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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!"
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 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
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.
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.
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?)