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S2395 Letter 1
Brett Wynkoop
622A President Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
The Honorable Charles Schumer
United States Senate
313 Hart Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510
via FAX: 202-228-3027
Dear Senator Schumer,
I am writing to urge you to vote no on S2395. While its original intent
has points that can be argued as being good for the United States and its
citizens, the current incarnation of S2395 with its hastily added references
to Digital Rights Management (DRM) will cause great harm to the people of
New York and the rest of the United States.
If DRM is enacted as the law of the land that will make it impossible for
developers to write Open Source Software that is of great benefit to the public.
Most of the software that powers the core of the internet is Open Source
Software. If this software was effectively outlawed because it was not
able to run on computer systems crippled by DRM chips, the internet as we know
it would cease to exist. The three most basic core services on the internet,
email, Domain Name Service, and Web Service are for the most part implemented
with Open Source Software. If Sendmail, Bind, and Apache were taken away from
the internet by an ill conceived measure brought to the Senate floor by persons
with no true knowledge of the way the internet works, then the PUBLIC will be
harmed in countless ways. I think I can give you some idea of the scale
of the problem with the following information:
- Apache powers 56% of the websites on the internet -
source http://www.netcraft.com/
- Sendmail is the most used Mail Transport Agent on the internet powering
four times more sites than the next largest competitor -
source http://www.sendmail.com/
- BIND powers the root name servers for the internet's Domain Name System
and most of the DNS servers on the internet - source http://www.isc.org/
As you can see, if these 3 pieces of software became illegal because of ill
conceived DRM legislation, the internet as we know it would be gone. There are
other problems with the various DRM proposals that the entertainment industry
is trying to get Congress to enact. I look forward to meeting with you when
you are home this summer to discuss not only these issues, but also how DRM
steals from the body of knowledge the PUBLIC expects to have at its disposal
after expiration of copyright restrictions.
Sincerely,
Brett Wynkoop
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