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.

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.

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: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.

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.