Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 07:26:10AM +0200, Philippe Vaucher wrote:
> > (and I do note you'd still have to go through the horrors of finding a
> > pen and paper in your office and manually using your arms to hold
> > it up to the webcam)
> 
> Please, I said 3 times already that YOU JUST TYPE YOUR NAME ON YOUR
> KEYBOARD, or attach an image. Yes, that's how I did in in Adobe Sign
> (just typed "Philippe Vaucher" on my keyboard). The only thing it did
> is the name was displayed using a hand-written font. Surely this
> cannot be complicated to duplicate. I already said all this.

But anyone can type your name on her keyboard. I can type it. Am
I now signing something for you? Is it valid before court?

That's the "interesting" problem. Yelling doesn't solve it :)

Now you'd say that I could forge your signature on paper and send
it in, but traditional trust into something like that is a tad
higher, and I see two reasons for that: (a) it is more difficult
to get hold of a physical signature of yours to do the forging,
and (b) there is significantly more expertise in place to detect
forged signatures.

Now PGP/GPG might be a technically perfect solution to the problem,
but effective deployment has been hindered, not last by entities
hoping to make quick cash of that and seeing a free solution
threatening their pie-in-the-sky business plans.

The situation is what it is, alas.

> Sorry for yelling but maybe with caps it's more clear.

Nevermind, but I think you're still missing the point: at the
moment the FSF ends before court over some copyright spat (and
there have been high-profile ones, they can be hellishly
expensive, see [1] if you think you've got some time to kill),
at this moment the FSF will have to prove that it has done its
due diligence... and no, Someone (TM) at the other end of an
HTTPS connection saying "yeah, sure, it's me" probably won't
cut it.

Solutions [2] welcome. Especially if they aren't spiked all over
with Surveillance Capitalism :-)

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group%2C_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.
[2] Sometimes I dream of decentralized FSF "delegates", one
   in each small village, who can sign someone's public GPG
   key. Then I wake up and realize that I'm re-inventing the
   web of trust, and I hear "PGP? But that's really hard",
   and keep wondering where that sick meme comes from. Sigh.

-- tomás

-- tomás

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