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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!"
i think fritz owns a pawn shop down the street from me... hmm... I WONDER~!! haha
MORONS. You cannot force us to make digital device copyprotected. It is the duty of the maker of the end product being copied to do so.
The land of the not-free.
And the arguments posted to my comments yesterday about whining Americans is bullshit. Just so you don't have to bother.
This is about me being forced by the government to use devices that are altered so I can"t do what I please. Soon cars are only going to go 65mph, my stereo will only goto 10 instead of 35, and alcohol will be 0%. b/c god forbid we have some sort of free choice.
BAH.
Just my worthless bitching today.
Congress today approved a grant today towards a medical program that will implant small chip into the brain of every American child shortly after birth. Its function will be to monitor the sounds brought in by the ears and shut them off for a period of five minutes if any pirated music is heard by the implantee.
Auto insurance companies are engaged in a furious fight to stop the next version of the B-chip, which will include the capability to instantly shut down the eyes in a similar manner.
I love technology.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Premise one : it is Work to create content, whether it be music, video, the printed word, or computer code. What do I mean by Work? Well, first it requires a portion of the content creator's lifespan to create content. It can be anywhere from 6 months of a book author's life to hundreds of manyears of time to create a major movie. Obviously, the people doing the creating must meet their needs during this time, and more skilled (or at least more popular) content creators must receive proportionally more compensation for their labors. (hence popular content receives more compensation)
.coms run out of money they stop producing anything.
/.ers that will work. In reality, it will take very draconian measures for the content creators to ensure they receive fair compensation for their efforts.
Premise Two : If someone is allowed to enjoy such created content, whatever to media, without paying for it they decrease the incentive the creators of such content have to produce it. If so few people pay for it in some manner that it is more effort to create content than the creators are compensated (measured in subjective terms, of course) then the creator of the content will likely move on to a more productive form of employment. Hence, noone makes a sequel to a movie that fails economically, and when the
Premise 3 : The digital age allows one to make absolutely perfect copies of content, for almost any form. Many people find they can get content for free with perfect quality. The same incentive rule applies : if you can get media for free, why pay for it? Thus, Something Must Be Done. Especially the major media creators who risk billions in making motion pictures (which is why the MPAA is the most strict about copy protection : a movie takes hundreds of times the money and effort as most other forms of content creation).
I have not seen any proposals made by
One last thing to note : some of you will allege that content creators do not in fact receive "fair" compensation...that they make obscene amounts of money compared to the cost of producing the media. That is simply false. First, in the case of music the $15 you pay for the cd goes to the ADVERTISING, which is just as big a part of the content you pay for as the music itself. The advertising makes you "feel good" about listening to the music, even if the music actually sucks. (hence the popularity of Miss Spears. Remember, advertising refers to more subtle forms of expression than mere T.V. commercials). For the movie example, much of the profit studios make on successful movies has to go to pay for the films that flop.