Re: CD images and US export laws
The law is actually the same. What changed was an administrative policy
regarding interpretation of the law. The problem is that, although the
new policy is broader and has great benefit to commercial vendors, it has
a lot of complications for free software.
For example, a commercial vendor always knows exactly where their box is
going, so selling to Germany or Benelux would be perfectly fine. At most,
the purchaser would have to promise not to re-export the product to some
prohibited place (Libya, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc.) but
otherwise this would be a normal commercial transaction.
With free software, or anything just posted onto the Internet for access
by anyone, it is not entirely clear what the restrictions are. Netscape
has been following a practice of putting a gate web form which requires
the user to promise they are not in a prohibited place, but obviously
someone in a prohibited place can just lie. Whether such a form is even
required is not clear, but the Netscape lawyers seem to think it was a
good idea. Some of the government lawyers involved in the Bernstein case,
as I understand it, have represented to Bernstein's lawyers that he has no
duty to actively prevent people in prohibited places from downloading
things he posts on the Internet, but it is not clear if they are speaking
for the government nor, in my opinion, whether their comments are confined
merely to source code.
The political reality in the United States at this point is that the
software industry has convinced the Congress that the restrictions are
stupid, technically and economically, and the administration is trying to
salvage whatever it can of the restrictions in order to keep the law
enforcement people and the spies happy. So the result is that the
administration is actually trying to avoid making clear statements about
what is and is not allowed, in order to pacify the disparate interests.
At the same time, the courts show every sign of simply ending the
restrictions entirely on free speech grounds, and the Congress seems to be
giving the administration a chance to fix it before doing it themselves.
-- Mike
On 2000-05-25 at 13:21 +0200, Frederik Vanrenterghem wrote:
> I don't get the problem. Wasn't this law recently changed, resulting in free
> export of encryption software?
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