India should opposse DRM: Richard Stallman India should not enact a Digital Rights Management (DRM) law, Dr. Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project said. He was speaking at the Fourth International Conference on GPL v3 held at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, on August 23rd, 2006. He commented that the people who implement DRM, which he called the "Digital Restrictions Management", should be in prison if the government is really of the people, by the people and for the people. This law actually restricts the freedom of the people. A company that uses the restrictions in producing its DVD will give the format it uses to create the DVD only to a company that promises to protect that restriction. The law has been enacted in the US and the European Union has given a direction in favour of DRM. Now the government of India is contemplating modifying its laws to incorporate DRM. The time given for the public to register their comments on the law was short and was insufficient for anyone to give a comprehensive response. That time itself is now over. It is important that the public take this issue and try to convince the government that what they are planning to do goes against the interests of the people and protects only the interest of the large companies. He went on to say that the Free Software licences like the GNU General Public Licence can do only a little to protect users from these laws. The conference was organised by the Free Software Foundation of India, and the Free Software Users Group, Bangalore, in association with the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, to discuss the draft of the new version of the General Public Licence (GPL), GPL v3. Dr. Stallman explained why a new version became necessary. He said that revisions become necessary when problems with the existing licence became clear, and when new circumstances threatened the freedom that Free Software promised its users. As an example of the new circumstances, he mentioned the DRM law and the example of a program called Tivo. Tivo is a device that records television programmes for the user to watch at another convenient time. This is a combination of software and hardware. The software is based on the GNU/Linux operating system, which is Free Software. All Free Software gives its users the freedom to modify the software to suit their purpose, and thus this software also gives the freedom to its users. But the hardware is designed to reject any software that is not one of the versions that is designed to run on it. Thus, though the user has the freedom to modify the software, it becomes meaningless because then it cannot be used. In other words, though the software is Free, the freedom becomes meaningless. The present GPL is not violated, though the freedom is, in practice, useless. The new version became necessary because of such circumstances. Prof. Eben Moglen, Professor at the Stanford Law School, Legal Advisor to the Free Software Foundation, and one of the important contributors to the new draft, said that protecting the licence from violations is not an easy job, and involves considerable work from a trained advocate. He said that a legal expert will be engaged in India if many violations of the GPL are found here. Referring to the problem related to some circuits used in wireless networking, he said that there has been serious problems from Japan, which has declared that any programmer who releases software for wireless circuits under any licence that makes its source code available, will be arrested next time the person lands in Japan. The conference will continue on 24th August, when two panels will discuss the relevance of Free Software for software businesses and in Education. The draft of GPLv3 can be read at http://gplv3.fsf.org/ and the detailed programme of the conference can be seen at http://gplv3.gnu.org.in/Conference/Schedule. Some photographs of the event are available at -- http://gnu.org.in/gplv3-conf-pics/index.html Anivar Aravind Free Software Foundation of India http://gnu.org.in