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MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!
A month ago, the MPAA filed
its report [PDF]
with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terrors of analog
copying. I quote: "in order to help plug the hole, watermark
detectors would be required in"
-- are you sitting down? -- "all devices that perform analog to
digital conversions." At their page
Protecting Creative Works in a Digital Age,
the Senate lays out the issues they'll be looking at, including
briefs from corporate groups, and provides a
comment form
so your opinion can be heard as well. As Cory Doctorow writes:
"this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than
the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed.
...the
Broadcast Protection Discussion Group
is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood."
Doctorow's article on the "analog hole"
for the EFF does a great job of explaining the issues to
non-electrical-engineers, and has many thought-provoking
examples of how requiring such technology would be a giant step
backwards.
There's no way the MPAA can succeed in this. All analog-to-digital conversion equipement?? I remember using a really simple A to D converter in one of my courses in University. I bet that chip costed a buck or two. Putting anti-piracy measures in it will increase the cost significantly, and for a really simple A to D converter? That's just ridiculous! Who are these morons coming up with this crap? This won't fly... no matter how dysfunctional these law-makers are.
Do these idiots realize that this proposed 'policing' of ADC(analog-to-digital converters) would include things like microphones and portable tape players? I'm sure they use these devices during their board meetings and hearings, and probably discuss confidential and/or copyrighted issues. Who's gonna police these?? Also, they will have to stop using their portable tape players to dictate notes for their executive assistants to scribe, since the information they want scribed could also be considered copyright material!
Bah, I'm getting my old VCR to plug up someone's 'analog' hole!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
This is getting amusing. The farther they go with this, the more crazy they sound. At this point it's just a question of whether they'll realize they're trying to dig a hole in water and try to make money off the new phenomenon rather than trying to suppress it, or will they just totally flip off the deep end?
A less extreme plan is buy everything you want used, like on half.com. The Industry doesn't get any of your money that way.
Did you know the Industry once tried to purchase legislation that would let them tax the sales of used media? The law now (and then) is that once a copy of a medium is sold, it can be resold without any obligation to the copyright holder (because he got paid from the first sale, "exhausting" his rights in that copy). The Industry failed at that, for some reason.
- Have a picture
They just don't stop, they just don't listen, and they NEVER LEARN
You are right that the MPAA (et. al.) do not stop. But they DO learn. In fact, they have learned all to well. They have learned that sufficiently large donations to politicians result in legislation that protects their interests at the expense of the puble, and past legal precedants be damned. The MPAA does not have to listen to the likes of us, and the politicians will politely listen, but will not bite the hand that pays to re-elect them.
I contact my congressman over this stuff every time, and I will continue to do so.
And I would encourage you, and anyone else who finds this sort of legislation offensive. Unfortunately, until the campaign financing laws are changed in our supposedly superior western democracies to prevent corporations or lobby groups from buying politicians (and legislation), we should not expect the politicians to act on our concerns.
The problem is of course that the people who benefit the most from the present system will almost certainly fight the hardest to maintain the status quo.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I'll make this short, but sweet.
The United States was founded by people who believed in the public good. They set up commissions for public libraries and promotion of the arts, while at the same time granting inventors and authors the ability to profit from their works until they faded into the public domain. Our most hallowed documents, our most cherished music, even our national anthem come from the re-use of work written by authors and musicians a generation before.
Yet, the MPAA and the RIAA want to tell *me* that this is Unamerican. That my role in society is not as a citizen, or a voter, or a patriot -- but solely one as a consumer. Had this been the prevailing attitude in the late eighteenth century, there would be no Congress, no Senate, no President, no freedom; we would all be loyal subjects of the King, and Benjamin Franklin would be remembered as an eccentric intellectual imprisoned and executed for copyright violations.
I am not a consumer, or a "content provider", or a market statistic; I am a *citizen*. Please treat me like one.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Isn't that what we thought about the original Hollings bill?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.