Surefire Way To Stifle Innovation

denissmith writes "C|NET has a very funny piece by Patrick Ross, where he pooh-pooh's Congressman Rick Boucher's (D-VA) efforts to protect Fair Use by claiming that it will stifle innovation." From the article: "If HR-1201 becomes law, every consumer could legally hack any TPM by claiming fair use, and as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers. Consumers would be legally sanctioned to break their contracts with the content provider. No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will, but that's what HR-1201 permits. That hated TPM would disappear from the market, as there's no reason to employ a lock if everyone has a legal right to the key. But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it."

Comments

It's always the non-creators who want free stuff

[Tominva1045]

Congressman Rick Boucher's (D-VA) has obviously not labored months or years crafting desireable content. If he had he would appreciate the creator/artist/software engineer wants and needs to be compensated in amounts the market offers- and not in the miniscule amount some non-creative, we-want-all-content-free hippie type espouses.

Just because technology makes replicating and uploading someone else's hard work to a Bit Torrent server easy doesn't make it responsible to do so.

Put more clearly, if people keep hacking music, video, and software soon it will be fiscally irresponsible for companies like SONY to sign ( insert your favorite garage band here ) to any kind of record deal at all.