[Peter is a longtime Politech member and an author of books on cryptography and open source software. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times. Previous Politech messages: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=agfa --Declan] --- Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 08:27:18 -0400 To: declanat_private, cpat_private, mattdat_private From: Peter Wayner <pcw2at_private> Subject: Re: FC: Agfa DMCA debate: Charles Platt vs. Matt Deatherage I enjoyed the exchange. This just verifies what I've always though: The DMCA hurts the artists and the content-creation professionals the most because they're the ones who must cut and paste to make a living. The rest of the world can go do something else if the VCR/DVD refuses to work. This was brought home to me one day when I spent an entire afternoon trying to change a semi-colon to a colon in a document I prepared. Why did it take so long? Because I created a Acrobat file and mailed it to a friend. Then the computer crashed and destroyed the original document. No problem, I thought. I'll just change the Acrobat file. I own the pro version of Acrobat which allows editing. "Not so fast, Font Pirate!" said Acrobat. Apparently the font I used couldn't be found. When I rebuilt the system file, it was missing. I don't buy fonts. I'm not that sophisticated. It ended up on my disk because some software package gave it to me. Which one? I still have no freaking idea. There was no way I was going to spend an afternoon reinstalling every piece of software. Who knows where it came from? It might have been installed by a sample I download and then deleted and forgot. In the end, I was able to hack around this by extracting the Postscript from Acrobat, editing the postscript file and re-distilling it. It took me four hours to come up with this solution. Now I'm bitter about Adobe and I have deliberately begun avoiding my lawfully owned products like Photoshop, Acrobat, and InDesign. This was building after I discovered that their secret surveillance software kept crashing my Mac. The products are great, but open source alternatives have their advantages too. In the past, I would stick with Adobe because of their quality. Now I shun them because I'm worried that I'll be abandoned and falsely accused in my hour of need. Open source code doesn't do that. The Content Czars seem to think that we're all just a bunch of pirating fiends out here who can't wait to make a copy of something, anything, right away. Hah. I'm just trying to get my job done. There's no way I'm going to buy professional grade Agfa or Adobe fonts now. There's no way I'm going to buy Fontographer either. I don't need their quality and they just seem to be a big hassle. There are plenty of free fonts that are good enough and easier to use. --------------- Two new books: _Translucent Databases_ (http://www.wayner.org/books/td/) shows how to add ultra security and privacy to databases. _Disappearing Cryptography_ (http://www.wayner.org/books/discrypt2/) explains how to camouflage information. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign this pro-therapeutic cloning petition: http://www.franklinsociety.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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