Slashdot Mirror
Anti-P2P Law Looms over the Horizon
Adrian Lopez writes "MIT's Technology Review has a piece by Eric Hellweg about pending legislation known as the Intellectual Property Protection Act. According to Hellweg, IPPA could make it illegal to skip past commercials and could 'criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of iTunes, Apple's popular music software program.' More information on IPPA is available at the Public Knowledge website."
We need some kind of bill-watch section. That way when this gets voted on, we can have an article saying which way it went. Most of the bills that are brought up on slashdot are totally forgotten about afterwards and never posted about again.
The gameplan is: Lump some eight laws together in a package. Make one of them outrageous stupid. The stupid one gets all the flak, is pulled from the package and the rest sails straight trough congres.
TCAP-Abort
I'm a little concerned that the EFF and other groups like downhillbattle.org are not helping organize opposition to this bill.
It's common knowledge that the government is slow and us internet folk are fast. Yet here we are seeing the opposite, the government is being fast, and freedom organizations of the internet are slow to pick up the fight.
Perhaps this suggests groups like EFF, et al need to re-examine how they react to legistlative bills. Not to sound over-dramatic, but I think they need an "army" of concerned citizens ready to start calling/writing their legistlators within 24 hours notice. Sort of like the minute-men of the American revolutionary war. Perhaps we even need a figuritive watch-tower to monitor congress and catch these bills in the very earliest stages.
In the bigger picture I'm an optimist and I hope to see over the next few years that the internet will help people get organized and bring strong pressure to bear on governments. We see how powerful the open-source model is, I'm waiting to see a similar phenomenom with politics. We see beginings of this with the Dean campaign and things like Groklaw but again I'm hoping this is just the begining.
I just wish there were more I could do personally.
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First let's examine where the Feds think they derive the authority to even debate these issues. It probably comes from Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8,"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Note that the language includes "promote the progress". It does not include provisions for deterring competition. Note also that the language includes "authors and inventors" and makes no provision for the corporate empires which manage to back authors and inventors into a financial corner to induce them to sign away all ownership.
As always, without anything in the Constitution to specifically address P2P, fast-forwarding of commercials, or regulation of content and viewing, we must defer to the 10th Amendment,"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
To preempt those communists in the crowd who would like to interpolate their favorite part of the Constitution to include their pet issue of the week I would like to remind everyone of Amendment 9,"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So, there you have it. As always our federal politicians are wasting our taxpayer money debating issues which they have no authority, responsibility, or legal jurisdiction over. As always they will come up with mandates which will tax us further, hamper manufacturers, and prevent the consumers from getting what we pay for.
Don't blame me. I didn't vote for any of the current politicians. I also do more than my fair share attempting to educate those who don't have any clue what real freedom or liberty is.
Bring on the trolls.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
As a Tivo owner I have a special perspective on commercials.
When Im forced to use a "hostile television" I notice a few things:
1. THe SAME commercial gets played over and over. I was watching the Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle live and saw the same truck commercial five or six times. Same with the rest. So skipping something you've seen is hardly costing anyone money.
2. Commercials have zero information quantity. That is to say they are all emotion and no logic. Whats the MPG of that truck? What is its safety ratings? I dunno, all I know is a busty woman is leaning on it on a backdrop of some colorado mountain scene with a flag somewhere on the screen. Or as Dr. Rappielle says "It appeals to the reptilian brain." I'm not a reptile and I like making informed consumer decisions (usually).
I guess the term "victim" here is what is being debated. A market shift to different modes of operation isn't victimizing its the future! Its why we have free markets. So companies can adapt. The old advertisers will be replaced with the new.
It won't be too difficult. The standard thing that the US does in this situation is to say "implement our laws or we won't trade with you, we'll tell everyone else not to trade with you, and we'll make it even more difficult for your citizens to travel via or into the US".
It's surprisingly effective, because they only need to actually have it enforced in western countries, and such countries typically rely on trade with the US either directly or indirectly.
It's really not so surprising that corporates (most obviously Microsoft) get away with what they do in the US, because the Federal Government leads by example. The essential foreign policy of the United States is to use its power/monopoly in one region to lock everyone else out of another region.
Having said this, I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us. I'm not sure which is worse.
We are comparitively lucky in many ways out here, though. I won't forget that.
It's a lot easier to add a rider to an existing bill you think will pass, than to write a new one.
It also creates all sorts of back-room deal making. Basically, "I'll vote for your bill if you add this pork for my local constituancy". It'a also why attack ads can say "So and so voted against mothers and apple pie!". What they really voted against was some other thing the bill, the "mom and applie pie" was added on.
It's really really stupid, and it's very American.