 bits per inch or some such.) The general idea was that one would receive a tape, purchase some blanks, duplicate the tape onto the blanks, and ship them off to a few of one's "closest friends" -- one might call that the 1980's equivalent of a chain letter, for distributing various forms of shareware-freeware.

It was not illegal, of course, though under certain circumstances it might have been, were the tapes to actually contain sensitive information or commercial software instead of DECUS-sponsored stuff (the only thing I can remember was something called "ICE", which was a bit of a precursor to bash command-line editing today, for VMS DCL's command-line prompt.)

-- Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.