10 INPUT A$ 20 PRINT A$
Distributing the preceding 2-line BASIC program for profit or reputation gain will be a federal felony in the US, punishable by up to five years in prison, if the CBDTPA becomes law, as the program fails to prevent any copyrighted works entered from being illegally copied. Seriously. (ta, Toby)
2x death penalty for, then:
10 input a$
20 print a$
30 goto 20
I can't remember when the last time I read something in BASIC was. Thank you for bringing back some happy memories.
Doesn't my screen fail to prevent copyrighted material from being "copied" to my eyeballs? I want a copy protection chip implanted in my eyes! I don't want to go to jail mummy.
c
c NOTICE:
c IF THE CBDTPA ACT INTRODUCED BY SENATOR FRITZ
c HOLLINGS IS PASSED THE DISTRIBUTION OF THIS
c CODE SHALL BE A FEDERAL FELONY OFFENCE PUNISH-
c ABLE BY UP TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON.
c
c TO DISTRIBUTE YOU AN APPROVED COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
c ROUTINE MUST BE IMPLEMENTED WITHIN THIS CODE.
c
program CBDTPA
character*8 cbvar
read(*,*) cbvar
write(6,*) cbvar
stop
end
what about
cp notmyfile.txt /mnt/floppy
Will all such system commands have to check the copyright status of the file being copied? How do you flag a text file or some other basic document type as a "copyrighted work"? It would have to involve some kind of modification to the file system itself, so files could be flagged with the various permissions. Something that could be done _fairly_ easily on windows (Introduce a new version of NTFS) but which would be much more difficult to implement on the multitude of Unix platforms (and make software aware of it).
In a way I'd like to see this bill passed, because it is just not going to work. It would impossible to live up to the law of it, and it would go down in flames very quickly, hopefully teaching some people a lesson.