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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.
This is an inflammatory puff piece. Obviously there will need to be exceptions to the analog->digital rule, especially in cases where the MPAA's IP rights are in no danger. But this is an emergency situation, they are perfectly justified in getting out a blanket law right away and then tweaking it to allow certain behaviors afterwards.
IP is being ripped off left and right. This is costing artists and their agents millions if not billions in lost revenue. Sure, they are big, rich entities--but they won't be if this keeps up much longer. That's the emergency.
This isn't X-Files. This is reality, where it doesn't matter how rich somebody is--stealing is stealing.
Maybe you don't like NSync--but they rose from nothing based on only their hard work and dedication. If the starving people in the world put half as much effort into finding food that NSync does into their music, they'd find themselves on top as well.
There goes my solar-panels... They can fall under the category of A/D...
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