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CBDTPA Finds A Champion In the House
pshoemaker writes: "Wired is reporting that House member Adam Schiff of Burbank is seeking a co-sponsor for his House version of Hollings' CBDTPA. His 'Dear Colleagues' letter lays-out the same inspired thinking: that without copy protection there can be no broadband entertainment." Another reader suggests: "Be sure to also check out who's been paying him just so you know who it is he's representing..."
Sure, he can claim it more easily than most other representatives, but that doesn't make it true.
Schiff represents not just Burbank, but also Glendale and Pasadena, huge technology areas. I wouldn't be surprised if he has ten times as many constituents who work in the tech industry, than who work in the entertainment industry.
Can we fight fire with fire? I think it's time that tech businesses in his district started giving Adam some big donations, too.
errr he is from Burbank..the home of half the bloody movie/TV studios in existence. The amount payed to him is minor considering he does represent their district. I am from California and would happily see this guy sweeping streets but can't find fault with him accepting money from his home district. Now the "REAL" Senator from Disney, that goofy guy from Carolina, should NOT be deriving money from the movie industry at such a rate but, he has things to offer them and is in FACT being bought...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I wonder if the representatives who are sponsoring these bills could be charged with accepting bribes? After all the US Government is supposed to be Of the people, By the people, and FOR the people. There is NO mention of commercial eneterprises in the Constitution. Any lawyers out there have a view on this?
The moral of the story is: "Always remember to mount a scratch monkey."
Why is it *their* Internet all of a sudden? Just downloading an ISO of Redhat 7.2 takes a miniature eternity on my gigabit backbone with 100mbits to the desktop, because that's not all *my* traffic - can you imagine the sudden and continuous drain in bandwidth when anyone in my subnet decides to turn on the tube to watch Glitter?
Okay... bad example...
You hear about telecomm companies putting their own special networks together all the time. The entertainment industry needs to do the same. HDTVNet (or whatever they call it) can then be tightly controlled, with high-security copy protection devices all down the line, right down to the decoder on the TV. Make them completely inaccessable to the desktop - freaked out connectors, bizzare syncing and decoding strategies, whatever. No special legislation required - just technological consistancy in their own products.
The reasons they don't do this, of course, is two-fold. One, it would be hideously expensive (although will all that piracy suddenly gone, they'd suddenly be overflowing with revenue... right?), and two...
Well, I can't think of anybody who would go for it. Re-purchase every bit of audio/video equipment I own just to conform to the new services? I don't think so.
Of course, it's not like I won't have to do that in the next few years anyway... Thanks, incompatable HDTV standards!
GMFTatsujin
TV/Movies/Music is only #4 on the list of people who are funding his campaign. That's about 1/12 of his funding. The three groups above #4 have little to nothing to do with the TV/Movies/Music group. If you want to draw conclusions from this chart I would say that the senator is doing this more because he believes in it rather than people paying him to do it.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I agree. Let's set up a Pay Pal account for a Senator on the Judicial Committe who doesn't have his head up his A$$.
Remember: "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Let's don't let this one get by like we did the DMCA.
Does anyone else think that this bill and the people proposing it are evil incarnate?
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
3) Everybody thinks that their product is 10 x cooler the second it's on the Internet. They think that they are 1337 h@x0rs or something. They think that sales will go through the roof because they are a .com.
.bombs? Yeah, but with senators in their pocket and the pocketbooks of all of their consumers to spend, they can make a bad business model work if they want to.
...perhaps they should have learned something from all of the
Also, I don't think that setting up a network is outside of their reach, I think that most people don't seem to understand that there are networks outside of the internet, or that you could use a web site to control a tv show shown on a diff network. Oh well, so much for infrastructure.
lets flood the local news papers with letters. If Hemos is still reading this, why not post up a list of emails of news people, lets get this issue on the Oreilly factor, MSNBC, and as many highly watched shows as possible, also lets write as many news papers as possible, how about a list.
While i dont think petitions will stop this, if you are going to petititon, do it seriously, a flood of letters to hundreds of diffrent news sites and shows may work.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I have yet to see this covered in any meaningful way in the popular media (CNN/ABC/MSNBC, etc)
Does anyone have links to existing news coverage?
How can we get this to be covered at all? Suggestions / links / emails?
USE BUSH!!!!
Even if you don't like him, use him as a second line of defense. This abomination has to be signed to become law...
Write (or fax) to Bush, and tell him to actively oppose this legislation, and to veto it if it gets passed.
Use his biases against him:
"Unwarranted intrusion of government into business"
Supports the "Liberal" Hollywood Elite at the expense of our innovative tech sector
He himself said that "I prefer innovation to litigation".
Even if you don't personally believe these things, remember that he supposedly does. Use his biases to our advantage! The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Even if you don't live in SoCal, write to KPCC, because that's the station that most of the entertainment idustry gets their NPR dosage from, and NPR is good at exploring stories that get whitewashed in the commercial media. The other major NPR station in the area is KCRW in Santa Monica.
Write specifically to Air Talk , Larry Mantle's two hour issue-oriented program. It's a popular show, Larry is very interested in big stories that get ignored, and he seems very open minded, although he is by no means terse...
Of course, you can also write to your local NPR affiliate, too.
I can see the fnords!
The abortion right, the gay marriage right,(the end of slavery took a complete war) the vietnam war protests,
all of these required marching in the street, people get beat up and hosed down on national TV, and all it did was make more people join in.
Believe me, if a few million people are in washington protesting and marching down the street people begin to notice, more people begin to march, more people begin to notice, it becomes a trend that no one can ignore.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
As for old people... well, I don't know about you, but very few of the very elderly people I know careed a great deal about aquiring wealth - if they already had it, there was no point in getting more, and if they didn't it was too late. They were more interested in preparing a legacy, and a great work of art certainly is that.
I think it's a fallacy that you need long term copyright to get people to create, anyway - in fact, it's obviously false. It's astonishingly difficult to make any real amount of money by creating art, unless you're willing to sign all those rights over to a corporation, who are the only entities that really gain from long term copyrights.
You know, the first time I heard comedian George Carlin say during a performance that "this country was bought and sold a long time ago", I laughed it off as no big deal; an idea from an individual trying to entertain. When the DMCA came around, I thought, "well it's ok, it'll have amendments attatched to it to ensure nothing like the original actually makes it to law". The DMCA is now used to prosecute law-abiding people now. Now we come to the CBDTPA.
;) ) No, the war is fine. The support for the war and the President has been great. But they still won, in that they managed to allow our most basic freedoms to be either taken away or put up for review.
By this point, I've lost virtually all hope for the government of my great country. I've watched as my rights have been stripped away at an unbelievable rate in the last 5 years, and it leads me to believe that all we've fought for since breaking away from Brittain in the 18th century is almost gone. In the wake of Sept 11th, our privacy has been ripped away, our innermost secrets about our supposedly private lives demanded by our government. Communications are snooped, our own spies have turned their eyes and ears on us, and our government, while becoming more secretive, has simultaneously informed us all that we, as of now, are no longer allowed secrets; at least not from them.
And now we come to the CBDTPA, formerly known as the SSSCA. Assuming this bill makes it into law without serious modifications, we will soon see the end to entertainment as we know it. But much, much worse, we will finally know for certain that our government has been purchased from us while we weren't looking - sold to a few large corporations who will, from now on, dictate when, how, why, and if (yes if) we may lead our lives.
This sounds so outrageously apocolyptic that many reading this will have already dismissed my posting as meaningless. However, consider this for a moment - if I told you 5 years ago that you could be jailed for informing an audience of people about a security vulnerability without ever having helped to or supplied the tools to exploit that vulnerability, would you have laughed? For anyone who works in law, if I had told you 5 years ago that making a speech that was neither slanderous nor the cause of (in the words of the Supreme Court) 'clear and present danger' (such as yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre) would cause a person to be arrested, would you not have pointed out all the reasons why this could never happen in America? How about this - if I told you 10, 20, 50 years ago that a person could be arrested and jailed for nearly four years without a trial, would you have not been outraged? (Regardless of whether he was right or wrong or whatever, he is supposed to be protected under the Constitution, and therefore is supposed to have the right to a "speedy trial".)
Now what really concerns me here is the fact that when you look at the people in Congress who are the most supportive of the CBDTPA, you find that they are the same people who receive the most money from the entertainment industry. "This makes sense" you say, but my question is simply this - when an elected official passes bills contrary to the public interest and desire to serve the ends of his campaign contributors, how is this any different than a judge taking money from a defendant in exchange for a lighter sentence? Are they not both saying, "if you give me alot of money, I will use my power in office to ensure your interests are furthered, regardless of the public interest."? In this case, the CBDTPA continues where the DMCA left off, stripping away at what has been declared by the courts to be 'fair use'. This serves only to maintain the profit margains of the entertainment industry, while forcing yet more money out of the pockets of consumers. This most certainly doesn't help more than a few people in all of South Carolina, and certainly helps almost no minorities anywhere. Yet a democratic (democrats generally champion the rights of minorities and individuals) Senator from SC has been attempting to force this bill into law, even threatening to use his position on the appropriations and budget committees to kill funding for anyone who stands in his way. Why would a democrat from SC want to throw every bit of weight he has into such an anti-individual, pro-corporation bill? Money. The entertainment industry has, year after year, been one of Senator Ernest Fritz Hollings biggest campaign contributors. This is a simple equation folks, money for laws. You give me money, I give you laws. If a group of people raised more money for Hollings' next campaign than the entertainment industry, we could get the DMCA repealed in no time and be on our way to getting whatever laws we want on the books. This, ladies and gents, is completely pathetic. Someone ought to make an Ebay user name EFHollings and start auctioning off laws in a dutch auction; as it's what he does every day.
While this annoyed me when I first realized it, it didn't really hit me nearly so hard as when I read this latest article, and others like it, outlining the support for this bill throughout Congress. When you look at the people pushing this bill, one by one you see they're getting most if not nearly all of their money from the entertainment industry. Carlin was right, this country is being bought and sold. The worst part is, the average person is either too stupid, too ignorant, or too apathetic to see where all this is heading, and just how far it's come in the last 5 years.
It doesn't get much better when you look elsewhere either. In the wake of the absolute horror of September 11th, I see something even worse washing up behind it. They won. That's right, I mean the terrorists; they won. What could possibly make an American who loves his country and wants to see it become the greatest unified nation in history say such a thing? Policies, laws, etc, etc, etc. It's not the war, mind you; I'm all for wiping out all who had anything to do with what happened that day or would like to see things like it happen in the future. And I'm certainly all for turning bin Laden over to the Israelies so they can have fun with him. (Our laws just don't allow the things I want to see happen to him; they on the other hand, have no problem turning his existance into the closest thing to hell on Earth any twisted imagination could possibly come up with... gotta love Israeli intelligence
Who would have objected to a strip search every time you walk into the airport 5 years ago? My goodness, such an idea would have brought outrage and shock. But since September 11th, people want to feel warm and cozy and safe, and they seem to think all this new security, like this x-ray machine that allows screeners to do a virtual strip search of you. Most people seem to be under the dillusion that in 10 years it'll all be back to normal and we'll all go about like we do now. I can only hope so, but once this technology is widely available and fairly cheap, I can see everyone from government to corporations, to schools putting this in and refining it further. Personally, I'm extremely offended by the idea of any fool off the street (yes, the security personnel at airports are usually but not always lacking in the mental dept.) being able to get a pretty graphic shot of my entire body. Why? Well, invasion of privacy is the easy one. But how about this one? In this country, we work under a system that you are innocent until proven guilty. Now, in this situation, I fully understand that increased security must allow for a bit of elasticity here. In this case, feel free to xray the hell out of my luggage until my underwear bakes if it makes you happy. As for me, I'll happily go through your metal detector if it makes you happy; it'll certainly make me a little happier to see everyone else going through it. And feel free to run my name against a list of known terrorists. If something comes up funny, pull me aside and we'll have a chat. With none of this do I have a problem. Want to put armed air marshals on every flight? By all means, hell, I'll pay a little extra on my ticket if it ensures there's a couple on my plane. Just make sure they're not psychotic, stupid, incapable or unwilling to perform as needed, and not themselves terrorists. I'm sure there are many other wonderful security ideas we can come up with that don't involve Sgt Ricky and Officer Mickey staring at my unclothed body when all I want to do is go to Cali for a holiday trip.
Other examples of this include carnivore, which was pushed up after Sept 11th, and this stuff I keep hearing about the government using trojans to extract (or possibly inject) incriminating evidence from computers of US citizens. I'm reasonably confident that my paranoid security setup will insulate me fairly well from this silly toy (I hear it could have been better coded by a 12yo) but for all the clueless users out there (5 9's of them.. ie. 99.999%) I feel it's an outrageous violation of their right to privacy and their presumed innocence. Not to mention the fact that the potential for abuse is so extreme, it boggles the mind as to how in the world this wouldn't get all FBI/CIA/NSA folks having anything to do with this arrested immediately. You can hack into my computer and plant evidence and I'll go to jail for 10+ years, but if I hack into your computers and do nothing more than type ls/dir for 6 hours over and over, I'll go to jail for 10+ years. Hmm... do as I say, not as I do?
So in the last 5 or so years, we've seen fair use, freedom of speech, presumed innocence, privacy, and many, many other basic Constitutionally guaranteed rights disappear. And now it looks like our government officials could be spending half their time in eBay private auctions to see who gets the laws they wanted for christmas.
I think I'll move to Holland now. Dutch people are pretty cool.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Conspiracy theories aside, the only way to win a seat in Congress is to get the most votes. Writing a letter shows one voter. A petition shows that many people who care enough to spend 10 seconds on an issue. Instead, Internet privacy/freedom advocates need to learn to LOBBY and to play their issues to the general public.
Learn to go to Congress and say, hey, we can and will win this debate with the public. Don't be on the wrong side when Hollywood forces crap technology onto consumers and makes the tech industry in the U.S. go the way of Detroit in the 1980s. Come to our side now or we'll blame you when Joe Public asks why he need to pay $15 to record "Who wants to be a millionaire" on his DVD Recorder.
BTW. Please don't think Adam Schiff supports this bill because he was paid to do so. Burbank elected him because he supports Hollywood. I mean it's really that simple. There's no scandal here.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
How right you are. I don't need Hollywood. If I never go to the movies again it won't bother me. Like you, I have many books picked up at yard sales and so on. I have a library card. I have a radio. I can go for a walk. There is plenty of free or low cost entertainment--local musicians, theatre groups, and so on.