Posted on 03/10/2002 8:01:51 PM PST by medved
Numerous articles on RedHat, Slash-Dot, and similar geek sites tell of a major kind of a $#!T storm called SSSCA brewing.
There is nothing sadder than seeing the democrap party walking around with a kick-me sign on it and nobody lining up to kick it. The whole world ought to be lining up to kick the dems over SSSCA; what they're talking about would be a nightmare of collosal proportions; the first thing I'd want to do would be to go out and immediately purshase several thousand dollars worth of present tech disk drives and CDROM drives. Imagine a black market in which the value of a "pre-ban" hard disk or a pre-ban cd player redoubled every month and a half for two or three years.
Some of a typical article:
Disney, Sony, and other record companies and movie studios want to repeal the "fair use" rights enjoyed by generations of music lovers; make music CDs unplayable in computer CD-ROM drives and legally purchased digital content impossible to copy or transfer between devices; and force the tech industry to cripple its products with built-in copy protection that benefits Hollywood and harms consumers. The tech industry is saying no, thanks, but the entertainment industry's campaign contributions have gone a long way in the U.S. Senate.
The evidence is the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) drafted by Senate Commerce Committee chair Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.), which hasn't been formally submitted yet but hung over a committee hearing last week at which Intel Corp. executive vice president Leslie Vadasz let go with both barrels. The outnumbered Vadasz hit it right on the head when he declared that Hollywood wants "to neuter the personal computer to be nothing more than a videocassette recorder" or other media playback device.
But Disney tycoon Michael Eisner seemed to find more sympathy with senators when he described the tech industry's position on piracy as "rip, mix, burn" and said the only reason he could imagine, say, Michael Dell not being eager to load his PCs with copy-protection hardware was that Dell wants to sell systems to pirates. "When Congress sits idly by in the face of these activities," agreed Hollings, "we essentially sanction the Internet as a haven for thievery."
Rest of article available as linked above
Sorry, Fritz. It's the U.S. Senate that is the haven for thievery. After you've thrown yourselves in jail, come and talk to us about what you're going to do with any other thieves.
My guess is that there will be substantial opposition from business (except the DMCA crowd, of course), because of the huge costs it would impose, and it won't get very far in its current form. It looks like that's what's happening with UCITA.
I'm more afraid of a watered-down bill of some sort, which might have a greater chance of passage.
I have a hell of a hard time feeling sorry for stupid people. There is a price for ANYTHING at which you maximize profits and that is not the highest price you could ever get for one copy of whatever it is. That's basic simple calculus and Business 102 or 103 or some such and the stinking music industry has never gotten that far in their educations. I figured CD prices wuold have to come down to around $6 or $8 a year or two after CDs came out around 1985, and the damned things have gone up instead of down. Most people I know simply don't buy them.
The most money the idiots could possibly make would probably be selling song titles for $.50 or $1.00 on the net but don't hold your breath waiting for them to figure that out; they're going to try to crush the entire computer industry instead.
Is this really a Democrat vs. Republican issue? I don't think the Republican Party has come out against this travesty (although it should). Are any prominent politicians of either party publicly opposing this?Rick Boucher (D - VA) has introduced a bill requiring labels to warn people of copy protection on CDs.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50886,00.html has the story.
Example: I place one of these 'copy protected' cd's into a portable cd player. The plug the line-out of that player into the sound card of my computer. Guess what? I can now rip mp3's from this 'copy protected' media.
True enough. I'd really like to see some Republican opposition though.
I have a hell of a hard time feeling sorry for stupid people. There is a price for ANYTHING at which you maximize profits and that is not the highest price you could ever get for one copy of whatever it is. That's basic simple calculus and Business 102 or 103 or some such and the stinking music industry has never gotten that far in their educations. I figured CD prices wuold have to come down to around $6 or $8 a year or two after CDs came out around 1985, and the damned things have gone up instead of down. Most people I know simply don't buy them.
The most money the idiots could possibly make would probably be selling song titles for $.50 or $1.00 on the net but don't hold your breath waiting for them to figure that out; they're going to try to crush the entire computer industry instead.
They should have figured that out by now; it doesn't require much imagination, since Napster spelled it out for them.
Part of what's going on is that the companies are afraid of losing control of the whole artificial top-ten song business. (Gatekeepers in general are losing their power.) The companies also have long-term contracts with established bands that they couldn't get most bands to sign today -- the difference is that bands today have an alternative to the traditional distribution method, whereas that wasn't true even 10 years ago. So the companies are trying to milk these contracts for whatever they can, since they know that things aren't going to be so lucrative for them in the future.
Courtney Love had a interesting essay on this a year or two ago. It was interesting to read this from her perspective, rather than from the open-source software perspective that I'm more used to seeing.
Boucher has been a voice of reason in Congress when it comes to computer-related issues. Where is everybody else?
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