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."

Comments

Re:lots of other victimless crimes to worry about.

[Noksagt]

Do we really expect to throw people in jail in 2004 for behavior theyve been engaged in for more than a quarter century?

Your jails are full of fellow citizens that dared to smoke pot. That "crime" has been on the books far, far longer Senator.

Perhaps, but you are using very different reasoning from him. You point out so-called victimless crimes (or perhaps those crimes where victims are dehumaninzed--such as the corporations who own the IP that you're stealing) is a concern. Good luck getting those overturned. That would require a major socially liberal movement that just ain't gonna happen.

A of socially-accepted people have legally skipped commercials for 25 years. When the MJ laws hit the books, this wasn't the case. Drug users weren't a majority & they were able to use anti-african american and anti-latino sentiments to help pass the ban.

Re:International?

[RAMMS EIN]

``how will this be enforcable?''

The USA is a superpower, and they're not afraid to take advantage of that.

Re:International?

[rnash]

We're all living in Amerika
Amerika ist wunderbar.

Re:Trade blocks

[coaxial]

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.

As an American, I'd like to say, Good for you for standing up to our nutjobs. More countries (I'm talking about you Tony Blair!) should do that.

That said, free trade with China isn't really that good of an idea on completely unrelated economic terms. When we did this, we were told "Now we have 1.2 billion more customers!", only that's not what happened at all. And it was perfectly obvious that this argument was bogus. The Chinese simply don't make enough to purchase our goods. Instead, they make the goods, and we import them. But never fear! We can now all get jobs at Walmart.

I don't think free trade is good for workers in industrialized nations. It depresses living standards for 95+% of the population, through job loss. Regulated trade was worked since the beginning of time. There's nothing wrong with that system.

I'm a proud capitalist. Captialism works where alternate economic models (i.e. socialism) fail because it recognizes that fundamentally people are greedy bastards only out for themselves. It uses that the engine of commerce. (i.e. Sellers try to maximize profits, while buyers try to minimize cost.) Socialism on the other hand relies on everyone working for the greater good.

Capitalism in a very real sense is a greedy algorithm (Well actually, it's more min-max, but induldge me.). Greedy algorithms, are very good for a lot of problem domains, but they also have the annoying habit of biting you in the ass from time to time, because they don't examine the long term consequences. Capitalism is the same way. That's why we have economic regulations. They were all placed there, because at sometime in the past, we were bitten in the ass. Now that the US, and through extension the world, is all for deregulation, we're being bitten in the ass all over again. (e.g. Enron and California's manufactured power crisis, the recent Vioxx scandal, ...)