Monte Davidoff, the uncredited co-author of Altair BASIC, publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection as a Linux enthusiast in 2001

In a May 2001 interview with The Register, Monte Davidoff — whose math package was a third of the original Microsoft BASIC (claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited) — spoke as a working Unix/Multics/Tandem engineer who was, by then, an enthusiast of Linux and Python. He called Linux's development "a really good job," and named CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media) — a proposal to embed copy-control directly into the ATA hard-drive standard — as a live threat, saying of it: "It's changing the way we're doing our own business."

The structural interest is the reversal. Davidoff was an uncredited co-author of the very product that anchored Bill Gates's 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists," the founding text of the "hobbyists are stealing my software" framing (claim-gates-1976-open-letter-under-ten-percent-paid). Decades later, the erased contributor to proprietary software's founding anti-piracy document is found on the side of open software and against copy-restriction technology.

This is why the note belongs beside the vault's credit-misattribution cluster rather than inside it. The Ann Hardy, Linnainmaa, and Werbos cases (claim-ann-hardy-tymshare-os-miscredited-to-husband, claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity, myth-werbos-invented-backpropagation) are about who gets named. This case adds a different axis: what the erased person went on to believe. Same family of surprise, different shape.

The CPRM proposal Davidoff opposed was itself rejected by the T13 standards committee in April 2001; the specifics of that fight (the 4C Entity's mechanism, Andre Hedrick's objection, EFF's claimed role) are not established here and are routed to question-verify-cprm-t13-rejection-4c-entity-eff.