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SSSCA Squirms Forward Again Thursday
An anonymous reader writes: "Here we go! Only temporarily tripped up by Sept. 11th (and of course journalists and webmasters calling his office), Fritz Hollings is starting hearings on embedding copy protection in all digital devices and making the removal or circumvention of these protections a crime. Hurrah for freedom!"
Did they consider that other events in 2001 besides increased piracy that might have led to people buying fewer CDs?
Something to think about:
Post Enron, and all the campaign finance issues that it has brought up, might there be a way to defeat this through bringing to light the contributions recieved by the sponsors?
Or is that even relevant? Should we be looking at the motives of politicians who sponsor bills? IMO, we should when the bills are being passed for the benefit of donors to the pol's campaign. It seems to me that Senators and Congressmen forget who they work for (the people who elect them) and just care about fundraising.
Okay, rant mode off.
I have no friends. Will you be my friend?
I find it interesting, though, that Intel is on our side in this issue: "We don't think government-mandated technology solutions are in the best interests of consumers or anyone else," according to their spokesperson. It's not too often that big business comes down on our side, although I can certainly understand why Intel would on this issue. Being forced to implement copy-protection in their hardware would NOT be compatible with their business interests.
I also find it interesting that the senator promoting this heinous piece of legislation is a Democrat. Aren't the Democrats supposed be the party that sticks up for the common people as opposed to big media interests like Disney and the MPAA?
But in September, a Disney lobbyist defended Hollings' draft SSSCA as "an exceedingly moderate and reasonable approach."
Yikes... if they think SSSCA is merely "moderate", I'd hate to imagine what they *really* want.
Also this week, the Recording Industry Association of America published data saying that music sales were down 10 percent last year and online piracy and CD burning were a "large factor contributing to the decrease."
Let's see, CD sales were rising when Napster was in its hey-day so obviously the dismantling of it is a "large factor contributing to the decrease."
The DMCA sparked controversy after the eight largest movie studios successfully used it to stop 2600 magazine from distributing the DeCSS DVD-descrambling program.
As I recall, 2600 only linked to sites with DeCSS; it didn't distribute it.
The entire article reads like a blowjob for the RIAA and MPAA.
Can somebody explain to me what's so amazingly important about broadband. As I understand this, the media companies want to trample on all of our rights so that they can sell us more bandwidth that they can use to transmit to us the movies that they sell. Can somebody please explain to me the compelling societal interest that's being promoted here?
Bandwidth is a wonderful thing, but it seems like inacting legislation to artificially generate demand for it is an ill conceived idea. Fine, if copyright controls aren't built into every single piece of electronic equipment it might mean never watching Lord of the Rings on-line. WHO CARES? Fine, I'll go to a theater and watch it, and there I can get the experience of being with a large audience, getting the big sound and picture that I can never hope to replicate in my home. What is so almighty important to our society to be able to download this stuff?
I guess my feeling is that if the big movie studios don't want to put their stuff on-line, fine, don't, I don't really care. What's the worst that happens? Nothing. Nothing at all. They keep making money the way they always have and we keep watching movies the way we always have. The only risk to them is that somebody else is going to come along and make something of that market without any of this copy protection technology built in. So really, in the end, this is all just an effort to further the monopoly of the MPAA over movie production and distribution. Isn't that grand?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I can rent a movie from a local video store. I can then take it home, place it into my VCR, and record it to a second VCR.
The total cost to me is between $.99 and $3.99 Canadian Dollars, plus $1.99 for the blank cassette tape.
I could also record it to my computer, and eliminate the second cost.
Why do video stores exist? Shouldn't the MPAA be burning them down, or whatever it is that happens to offenders that enable piracy?
Oh, because they generate revenue. Slipped my mind. The MPAA sure are clever fellas, realizing that.
Except that they didn't realize that until after-the-fact. They had permitted rentals of BetaMax, and discovered that they could not legitimately restrict rentals on the basis of the VHS medium. They went with it because they had to, not because they wanted to.
And look at all the money!
The reason that the Internet is so scary to the MPAA and ol' Jack is because it's so big. They think, "My goodness, 400 million people can download our movie and watch it." What they fail to realize is that if they provided a service to download movies legitimately, with no worries about stripped frames or out-of-sync sound, then perhaps 40 million of those 400 million would pay a $5 service fee. Because, hey, $5 is worth saving me a half an hour of frustration. If I could pay $5 for a movie, and KNOW that it would play correctly, and have it certified to run on all hardware exceeding a specific spec, I'd pay it. My serenity in watching a movie is worth a fiver. Really, it is.
This has been said and said and said. Not everybody who downloads something off the internet ever would have purchased it. If I download a Britney Spears song because I'm having an argument over whether she's saying "My loneliness is killing me" or "Fuck me now, Tiger!" with my roommate, I'm not stealing their profit, because a stupid argument isn't worth buying a CD. Although it might be worth a micropayment, if that service existed. Of course it doesn't.
The MPAA and RIAA are both trying to take traditional bricks and mortar businesses online. But, unlike Amazon, they run into a big problem: on-line, for the media formats they're pushing, they run into competition from the illegitimate side of things (Books aren't often pirated). What they have to do is make their service offering more attractive than theft.
You'd think it wouldn't be hard to do that, except that their service offering is, and has been for about 40 years now, theft. They overcharge, they price in a predatory fashion, they artificially increase demand and artificially decrease supply. They constantly reduce production costs and yet constantly raise price tags.
Look at the computer industry: The first computer I bought and paid for with my own money was a 386 SX 20. It had a 20 meg hard drive. It cost me a fucking mint -- over $1000, and I was getting it at a discount.
Now, I can buy a 1 gigahertz computer for that price. Or, I could buy myself a K6 2/300 for $300. An increase in production efficiency coupled with a decrease in production costs resulted in a decrease of the price-to-consumer.
Well, duh.
But a CD? I bought a CD 10 years ago. It cost me $18.99 (Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense). I bought a CD yesterday, it cost me $24.99 (Kristin Hersch, Strange Angels). We all know that the price of pressable audio CDs has been decreasing, right? We all know that the methods of pressing tham have grown more efficient, right?
Q:So why did the price of my CD *increase* instead of *decreasing*?
A: Because the crooks in this equation are the RIAA.
Oh bleh. I buy CDs to support the artists I like. The more copies sold, the more important they are to the label. The more important they are, the more exposure they get. The more exposure they get, the more people listen to them. The more people listen to them, the more shows they play. The more shows they play, the better the odds that I'll get to see them -- except, of course, that the tickets will probably cost enough that I'll have to sell a kidney.
Fuckers.
-l
I see no reason why every computer should comply with their "standards" just in order to accomodate some business or the other...
If they cannot adapt to the medium then tough luck ! It's not theirs to change in the first place.
They think it will work because if you want files suddenly you will be required to use one of those fee-based online download services that currently aren't doing so well.
Once again, the content industry is trying to pass off the costs of securing content. As I said the other day, in relation to Jack Valenti's most recent act of public self-humiliation (er... I guess that's what they call PR)
"The content industry has been trying to force the costs of secure IP on everyone BUT themselves. First users, then ISPs, now electronics manufacturers. When the hell will they figure out that securing their content is their own damn problem? It's like they can't figure out how to lock their own door, and instead of building a better lock, they'd rather criminalize the act of using a doorknob - er, excuse me, "wall-circumvention device." Obviously, that was a subversive Freudian slip.
Okay, so maybe recycling comments is bad form, but its even more prescient now than before.
That being said, feel free to call me hopelessly optimistic here... but I sense the tide turning.
Okay, I can hear the collective huh? out there, but I'm saying this seriously. I think there's two indicators that may mean the tide is turning away from the property rights hawks and toward the rest of us.
First, the Senate has gotten into the game. Sen. Boucher has given the RIAA flack recently about copy protection schemes and digital watermarking, and Sen. Hatch has voiced on at least one occasion that the DMCA may not be working. ("Hey, no kidding, Orrin!?")
Second, the Supreme Court has gotten into the game. Last year's Tasini decision (look it up on Findlaw) was the first subtle blow to content owners, and I think the Eldred appeal, if the Court strikes down the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, may be the next.
To paraphrase Churchill, I'm not saying this is the end. It's not even the beginning of the end. It may, however, be the end of the beginning.
Excuse my proselytizing, but where that ends is up to you. Email your Congressperson about the SSSCA. I don't care - tell them you think Hollings is a weenie. Just make yourself heard. If you've got time to peruse Slashdot, you've got time to write the damn email. And that doesn't even have to be in HMTL.
What are you waiting for?
It may be cold, but at least it's clear.
We can all fight this, but it's coming so we might as well get used to it and get some sleep.
The fact is that technology is created by giant corporations. Can you manufacture a Pentium in your garage? Nope. Hard drives? Monitors? Network cards? Cable? Infrared mice? Nope, nope, nope. Basically the only thing that we have control of is the software, the rest is made by multinational corporations who have very little of our best interests in mind.
No one really respected computers before 1995. Only office workers used them and NO one used them for entertainment. The same argument can be made for most digital devices. Now suddenly, everyone gets the clue and realizes what sort thing of thing that Greek chick has let out of the digital box. In the coming years every book, every piece of music, every movie, every television show EVER CREATED will be available digitally. And as it is now every piece of this copyrighted material is free to be transferred between people without cost.
Everyone gets the idea now. And they're going to do something about it.
So, multinationals are going to do what they can to protect their own and the government (especially a Republican led government) will let them. Companies like Sony who once pushed for BetaMax openness will now push for DRM on everything. Even little companies like Blizzard get it and pushes for complete control over it's product and how it's used on the Internet. It won't be long before Microsoft does the same for Windows (want to use the net? You have to use the Microsoft Internet Protocol TM - or you go to jail.)
And what are we, the people, going to do when the corporations do this? Nothing. Because again, we can't create our own fiber-optic cable in our bathroom, we can't create DRAM in our kitchen, etc. We are at the bottom end of the line waiting for whatever digital product these corporations produce.
Normally we would not buy such horrible products and then we would go to our government for protection from such strongarm tactics, but the government is not on our side (and hasn't been for a while). In FACT, they are ASKING the corporations to COLLUDE! PLEASE restrict choice. PLEASE come to an agreement on how to best restrict digital freedoms. PLEASE make it so the status quo can be maintained. THAT is best for the country.
The corporations and the government know NOW that the technology user only has as much power as they GIVE them, so they're going to come to an agreement on the best way to restrict this power.
Get used to it.
-Russ
Me
We trust the people enough to sell lethal firearms to anybody who walks in off of the street.
We trust the people enough to let a soccer mom drive a 3-ton truck with no special training.
But we don't trust the people enough to let them have a general-purpose computer.
It's insane.
So, if the bill passes, we should see a giant upswing in the number of computers purchased. Then two years from that time, the number of computers purchased will have significantly dropped.
Fritz Hollings: "All your computer are belong to us"
To me the most infuriating part of this is the mentality, expressed in Hollings' letter, that the world is divided into content "creators" and "consumers".
If we are not in the business of making money off copyrighted works, then we must be "consumers" of copyrighted works. There appears to be no notion in either government or most major media outlets that some of us might value some of our rights that don't necessarily advance our positions as "consumers".
Clearly it is too much to expect the public at large to "get" open source, but is there no general sense that our rights ought not be pidgeon-holed like this?
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
Unless, of course, the WIPO succeeds in forcing all of our allies into adopting similar policies. Then it will be the US, Europe, Japan, South Africa, the more-developed parts of Asia and Latin America, and possibly India pitted against China, the Arab world, Southeast Asia, and all other non-participants. One side will have a massive head start but next to no ability to progress, while the other side will have the freedom to innovate.
How long will it take the nations that don't adopt SSSCA-like laws to overtake those that legislate meaningful research in CS out of existence? If they are able to maintain the current pace of technological progress, it may not be long at all.
My advice: teach your children Mandarin or Cantonese if you want to ensure their future.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Just like your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, one could could argue that your freedom to copy data ends when it's someone else's data. If this is done well, it should not hinder legitimate use, but I bet most people here are more interested in whether or not they will still be able to rip those rented DVDs.
If you think about it for a moment though, you'll realize that something like this is bound to happen some time. Instead of protesting and hoping it won't, you need to accept that it will, and try to shape and influence it so that it doesn't become a nuissance for legitimate uses, make sure it doesn't become a Windows-only thing, etcetera.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Declaration of Independence is a legal document. It explains part of the terms of enforcement for the Constitution. When those who claim to be government defect from the contract, the declaration goes into effect.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Anyone recall Lessig's "Ask Slashdot" answers. He gave us all hell about whining here on Slashdot but doing nothing practical.
I am growing more and more envious of the anti-globalisation people. Hell, at least they DO something else than whine about it!
The owls are not what they seem
the hearing is meant to discuss whether the government must step in and mandate standards -- which Hollywood believes will allow movies to be distributed safely online, spur high-speed Internet access, and boost hardware sales.
Sure, it'll boost hardware sales... I know that I would buy up as much hardware as possible as soon as possible, if copy "protection" were looming inevitably on the immediate horizon... But somehow I don't think that's what they were talking about...
Do not read this sig.
Wanna download media on-line from us? You gotta buy this dongle (similar to USB and parallel port software locks) and client software. If people don't want it, they don't have to buy it.
Instead, they blow all this money on trying to implement "protections" which will be useless by the time they get to market. The worst part that protecting the interests of these companies is almost all on the taxpayers dime. Let the industry work it out for itself.
*sigh* too bad it's a pipe dream. Sometimes I wish the companies would fail and then both sides will see what happens when compromises can't be reached.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
I like the parent post but most of the stuff I read here does not address the most important issue!
LINUX CAN NOT RUN on SSCA hardware because everything from the chip to the hard drive incorporates this encryption and trusts one another with handshakes! In other words without a key all data is locked@ IT can't be revesersed engineered thanks to the dmca, it can be broken because its in hardware, and if it incorporates any drm technology, guess who already has a patent on it? Microsoft!
USe Windows or go to jail. Oh. by the way the license for the upcomming Windows.NET is rumoured to be timebombed so expect to pay a monthly bill to Microsoft or TURN YOUR PC INTO A DOORSTOP!
If this goes through into law I will be so f*cking angry that It will be beyond words! I may even throw my computer out in protest. If this is the future of computers, then I want not part in it!
http://saveie6.com/
The "Stupid Hollings Bill," (or TSHB) as we have come to call it, is bad for us and bad for America. It is bad because it is blatant protectionism of a small class of persons (who already have received their Constitutional quota of protection with respect to the underlying rights in a Copyright and Patent) at great cost to the rest of us. It is bad for the same reasons that all economic regulation is bad -- it invites capital to go to places other than America.
Whatever can be said about intellectual property laws, they are grounded in a fundamental need to balance conflicting interests -- the interest in giving incentives to talent to create, and the interest of giving those who follow and stand on the shoulders of those giants to innovate therefrom. IP, when properly balanced, stimulates growth and innovation. When unbalanced, one way or the other, leads at best, to stagnation.
But TSHB serves none of these policies. It dumbs down and compromises technologies that are at the very economic core of our modern economy, for no reason at all, but for the litigation convenience of a political constituency that, apparently has more dollars than sense.
This is the same constituency that years ago whined about its death in the face of the piano rolls, then the radio, then the television, then the audio tape, then the video tape, then the DAT, and now the Internet. In every case, they lost their war to regulate technology and media, and despite themselves, profited immensely. Losing the Betamax case was the single best thing that happened to the movie industry, except for the few dinosaurs who liked too much their old ways.
And America benefitted from such changes, despite the whinings of the powers that be. Each new technology meaningfully changed our lives in useful ways, created growth and jobs, and most important, made new and greater incentives for people of talent to create.
Imagine if each and every new medium and technology was subject to regulation and review, subject to vetting by every content provider. Who is going to pay for test-drives of new media? Answer: noone, at least noone in the United States. Capital will be invested elsewhere, and the innovators who brought to us these wonderful technologies will go to medical school, law school or elsewhere.
This much we know. The "parade of horribles" of the RIAA and MPAA against underregulation never happened. None of these industries were destroyed by any of the aforementioned technologies. We have seen regulation, however, keep novel technologies from prospering. (And, although cause and effect is certainly not evident, I take great pride in noting that RIAA had their best year in history the year before the Napster decision, when they were terrified that Napster would kill it, but virtually contemporaneously with their 9th Circuit victory, found themselves suddenly unable to sell records.)
TSHB is bad for America because it is unnecessary trade regulation. It is bad for America because it deters creativity from the very sector that has provided the most vital growth (jobs and GNP) to the new economy, in favor of a whining constituency that has ALWAYS argued they were about to die, but has never really needed the protectionism for which they continue to fight.
TSHB is bad for America because it is, at its heart and sole, unAmerican. We need to foster technology, not regulate it. We need to encourage growth in new media, not to staunch its flow. Hollings would make the Commerce Department the gatekeeper of new media, serving as lapdog to content creators.
And in so doing, will only deprive them of the very success that new media technologists have provided in the past, and can always provide in the future.
New technology is driven by natural market forces. Regulation stops these things from working. Content people are the least qualified of all to vet and evaluate new media, except perhaps, for Commerce Department regulators. (And these remarks are coming from a "left of Che" liberal!)
TSHB will not help anything, for there is no real problem here, but it will cause harm. In my view, grievous harm, to America.
On the other hand, think of the opportunities this will create for EC economic and content development! (Has anyone checked for foreign contributors to Hollings campaigns?)