Ah say, that is, ah say, Ah need more cash-n-carry around money from Disney....
Posted on 03/21/2002 6:54:17 PM PST by grimalkin
Edited on 06/29/2004 7:09:02 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Fritz Hollings has fired the first shot in the next legal battle over Internet piracy.
The Democratic senator from South Carolina finally has introduced his copy protection legislation, ending over six months of anticipation and sharpening what has become a heated debate between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
Cracks & decoders will be released faster than they can change the scheme.
They had this vision in their heads that they would put out the movie, then sell video tapes, then put it on HBO, and then finally sell it to network television. They wailed and nashed their teeth when they couldn't get the legislation they wanted and judges struck down all their "no rental" clauses on the videos. Claimed it would bankrupt Hollyweird, and they'd never be able to sell the video tapes. Of course, we all know that they dropped the price to where people preferred buying videos because of the better quality and the packaging.
Good grief. All anyone would have to do is get a card with stereo "audio in" jacks, and the computer will record away. Same thing with DVDs. H*ll, the latest iMac already has a DVD recorder built in.
The music industry is taking it on the chin because they still insist on selling cd's that cost them maybe 30 cents to make and selling them for $16.95. And I'm not talking about new stuff they're paying production costs on now. I really believe the studio and production costs for most of Chuck Berry and the Beatles records have been covered by now.
I think most people would buy music off the web if the prices were reasonable. The last time I checked, web sites were trying to get two bucks a song for you to make a custom cd of songs you want to hear. That's thirty bucks for a fifteen song cd, and they charged shipping. Ridiculous. Reminds me of the old Dennis the Menace cartoon where he and Joey are trying to sell lemonade for $5.00 a glass. Dennis tells Joey, "we've only gotta sell one glass!"
Same thing with this. Most people will pay a reasonable price for a product. They are NOT, however, going to pay obscene prices for these things. Video tape sales are very healthy. People buy them, even though they can record the movie cheaper, because they want a professional quality product, and you can buy nearly two hours worth of entertainment for less than twenty bucks. Create a reasonable pricing schedule, and this problem will go bye-bye.
I don't recall hearing of people being killed by folks who figure out how to install software without paying for it, nor is it possible to imagine how it would be a loss of revenue for someone who could not afford the software package in the first place to install a cracked version. In fact, history has proved the contrary, e.g. AutoCad cracking by small firms and students stimulated sales of AutoCad if the company or student became more successful (and legit). Similarly for music, bootleg concert recordings were determined to stimulate record sales and tour attendence for the Grateful Dead.
Do not be confused - what is going on here is an attempt to hijack commerce by criminalizing competition. The pirates are the MPAA and RIAA, who think co-option of government is necessary to support market position, and damn the actual consequences. They will not get what they want even if successful, and the effects on freedom are clearly signaled by actions already taken, e.g. people sent to prison for knowing too much and telling others about it.
Remember, the more criminal laws, the more felons. Felons are automatically second-class citizens, amenable to all forms of coercion and disrespect in order to go about their daily lives. This makes it easier for the tyrants to maintain a pretense of legitimacy - if you're a felon, why should you expect any rights?
Remember to ask your candidates which laws, ordinances, regulations are deserving of repeal and when they are going to do it. I'm afraid it's too late for the already elected. However, I wonder if I should ask legislators why they are so diligently determined to make it eventually necessary for us to "vote from the rooftops"...?
This bill is insane. Want to swap out your hard drive? You can't, it's encrypted. What if it crashes? Tough, no backups allowed.
I predict old PCs will suddenly become very valuable if this passes.
"It seems to me that it's still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt freedom--but this is one place where the most extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the "Four Horsemen" that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the "Terrorist Horseman" is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It's not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described."
Vernor Vinge, August 1999, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ISBN 0-312-86207-5
Today the "Terrorist Horseman" is in full charge, whipping us toward ever-tighter controls over technology. And Vinge's prediction is embodied in the CBDTPA.
I got over 26,000 posts that have May's email address in a Google Groups Search... arranged by date...
Ah say, that is, ah say, Ah need more cash-n-carry around money from Disney....
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