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Fox Explains Why SSSCA Is Bad
corbettw writes "Fox News is running an article that slams Sen. Fritz Hollings ("The Senator from Disney") and the Democrats (with the notable exception of Rick Boucher) as having betrayed their principles. More importantly, the article explains why the SSSCA is so bad, in language any American can understand. It's nice to see someone in the mainstream media taking this beast on before it becomes law."
Frankly, I'm not so worried about the implications of this legislation. If it passes (unlikely), it'll just get attacked in the House or defeated in the courts if it somehow makes it past Dubya's desk.
It's more that SC (and the US in general) has a gentleman like this steering legislative policy on something that didn't even exist when he was celebrating his 60th birthday. I'm not saying older folks can't learn, but in this case, I think it's safe to say that SC is not going to become a technology center (nor will the United States remain one) as long as its legislators insist on kissing up to interests that have less consideration for the proper deployment of technology than they do for the protection of their short-term revenue streams.
Anyway, God help us all. Fritz is a nice man, but he should be ignored on this issue.
The Recording Industry Ass. of America and Motion Picture Ass. of America seem to have stepped in it here. Going after people's ability to make mix CDs may finally wake up the general public to their game. The .23 cent royalties on downloaded songs give the lie to their mission to "protect the artists". Saying that music piracy is more important than AIDS makes them look like the self-absorbed pricks that they are.
Is it just me, or do they seem more and more desperate with every passing day?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Well Fox has hired many people from both sides of the spectrum and are basically told not to hide their feelings and say what they really think. So you do hear extremly right wing and left wing beliefs. As opposed to more news orginizations which tend to lean to the left but try their best to hide that fact.
It's not fox(x-files, family guy), it's Fox News. They've been doing a lot of very excellent journalism lately, especially with programs like The Oreilly Factor. They were the first to bring up the fact that the Red Cross, united way, and other charitable organizations were misusing donations from the money they collected under the guise of helping sept 11th victims. They carried the gary condit scandal before anyone. Fair and balanced, Fox News takes on both the democrats and republicans, and holds them accountable for their actions.
C'mon folks... you absolutely have to "follow the money" when looking
for political motivation. From Enron to SSSCA. Nobody should be shocked when
they hear something like this. Its just an extension of the old golden rule...
he who has the gold, makes the rules. Unless the people (perhaps with help from
the hardware manufacturers) vehemently make their views known, there will be
people like this who try to run through legislation designed to screw the little
guy.
We obviously don't count as much in the process. Voters are needed to be elected...
but MONEY is needed to get voters to vote for you. They don't get money from
the voters. Besides... they figure we'll forget and just vote for the incumbent
anyway.
I'm babbling...
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
-- Find the Truth...
They have?
"I believe that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) passed in 1998 helps to accomplish this goal. I feel we need to continue to encourage innovation in technology while protecting the intellectual property rights of inventors, artists, authors and musicians."
Warning! Contradiction encountered! Dumping core...
Well, maybe not. She didn't mention anything about the rights of the citizens...
I am a staunch Democrat and always have been, but on this issue I must agree with the "fair and balanced" Fox news and I bet that most other Democrats would also. On most issues Democrats consistently come out in favor of consumer's rights. You only have to look at historical examples ranging from automobile safety to the breakup of AT&T to realize that the precedent strongly favors the Dems. For the most part we are in favor of government assistance in balancing the playing field (mostly by trying to check the interests of big corporations). The Microsoft trial is a great example. The case was vigorously pursued by the Clinton administration and it looks like the Bush administration is basically giving up on it.
That's why the SSSCA is such an interesting case. It looks and smells very bad indeed when you have prominent Democratic leaders like Hollings, Boxer and Kerry falling in line with the people who gave them huge amounts of money.
The author also tries to compare this to the Enron debacle--please...how many people lost their life savings here... But I do think that they have one thing in common. They are both fabulous examples of why we need meaningful campaign finance reform.
The Original SSSCA.
Statement of Yakval Enti, spokesman of the MPAA (Mnemonists, Praise-singers, and Anthemists Association) to His Highness Hammurabi, King of Sumeria:
Your Majesty: I wish to call you attention to a severe threat to the security of your kingdom, and the livelihoods of thousands of your subjects.
After Shamash sets and the people kick back after a long day of growing millet, they desire entertainment. Their favorite forms are stories, tales, and sagas, told by the members of the MPAA. Talented boys spend up to 12 years learning the tales by heart at the feet of the masters. Any evening MPAA members can be found in the taverns singing the old tales, praising the praiseworthy, and creating new tales from the old.
This system has worked well since the beginning of time - there were storytellers at your coronation, there were storytellers at your father's coronation, and there were storytellers in the caves of our ancestors.
This natural arrangement is now threatened from an unexpected direction - the scribes and accountants. The geeks' system of recording numbers and quantities has been perverted to freeze speech onto clay.
Understand the threat to our business model. At the moment, if someone wants to hear 'The Tale of the Ox, the Ass and the Sumerian', they find an MPAA member, pay him, and sit back to listen to the whole four hour saga. While anyone could recall and tell others the general outline, only MPAA members know every detail and can give the listener the whole story. If you want to hear it again, you pay again. Thousands of MPAA members rely on this fact for their livelihoods.
With the recent invention of "writing" the system is in danger of collapse. We've found that some scribes are actually "recording" entire sagas onto clay. Any scribe can "read" these out to people for free or for money, complete and word-for-word, without being a member of or paying the MPAA! A scribe who has obtained a set of tablets of an story can even read it an unlimited number of times, or (worst of all) make copies. This is starting to have an economic impact on our membership. Consider Rimat-Ninsun, whose masterwork "The Epic of Gilgamesh" took him three years to create, and who looked to it to put bread on his table into his old age, as he told it for money, or let others tell it under paid license after learning it from him. 'Gilgamesh' is now circulating on 12 clay tablets, and Rimat is starving. Who will bother to create new tales if they are just going to be written down?
"Writing" presents insidious dangers to your kingdom as well. It can be anonymous. Before writing, any message arrived with a person to speak it, who could be held accountable for their speech. With writing, it is impossible to tell what scribe "wrote" a message. Anonymous threats, kidnap notes, and untraceable sedition are now possible. Clearly "writing" carries with it far greater problems for our civilization than it does advantages.
However, scribes, accountants, and their skills are essential to business, contracts, laws, and the collection of taxes. We just need to make sure that they are controlled properly.
I therefore propose the Scribal Stylus Safety Control Act. (SSSCA). This requires every scribe to have an MPAA approved, "literate" slave with him at all times, peering over his shoulder. If a scribe is seen to be "writing' something other then accounting information, for example a story (stories are the province of MPAA storytellers), or a message (which should have been given to a paid mnenomist for delivery), or anything seditious, then the slave will take away the scribe's stylus and call the authorities. I ask you to have this Act "written" into your Code of Law.
Is this difficult? Yes. Is it expensive? Yes. However, it is clear that without strict controls, widespread "writing" will not only destroy the entertainment industry, it will threaten civilisation itself!
---
Disclaimer:
The above are strictly the personal opinions of myself, and I'd be astonished if my employer had any official position on the matter (so don't pretend otherwise).
Feel free to copy this document in its entirety, with proper attribution.
Peter Trei
ptrei@rsasecurity.com
http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting talks about how Fair and Balanced Fox News is.
Vote Repulsocrat!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Here is the text of a submission I just made to Barbara Boxer's website.
(If you're going to write, PLEASE be a grownup: typical Slashdot flaming gets us nowhere.)
----
Dear Senator Boxer,
I was a bit surprised to hear that you are favoring Senator Hollings' SSSCA bill. While there are real concerns about illegal file-sharing, an overly-broad and intrusive bill like the SSSCA is absolutely not the way to go about it.
As a technical professional (software architect, security and database systems), I strongly believe that putting hardware copy-control devices into general consumer PCs is a terrible idea, one that will help stifle creativity in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Code is speech, and there are many people who are quite passionate about this issue, and others having to do with free and open access to technology. I, for one, am made very uncomfortable about mysterious black boxes, legislated into hardware, over which I have no control.
The problem is that the PC is a very general device, and requiring "certification" for every operating system/hardware combination will merely enrich the mainstream at the expense of the cutting edge. This sort of legislation is very dangerous to the continued health of Silicon Valley innovation. Our neighbors to the south in Hollywood have legitimate concerns, but harming one signature California industry to help another strikes me as the wrong approach.
Thank you for your attention,
Andrew MacBride
I just got off the phone with the Technology affairs guy in Barbara Boxer's Washington office. He is denying any support of SSSCA by Barbara Boxer at this time. I read him the accusation from the article and gave him the info. He was less than happy.
While there's no doubt that the Democrats mentioned in the article are hardly acting with consumers' best interests in mind, it's laughable to believe that Republicans are going to lead the charge in the other direction as the author seems to suggest.
Sure they will. If it will help them garner more votes in the next election, they will use this as a club to beat down the Democrats. Though, you are right, neither side is really any better than the other. All our polictical system really is, is an attempt by the people to play the two sides against the middle, and hope that we end up with something at least palatable, if not good. And that is exactly where politictal commentary like this comes in (it is really a political piece). It helps to set public opinion against something that is disagreeable, and at the same time helps to present the Republicans with a perfect opportunity to slam the Democrats with it. This makes it more likely the that Republicans will take up arms on this one and probably kill it. Was either side really more moral or better than the other? No, but in the end the people won on this count because the bad bill was killed, and that is what we are after.
Ya, its a screwed up system, but its all we have at the moment, so we'd better make the best of it. The only power "We the People" have is our vote. It may not seem like much, but en masse they can be very convincing to a carrer politician.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Ironically, Fox News' parent company News Corp had its senior executives testifying to Senator Ernest Hollings' committee that high-tech companies were hypocritical for suing others for intellectual-property violations while failing to develop software or hardware to protect entertainment.
Looks to me that Fox News enjoys the freedom to tell the truth, even if the business end of the company seeks political intervention as a solution to a market problem. I cannot say I feel the same for other so called Networks who lean left and don't admit it.
I do have to say that our industry would do itself a huge favor by developing technologies that allow for better protection of intellectual-property for all types of electronic content. Not only will it move us towards wider consumer use of technology, but will protect intellectual-property from misuse which leads to high costs for all of us.
Question is: How do we protect free speech and the rights of intellectual-property owners? That is the next billion dollar high-tech industry!
Wait, but payola IS completely active and rife in the industry--you don't even have to "assume that statement is fully true."
I used to work for a college radio station as the programming director, and major labels were ALWAYS trying to push their schlock on our station by offering me free tickets, trips, etc. And we were just a college station, for God's sake--think about how it is with major metropolitan areas.
And you're kidding yourself if you think N'Sync (or any other boy/girl band, for instance) got to be where they are solely because of their "catchy hook." Yes, that helps, but something had to get it out to be heard in the first place. It's THIS step where payola is key--if no one hears it for the first time, how are they supposed to be drawn in by the hook? They can't. Therefore, record companies offer initiatives to radio stations to insert these "hitmakers" into the playlist. Plain and simple.
There are a lot of bands out there that have great hooks in their songs too, they just never see the light of day because their distribution doesn't allow for nationwide airing (read: their labels don't have multiple millions of dollars to get the songs heard on radio, etc).
It's an extremely crooked industry.
One paragraph of the article said:
Talk about screwing the little guy: audits of record companies routinely indicate "errors" that are always in the companies' favor. (Recording artist Peggy Lee just won a big judgment, and many other artists' lawsuits are pending)
This brought back some memories of conversations I had while consulting for one of the major record companies. Not only is the slanting of "errors" in the favor of the companies common, it's completely intentional and so common that the industry has a name and an acronym for it.
The term is "settle on audit" and the acronym, obviously, SOA. What it means is that if a particular clause in an artists contract is too much of a pain to apply correctly, or even if the company just feels like it, they deliberately choose to err in their own favor, with the idea that when (or if!) the artist chooses to pay a third party auditor to come look at the books, they'll just negotiate a settlement.
In some cases, the contract clauses are so bizarre and impossible to apply that this actually makes a twisted sort of sense (what would really make sense is to write contracts that can actually be executed), but the record companies apply this technique in lots of other situations as well.
And, if that weren't enough, they also make absolutely no effort beyond the minimum required by the contract language to facilitate these audits. One common practice is that when the auditors request sales records, rather than giving them the information in a nice, easily-manipulable electronic format (which is what the companies use to look at and process the data themselves), they print it all out and provide it in paper format, sorted in some less than ideal way. For a major artist that has sold millions of CDs these paper records can fill dozens of large boxes -- truckloads of paper. And the auditor is paid by the artist, typically by the hour.
I guess in one way all this chicanery is actually in the artists' favor: The artist never has to wonder whether it's worth it to pay an auditor, because however much the auditor charges, they can always be sure that the record company has screwed them for worse, so they'll come out ahead in the end. I pointed this out and the folks I was talking to said that there was some debate over that point, that maybe they'd be better off playing it a little closer so that some sizeable percentage of audits showed no underpayments. But they're pretty sure they get to keep more of the artists' money this way.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The difficulty with a signature-based system is that it favors a) incumbents, since they have the name recognition and existing machinery, b) ideologues with highly motivated power bases, c) the independently wealthy who can run on their own. A newcomer who's insufficiently fiery (or bizarre) to energize people might have trouble getting name recognition.
The current matching-funds system isn't particularly great (it's still tough on newcomers) but they do have some chance at least. Of course, one might have separate rules for newcomers and for those running against the wealthy... hrm. I wonder if those would pass Constitutional muster.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If corporations can not make donations, what about sole owner or LLC?
I just think you are hampering free speech by making limits.
Why not make it a requirement that ALL donors and their contributions are provided to the public? Maybe have a rule that elected officals, their political parties (soft money), and people running for office have to maintain lists of donors and their donations amounts.
my two cents.