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Orrin Hatch to Lead Senate Panel on Copyright, Patents
PontifexPrimus writes "Senator Orrin Hatch, (in)famous for his idea of destroying the computers of copyright violators is to head a Senate 'panel, which will have jurisdiction over copyright, trademark and patent law, as well as treaties intended to protect American intellectual property overseas.' Looks like file sharing will finally be erased once and for all. Oh, and this looks like another field day for those who refuse to subsume patent, trademark and copyright law under the heading of 'IP law.'"
Wow, this troll was old in 2003.
http://tinyurl.com/4vxlf
-josh
Very simple answer to your question about what they really want to do.
The banking and finance industry left us with a shamefully bad system of doing checks and credit cards. They abandoned all of their work on this for twenty years and let it ride until the year 2000 scam. And now they see that their system is so flawed that it can not work any more.
The result? People are increasingly opting out of credit cards as much as they can.
The system of banking is broken and they don't wnat to spend the money to fix it.
So what to do if you are a drug addled trust fund brat who doesn't ever spend any of his/her own money to do anything and lives off of the public nickel on some yaught up in Camden Maine?
Create the persception that your own insecure system of doing transactions is such a large problem that the government should pay to develop a new system.
That is what it comes right down to, people, the large banking and finance interests don't want to spend their own money making their system secure so they are going to get the government to pay to do it.
I may be wrong about this, I can be wrong about a lot of things. But this is the only thing that makes sense to me. They know that the system is broken and true to the trust fund classes way of treating the rest of us like slaves they will try to get the rest of us to fund their retooling.
This is probably a good thing for the engineers in Bangalore and China.
I think the basic premise is being tired of being screwed over. Most slashdotters were probably born between the 1950s and 1980s, we've seen records replaced by tape, then tape with CD and perhaps now CD with DRM-download
And to add to the insult and injury, there was both cassette tapes and 8-track tapes.
Since TFA mentions movies, we might as well point out the various video formats we've seen: VHS/Betamax, laserdisc, DVD, and soon-to-be Blue-Ray.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
> I respect their right to choose their own
> terms. It's a question of fair play - how
> could I possibly demand protection for my own
> rights, if I'm not prepared to afford that
> same protection to others?
The point I was trying to make is that - as far as I can tell - nobody is doubting the need for and value of copyright and other IP-related law. The problem is a) the draconion measures being employed to enforce it (eg, DMCA), and b) the corporate slant with which it is being developed and interpreted ("copy protection clubs", submarine patents, machine-gun patents, etc.).
Hatch didn't just argue that copyright should be kept strong. He argued that the computers of people violating copyright should be destroyed. That's a whole different issue.
The FSF core party line: "Without copyright, the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary".
I'm perfectly happy for you to "violate" the license terms of my GPL work - provided you waive all right to enforce copyright restrictions against me now or in future.
The GPL is only a problem for people who believe in copyright law. I disagree with copyright law, so I use the GPL to double-bind Infonazis.
Someone should just put a bullet through Hatch's brain.
It doesnt have to kill you to be a weapon. A weapon is just what is employed to threaten you or your way of life.
But sure, for the sake of the argument, let us say it does have to be lethal to be counted as a weapon - Terror has a higher chance of killing people than for instance a paintball gun, yet it is classified as a weapon. So is a slingshot, technically, and a nailfile if you try to get through airport security.
So his weapon is terror - that is to scare the crapola out of people in order to make them jump through hoops that he hold up.
ergo, he is per definition a terrorist.
Then again, by wielding the same arguments, so is Bush, and any other president and leader of nations out there. They just prefer to call it by nicer words. Cause words make all the difference.
Send his office some email detailing your concerns. Be respectful. Try to use facts. If enough of us did that, we might even have an impact.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
1- With your CD, you can do whatever pleases you and are not as such restricted in the destination media (for example i can use my CDs to fill my computer, my iRiver and my car sound system) ...) but they don't...
2- You own your CD, i can lend my CDs to my friends, i can't lend my DRM-infected media files
3- My CD has a very good quality that i can choose to use or degrade on the different medias i use my music from, whereas online music usually uses already crappy codecs (mp3, WMA) with low qualities (~128k?) and can only be degraded even more by transcoding (transcoding my WMAs to OGG gets me both OGG and WMA artifacts... yay).
They could use lossless codecs (MonkeyAudio, FLAC, Lossless WMA,
Result? the music i buy online is much lower quality than the one i get from CDs
4- Downloaded files are currently as expensive as CDs versions, while you don't get the rights and you don't even get the physical media...
Sooo, no, you don't get the same deal when you buy music online as when you buy a CD/DVD.
as it stands atm, online mp3/WMA/whatever blows. The only advantage it has over CDs is that you don't have to wait or move your lazy ass out of your shack.
that's all there is to it
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Sorry, I got you mixed up with bsartist.
:)
If you are found with large numbers of albums ripped on your laptop and cannot produce the CDs, will they accept your honest statement that the CDs were stolen?
Under traditional copyright law if you don't distribute those songs from your laptop you're not guilty of anything. It doesn't matter how you got them, you could have recorded them from the radio (legal), from a TV broadcast or simulcast (legal).
I do have a couple of trashed CDs I keep as the no-longer-readable originals, but that's because I'm compulsive, not because I legally have to.
Under the copyright regime the industry wants, you might well be liable for something just because you have a lot of MP3s on your computer... but I don't believe we're there yet. They have scared people who have downloaded songs over p2p into paying fines and fees, but if they were leeching (not redistributing the music) they should be free and clear.
If they find the songs on your laptop over a share or over a P2P application, well, you're boned no matter where you got them from.
Some music is available this way, true. I was referring more the problems of playing it under Linux, especially DVD's for which there are no legal tools to play or re-burn them. And the vast amount of "public domain" music and video and other documents are not easy to access or release because of the patent issues of formats such as MP3, and the DVD generation and encryption issues of video DVD's.
Orin Hatch is also chair of the Senate Jucidiary Committee - responsible for congress' oversight of the FBI. He stopped all investigation into misdeeds of 9-11 (not just incompetence).
G rassley_Letter_to_Ashcroft_7-9-04.pdf
Republican member of the judiciary committee, Grassley, interviewed on 60 minutes believes Edmonds testimony is credible.
Declassified version of Ashcroft's report into Sibel Edmonds (from the doj website - released on a friday at 5pm before a long weekend) (long, worth reading): http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0501/final.pdf Here is a letter that was retroactively classified by, and then finally unclassified: ""...we fear that the designation of information as classified in some cases [brought forth by Sibel Edmonds] serves to protect the executive branch against embarrassing revelations and full accountability... Releasing declassified versions of these reports, or at least portions or summaries, would serve the public's interest, increase transparency, promote effectiveness and efficiency at the FBI, and facilitate Congressional oversight."
U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) in a Letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft http://justacitizen.com/articles_documents/Leahy_
she didn't just alledge incompetence on transcribing the 9-11 tapes, she alleges espionage, and intentional blindness. To date this has still not been investigated according to Ashcroft's DOJ Report which noted that Edmonds was unfairly fired because of her whistleblowing.