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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."
I would be really dissapointed if Hollings is ever re-elected. The point of an elected government is to get rid of those who want to lower our freedom, and this guy is definetly going down that road, and dragging everyone he can with him.
/. all we want, but if we don't send the message in our ballots also, we have given up the battle.
We can rant and rave on
I sincerely hope that the people in his district are well aware of Sen. Holling's attrocities.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
FWIW, the "partisan opinion" in question is small-"L" libertarian Republican. What the author is arguing isn't just that the SSSCA is bad. It's that Republicans should take advantage of the fact that Democrats' support for the SSSCA makes Democrats look to be in bed with Big Business. I, for one, find it nice when either of the duopolistic parties adopt pro-freedom positions. It gives me hope that someday they might do so out of principle rather than just because it makes them look good. Is a pretense to virtue a possible antecedent to true virtue? I don't know.
Take from the article, for instance:
Despite being illegal, payola is rife, keeping interesting artists off the air in favor of the manufactured hitmaker of the week.
Okay, assume that statement is fully true, and major labels pay radio stations big bucks to play their manufactured hitmaker of the week. This is keeping the interesting artists off the air?
Wrong.
Somebody listens to it. Someone buys the albums. N'Sync didn't get big because of major label payola, they got big because some clown looked at a shelf in a record store, and said, 'I want THIS one!'
The same with Hanson, Britney, 98, blah-de-freakin'-blah. Someone's listening to this crap. And you know what? It's trendy to call it crap. But when a radio station, that makes money off ad revenue, has to choose what to play, it's either going to choose the mainstream 'crap', or the indie 'interesting' stuff. The rest of what will happen is left as an exercise for the reader.
Other things pointed out in the article are just plain criminal, however:
Record companies regularly deduct 15 percent off the top of sales as an allowance for "breakage" -- a survival from the days of shellac records that now simply serves to reduce artist royalties by that amount
and
And now, record companies -- who have allied themselves with the just-as-bad motion picture industry - want to make it a felony for you to own a computer that is capable of copying music from a CD to your portable player without paying them money, even though courts have held that such copying is entirely legal.
Blame the MPAA for a lot - the DMCA, copy protected CD's, starving artists that sell more than 50,000 records, but not for the bad taste of the little girl down the block.
-- Find the Truth...
That's because it's NOT an "article", it's an opinion piece. Look closely at the page; it's called "Straight Talk", and it's in the Views section, and it was submitted by a law professor.
This is an opinion piece, not an article. They're not claiming journalistic objectivity here.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
That is indeed a good slogan. But they could draft Charlton Heston as a spokeman too.
:(
How about:
"Keep your stinking laws off my computer you filthy apes!" (the real "Planet Of the Apes")
"Pop culture is people!" ("Soylent Green")
There have to be some good possibilities from "the Ten Commandments" and "The Omega Man", but I just can't think of them...
It's a pity those quotes couldn't be used while playing the clips from the movie they almost came from - it wouldn't quite make the fiar use criteria.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Do something about it!
t .html
Visit the EFF:
http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010921_eff_sssca_aler
I used that page to send a few emails to my Congresspeople. And they are listening!! I got this reply from Senator Maria Cantwell:
Dear ---:
Thank you for contacting me about the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). I appreciate hearing your concerns.
The SSSCA has not yet been introduced in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, nor does it exist in final form. My staff has been in contact with the Senator Hollings' office, one of the authors of the SSSCA along with Senator Stevens. I was informed that the SSSCA is yet to be completed, and the timeline for the introduction of the SSSCA is uncertain at this point. The early draft that was made publicly available on the Internet, to which your comments are likely directed, may be significantly different from the legislation that may be introduced by Senators Hollings and Stevens. You may be interested to know that Sen. Hollings held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee to address this issue on February 28 (To view statements and testimony from this hearing, see: http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/hearings.htm)
I understand your concern that we must work to achieve the right balance between protecting copyrights and remunerating the creators of those works and reasonable consumer use of copyrighted works. Indeed, the pace of innovation requires a diligent consideration of both of these interests. 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. The DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures and the trafficking of such technology. Thus, the law facilitates legitimate distribution of copyrighted work by allowing for the use of technological measures by the copyright holder and providing legal protections for those measures. However, you should know that I will not be supportive of legislation that unduly limits technological innovation or consumers' rights.
At this relatively early point in the development of digital distribution of copyrighted works, the U.S. Copyright Office has recommended that Congress make no significant changes to copyright law right now. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over copyright law, I will be actively considering these issues. Please be assured that should the SSSCA come before the Senate, I will keep your concerns in mind.
Again, thank you for contacting me, and please do not hesitate to do so in the future if I can be of further assistance.
Sincerely,
Maria Cantwell United States Senator
And he may be one of the few columnists out there that hates the RIAA as much as the Slashdot crowd.
I thought a little background on him would be appropriate since all the claims of conservative bias and such started being flung around.
-- null
Being Caught with 1 "illegal" copyright work: $25,000
Being Caught 3 years later with an "illegal" copyright work: $75,000
Total: $100,000
For 1000 mp3s: $100,000,000 (100 million)
And according to the SSSCA, an illegal work would be an mp3 of a song on a CD that you yourself bought. Or when the "secure content checker" written about in the SSSCA is on all computers, an illegal work is a work it doesn't recognize, such as a term paper you wrote 5 years ago.
$100,000 for trying to read your own paper.
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
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.
I'm disappointed in Slashdot's readership.
A lot of the comments so far are just reactions to where it appeared - not what it says.
Whatever you think of FoxNews, try to read the article without projecting on it what you think it's going to say. Note that it's really an opinion piece, apparently part of Fox's Straight Talk feature - corbettw mislabelled it in his summary.
The article in my view is really just analyzing the political risks and possibilities for both parties here. The reality is that both the Democrats and Republicans support constituencies at times that are at odds with the philosphies they publicly profess. In this case it's the support that several heavyweight Democrats have been giving to the recording and movie industries for the SSSCA. Glenn Reynolds (the author) really would like to see the SSSCA buried and all he's really doing here is pointing out is that the Republicans could help kill it AND potentially score political points for doing so.
Glenn Reynolds also produces music in his spare time when he's not teaching law. He also runs a 'blogger' website with nearly hourly comments. He's also a Slashdot reader and poster (which is how I first heard about his web site InstaPundit). I've been reading his site since just before 9/11 and he's been consistent in criticizing the record industry for its corruptness and sneaky ploys to take advantage of the consumer. He's hardly a ideological Republican. Mostly he's libertarian and anti-Idiotarian in his viewpoints. In this, I don't think he's that far off from most Slashdot readers. That is, if they can overlook their media outlet biases.
I recall reading an article about Winston Groom - the author of Forest Gump. He had cut a deal with the studio for a percentage of the profit from the movie. The movie generated revenue of over $600 million, but according to the studio, did not make a profit. So, when Valenti states that only 2 out of 10 movies generate a profit that's probably true. Hollywood's accountants may well be the most creative people in the entertainment industry.
[Insert pithy quote here]