Re: Anti-DMCA clause (was Re: GPL v3 Draft

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Nathanael Nerode:

> Hrrm.  We need a different clause then.
>
> "No program licensed under this License, which accesses a work, shall require 
> the authority of the copyright owner for that work, in order to gain access 
> to that work.  Accordingly, no program licensed under this License is a 
> technological measure which effectively controls access to any work."

I think this is overly broad.  What about the following?

"You must not add any functionality to programs licensed under this
License which may not be removed, by you or any third party, according
to applicable law.  Such functionality includes, but is not limited
to, technological measures which effectively control access to any
work, provided that removal of the measure would be prohibited by
applicable law."

(It would make sense to include language which requires the
possibility of legal redistribution without the features, but I'm too
tired to rephrase it again.)

The rationale is that we don't care if a piece of code enforces a
restriction if we can legally patch it away.  This is the difference
between mandatory DRM and an ACL check in a file system.