LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
The Black Market for Sensitive Software
Posted by Steven Wu on Sunday, December 01 @ 23:02:51 EST Copyright
According to this New York Times article, the inability (or unwillingness) of American officials to enforce US copyright and intellectual property law abroad has led to a thriving black market for scientific and engineering software that is barred from export due to the potential security risks of such softwares' dissemination. Included in this group of software are programs capable of "designing rockets or nuclear reactors or predicting the path of a cloud of anthrax spores." The article talks a lot about the futile efforts of programmers to get the government to do something about this black market.

One part of the article that should especially interest those turned off by the MPAA and RIAA's actions: "Though the case against piracy is passionately argued by paid advocates for the music and film industries and Silicon Valley, the Business Software Alliance's own surveys show that most consumers find it hard to summon outrage. They see the fight as a way to ensure that Bill Gates and Britney Spears get every penny coming to them. Not all concerns about software piracy, however, are about ensuring that the rich become richer. When software like Visual Light shows up on the wrong desktop, issues of national security come into play."

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by Steven Wu


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.192 Seconds