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Tech Industry To Hollywood: Slow Down, Camper
negativethirsty wrote to us with a story here at Wired, most of the tech industry heads sent a letter to the motion picture studios, with a nod towards the US Senate. Basically, the tech industry does not want SSSCA to be pased, and want to work out a "technically feasible, cost effective solution" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form.
The letter does not directly state support for passing the law - in fact it says "We have found these voluntary multi-industry standards setting efforts to be optimally effective in reaching workable market solutions." - implying that they think legislation is either unecessary or "sub-optimal". The wired article also picks up on this - somebody change the story text!.
I very much doubt big hardware vendors would be in favor of the kind of copy protection SSSCA seems to demand - it would be very onerous to have government imposed standards here, it could create a huge black/grey market in imported "free" hardware.
This appear to be them "showing support for the fight", not supporting "the weapon".
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The Witness list in no particular order includes:
Panel I
Mr. Michael D. Eisner, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company, 500 S. Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA 91521
Mr. Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer, News Corporation, 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036
Mr. Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation, 2200 Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara, CA 95052
Panel II
Mr. Andreas Bechtolsheim, General Manager/Vice President of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit, Cisco Systems Inc., 250 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, CA 95134
Mr. James E. Meyer, Special Advisor to the Chairman and formerly Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Thomson Multimedia, 10330 North Meridian Street, Indianapolis, IN 46290
Mr. Robert Perry, Vice President, Marketing, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, Inc., 9351 Jeronimo Road, Irvine, CA 92618
Mr. Jack Valenti, President and CEO, The Motion Picture Association of America, 15503 Ventura Boulevard, Encino, CA 91436
Online petition against SSSCA
The Draft of the SSSCA
The speech was made Michael Greene, President and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and the transcript is available here.
Content wise, there was precious little: copying music is evil; 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded each month; download from legal sites so artists get paid (a quarter of a penny per song, apparently).
Um, Dude -
Fritz Hollings is a Democrat. The Republicans are not the ones pushing this lame ass SSSCA.
Ashcroft is trying to make sure you are not killed by terrorists. That doesn't make him a nazi.
Hollings is trying to make sure you have no rights as a consumer.
Hollings also voted to take away your right to free speech by voting for the Campaign Finance Reform bill. If you don't like SSSCA, and want to run a political ad on TV against Fritz Hollings, you are about to lose the right to do so within 60 days of an election. Because you represent a dirty "Special Interest", and any money that you would want to spend on a campaign ad is considered "Soft Money". So your voice will be silenced during the 60 days that most people begin to pay attention to a political race.
Your only hope is that Bush will veto it. But he might not, because that would make him look partisan, and against reform.
So ultimately bad laws like SSSCA will pass and you have no right to air political ads when it matters most.
Blame the Democrats for this one.
As anyone with half a clue should know, forcing the use of DRM hardware is pointless. Unless you can also make the use of non-DRM data illegal, there is no point in creating hardware enforcement of DRM. All it takes is one person with a fully functional machine to extract the data from its DRM envelope. Then users with DRM machines can use the data in its non-DRM form.
If they had a clue, they would make it illegal to provide residential internet users with routeable IP addresses. This would be instant death for P2P networks. Any piracy network would have to have some centralized servers to route data. As we've seen with Napster, anything with a centralized server is an easy target.
It's strange that they haven't done this, since it seems a lot easier to implement than forcing a change in the hardware platform. All they need is AOL and the baby bells and they're golden. Should be an easy sell.
Grief. I just shouldn't allow myself to think about certain topics.