Your next computer will be a trusted client: Academics and legal scholars are claiming that copy control technologies deprive consumers of legitimate rights. The technologies in question include Microsoft's Product Activation technology (which will require new Windows installations to be registered and activated from Redmond), CPRM (hardware copy control coming to your next hard disk) and SDMI. Some are calling for amendments to copyright laws giving consumers more fair-use rights. Mind you, given that this is just a bunch of bleeding-heart leftists in ivory towers, with no "soft money" to donate to election campaigns, this will probably be given as much heed in the Real World as other academic proposals (such as equation formatting in HTML 3.0).

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