This is intended to be distributed in email, with a title of something like "Why the SSSCA is bad."



On Thursday, Feb 28, 2002 Senator Hollings lead a hearing on his proposed Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, known as the SSSCA.

The problem, as Mike Godwin said at [link|http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200202/msg00273.html|http://www.interest...sg00273.html], is that Congress doesn't understand the technical issues involved. So we must find examples of those technical issues in contexts that they understand.

Email makes a good example. Most people are familiar with it, and it demonstrates the relevant issues.

I am sending you an email. If you like it, you might forward it to a friend with a brief comment added. You might send it back to me with corrections made. You might copy phrases out of it to put into a report or memo. It might, as with the message I linked, find its way onto a website on the Internet.

By the act of writing this email, I have a copyright on my words. In these common tasks you redistribute, modify, and lose any attribution to me. Under the SSSCA the software cannot be allowed to let you do any of those things because the software is failing to protect my copyright. According to Hollywood and Senator Hollings, you would be a pirate and criminal for abusing my copyrighted material. Under existing copyright law your actions might infringe, or might be fair use. Mostly it is fair use.

So how would the SSSCA solve the problem of your using email as it was designed and intended to be used? It would make your email program illegal. The software must be rewritten. Once rewritten it cannot contain a "forward" button. It cannot allow you to copy and paste text from it. It cannot allow you to create a reply with my words included. It cannot allow you to send mail to existing email programs because they don't implement copyright protection. According to the good Senator, only pirates and criminals would want to do any of these things. My copyrighted content MUST be protected from criminals and pirates like you.

Email is but one kind of program that is affected. (Do not be fooled. The phrase they use is "digital device", but their definition of a digital device covers virtually all software programs.) Our lives are filled with electronic content that we produce, transfer, and manipulate. Whether you paste from one Word document to another or copy a spreadsheet, features you rely on can be used to violate copyrights. Therefore Senator Hollings wants to ban your software.

They call this the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act. They say it is needed to protect poor copyright holders (like me) from criminals and pirates (like you). I call this the complete dismantling and destruction of our computer infrastructure. Please decide what you call it and let your representatives know. You can find their contact information as follows:

Senators: [link|http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index_by_state.cfm|http://www.senate.g...by_state.cfm]
Congress: [link|http://congress.org/|http://congress.org/]

Sincerely,
Ben Tilly

PS Your email software has not (yet) been crippled in accord with the proposed SSSCA. Please feel free to use it to forward this message.