Boucher's Anti-DMCA Bill Gets High Profile Allies

Landaras writes "News.com is reporting that a newly-formed alliance called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition is throwing their support and lobbying efforts behind Rep. Rick Boucher's (D-Va) Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act. Members of the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition include Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon, SBC, Qwest, Gateway and BellSouth. The EFF and the American Library Association are also in support."

Comments

Hatch And Bono

[grendelkhan]

Now that Fritz Hollings (D - Disney) is gone, the only major stumbling blocks in the senate will be Senators Hatch and Bono. I think we have a shot if Rep Boucher can get this past the House.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[MoonBuggy]

Hatch generally brings up proposals notable by their insanity and is tenacious in his attempts at destroying freedoms, but his actual success rate is not so great. The strength of his ideas has gained him notability but he actually seems to hold less sway than it might appear.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[southpolesammy]

The only reason that Sen. Hatch can pitch the ideas that he does is due to the fact Utah is so overwhelmingly Republican that as long as he wants to be in office, he will never get voted out. The end result of this is that he can pretty much say anything at all publically without fear of reprisal from his constituents.

The GOP and other right-wing/corporate leaning organizations know this and use him to pitch ideas that other Senators can not safely propose without possibly drawing the ire of their constituencies and risk getting replaced in 2/6 years. By contrast, Democrats do not have this luxury in the Senate, as there is no state in the nation that is as heavily biased towards Dems as Utah is towards Republicans, therefore you rarely ever see bills in the Senate with as extreme a left-leaning slant as Hatch's right-leaning bills.

So even if Sen. Hatch's ideas seem completely crazy to everyone, including his own party members, they do serve a purpose, which is to make the moderate conservative bills seem less crazy and outlandish, and therefore to get more credence. Coupled with the lack of an extreme liberal counterbalance to make moderate liberal bills seem more plausible, what we're left with is a permanent tilt towards the right in the Senate.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[gfxguy]

So you think the entertainment industry is "right-wing/corporate leaning organizations"?

Get real. The worst offender was Hollings, a DEMOCRAT. This is not a partisan issue, there are powerful interests that support the left, and there are powerful interests that support the right.

Frankly, most of the entertainment industry (make that the majority of the media industry) supports the left, but I'll say it again, cow-towing to large, influential organizations is a NON-partisan pastime of many politicians, so suck it up and stop being so divisive by trying to find some left/right wing conspiracies in EVERYTHING.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[Anonymous Coward]

You must think Democrats are the same thing as liberals. Please consider recent history: Clinton, Gore, Kerry. These are conservatives, people. Democratic conservatives running against Republican conservatives. The Democrats once had a powerful liberal wing--in the McGovern era. Now it's just Wellstone, and he's dead. The Republicans also used to have liberals--in the Nixon era--now the only liberal Republicans to be found work at the state and local level.

"Liberal" does not mean the leftmost half of any given group of politicians lined up by ideology. If that was the case, half of Nazi Germany was liberals. No, liberalism is a set of guiding principles which, at least in America, politicians have long abandoned. This leaves liberal voters with nobody to vote for, which is why Democrats still like to pretend to be liberal by rolling out Ted Kennedy like some sad liberal mascot from time to time.

Democrats are now a conservative pro-business anti-tax isolationist party with a passing interest in selected civil rights. Republicans are a conservative Christian anti-tax aggressive military party with no interest at all in civil rights. Neither are liberal.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[bechthros]

This is off-topic, but...

I think it should be the other way around - *don't* vote, and find yourself dropped off in a country where you'll never have to worry about that pesky voting ever again. I think not voting should not only be a criminal offence, but it's only punishment should be deportation to the non-democracy of your choice.

I understand that many people feel that if they're disgusted with all the candidates that they can best express their opinion by not voting, but it's obvious to me that this only provides incentive for politicians to get more disgusting. The more disgusting they are, the less people vote. The less people vote, the less accountable the politicians are. The less accountable the politicians are, the more evil shit they try to get away with and the more digusting they are... Iterate...

The other thing I think we in America need to get over on a national level is this silly trepedation against telling people how you voted. Sharing our votes with others is the only way vote we could ever get any sense of when voter fraud was occuring. But as long as we're clamming up about our votes we'll never know.

Re:Hatch And Bono

[toiletmonster]

whereas democrats never take money from powerful special interest groups.

so what if politicians take money from supporters? sounds like free speech to me.

what we really need is an extra check on congress who keeps passing more and more laws every year when we don't need more laws, we need better laws.

i think we should have either a 10 year limit on all/most laws or a new legislative body called the anti congress of elected officials whose only role is to repeal laws.

This certainly smells of election-year politicing

[Dagny Taggert]

I think it's bold, and a move in the right direction, but it's folly to think that they media lobbies are going to let this go unmolested. They have almost unlimited funds (money we've paid for CDs and movies) to fight this.

A good start, but in the end probably ineffective

[keraneuology]

It is a good start, but in the end not much will change. Your average consumer doesn't care much about copy-protected or not-copy-protected CDs and even if they have "this product does not conform to the CD standard" in big bold letters on the cover of the latest hairball that Brittany Spears coughed up they will still buy it just because they have to own whatever it is that Brittany Spears puts out.

I am waiting for a law that says that producers have a choice: they may a) allow consumers to back up their music/movies/games or b) agree to replace on demand and without charge any CD/DVD that has been damaged and is no longer playable.

Re:Money Talks, Folks

[Overzeetop]

I'm in Boucher's district and have met and talked with him personally before - he's a genuinely smart guy. My only dissappointments are that he feeds at the pork trough like eveyone else (my community has been the benficiary of about $60k in various matching grants for small projects) and that he's very party-line on general issues. Of course, I've never met a politician who doesn't have those faults, on either side.

At least according to press releases from his office he is facing a heavily (Republican Party) funded carpet-bagger in the next election. I dont' remember the fellows name, but I think he's from Florida. I'd like to say he's safe, 'cause even my far-right in-laws vote for him, but you never know. There are a lot of stupid people areound here who believe anything a TV commercial tell them, and some of them vote.

Re:Why would these companies sign on?

[Kick the Donkey]

Probably because they are getting tired of being dragged to court for DMCA violations...

Re:A good start, but in the end probably ineffecti

[AlexMax2742]

Question is, are they going to do anything about it. Will they actually do something about it, or just keep buying the same diarrhea and keep complaining about it for a few seconds before he finally pulls out his portable CD player and listens to it.

Sadly, people like them exist in our world. Some people just don't care.

Wouldent this money do better with the EFF

[SteakandcheeseUm]

I've Donated to the EFF, have you?

EFF's Donation site

Simple

[Sycraft-fu]

Write your representitive (senators too) and let them know your postition. This goes double if they are on the fence, or opposed to this bill. The next part is to vote out those that oppose it during the next election. Politicians will go with special intrest groups only until the general public lashes back. If they are foolish enough to go against the majority's wishes, well they won't be around to do it again.

Seriously, let them know how you feel, and if they fail to listen, vote them out (and encourage others to help in that regard.

Re:Why would these companies sign on?

[div_2n]

The price of restrictions on consumers is great for those that provide them. For example, the other day I opened a checking account. The bank officer was complaining about the PATRIOT act where he said, "Even if my mother were to come in here to open an account, I would have to photo copy her ID."

Someone has to pay for the extra measures set forth by these types of consumer restrictions. Inevitably it is the consumer, but in the short term it is the providers. In the end both lose.

Re:This certainly smells of election-year politici

[velo_mike]

I think it's bold, and a move in the right direction,

It's my opinion that it's neither. The way to fix a problem is remove it, not keep patching it up. Bad laws, the DMCA is a prime example, need to be removed. Patching it here and there will give us the same mess we have with the nightmare of drug laws.

Currently, drugs are against the law, except for some drugs, and unless you're in some states and have a medical condition, except that isn't recognized by the federal govt nor every state. Let's throw in the decriminalization movement which leaves the laws entact for certain amounts and certain other drugs, but doesn't outright permit the legal use of drugs. Follow all that? Now, do you really want fair use to look like that?

Either support the DMCA or work to abolish it entirely. This half-assed approach will, in the long run, leave us worse off than we are now, subject to a patchwork of laws and most certainly guilty of something. The only people who benefit from this is the lawyers.

Re:A good start, but in the end probably ineffecti

[yerfatma]

Well, Microsoft's Darknet paper (1mb .doc file) (as referenced in Cory Doctorow's recent speech to MS) suggests they'll research the problem until they come across a solution (e.g., KaZaa) to circumvent the protection and get their files in mp3 format. Next time they'll probably eliminate the middleman and just go to KaZaa.

nice.

[man_ls]

I am thinking about entering politics once I get my degree finished...a politician with a CS degree, that's unheard of.

But, I'd be in touch with important issues.

I.e.: Don't install face recognition systems -- they don't work. Instead, spend $BILLION to pay the minimum wage rentacops at the airports to actually care whether or not a terrorist goes through.

I will fight for the consumer's rights against Corporate America, and ensure your privacy in the digital age.

So, who'll vote for me?

Re:I'm still skeptical though

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in a position to know what's going on inside the committee. There is no chance of this bill going anywhere, and it has nothing to do with its merits. The bill is ensnared in a political spat between two lawmakers.

However, the PIRATE act looks as if it might pass without a hearing.

chances are VERY high

[argoff]

You see, what's going on here is that copyright enforcement is in a world of hurt right now - and so the media industries are trying to microregulate every other industry to do the enforcement for them. Right now we are seeing a back-lash that will likely succede, because the tech companies together have far more economic clout than Hollywood. This will also likely cause all hell to break loose.

This is not new, it happened in the industrial revolution too. Unlike farming, the industrial revolution required a mobile and educated workforce. It was a disaster for the plantation system who envisioned that the entire meaning and purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. At first they reactred by making tougher slave laws, till it got to the point you couldn't even teach a slave how to read, then they responded by trying to "force" the industrial northern states to enforce their slavery restrictions through a series of heavy handed regulations, when that went to hell the southern states tried to break off from the union and fence themselves off from the north.

Today the information age requires the free flow of information, and it is a disaster to those who rely on the copyright system whose vision of the information age was to use inventions like the internet to impose copyrights to the far corners of the earth. At first they responded by making copyrights last (effectively) forever, and imposing punishments for copyright infringement that rival those imposded for violent criminals. Then they pushed through the DMCA, to "force" all the other industries to impose copyrights via heavy handed microregulation. Now that's having problems they are trying to fence themselves off from the rest of the world by using DRM.

So watch out. SCO was a peace walk. All hell is about to break loose.

what a bad idea...

[maxpublic]

...this is. Rather than solve the problem by repealing the laws that cause the problem in the first place, we pass *more* laws which simply muddy the issue so badly that only the lawyers can figure out what the fuck is going on.

This doesn't solve anything, it only makes the whole situation worse. With the DMCA at least I *knew* I was guilty of copyright infringement when I did thing X; after this act I won't have a goddamn clue. That can only be a good thing for the RIAA/MPAA, who'll then be free to persecute Americans who couldn't figure out the fucking bill and committed a series of crimes when they thought they were in the clear.

If I were you, I'd wonder if this boy isn't getting funding from some bar association.

Max

BPAC

[argoff]

There this should help contact me and explain where I'm comming from or at least why I see things this way .... the idea came to me when I was trying to question how needed copyrights were, and asked myself was thre ever another time in history where society asserted false property rights?

BPAC

As for reference, I think most everything I said there was pretty much common knowledge from what I can tell. I think it's well known that they did pass harsher and harsher laws on slaves all the way up till the civil war, they did attempt to get the northern states to enforce laws on runaway slaves - and the northern states often didn't cooperate or like it. And they did break off from the union and push the US into a civil war after Lincon got elected symbolizing that the north would no longer cooperate with the south on runaway slave enforcement.

I am not a history expert, but from what I've gathered from people who are is that the northern and southern business leaders were very tight nit, but the forces that pushed them apart were greater than the forces that kept them together.

In fact there was even a stock market crash in the 1850's? due to rampant speculation on industrial technology, and our modern war on terrorisim looks very close to the problems the US had with indians (native americans) arround the same time frame. Not to mention that cooincidences like calling slaves a property right when they clearly wern't, and the vast prosperity that the initial industrial boom brought to the plantation system. There is even some similiarities, where Europe was far less interested in upholding slavery that the US was. In many ways, it seems history is repeating itself. Just something I noticed.

Re:This certainly smells of election-year politici

[Happy go Lucky]

Its kind of hard to call it election-year politicing when the bill was proposed two years ago

For members of the House of Representatives, every even-numbered year is an election year. All 435 of them face the voters every even year.