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20 Lawmakers Want to Kill Your Television
Macki writes "As previously mentioned, the Broadcast Flag is back before congress. There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill. The insane thing about it is the fact that no one supports the bill except a handful of entertainment companies. Probably not even the employees of the entertainment companies. It's bad enough they want to break our televisions, but the way that they are subverting democracy is just astounding. Danny O'Brien at the EFF has done a spectacular job deconstructingthe MPAA/RIAA's efforts to ramrod this through, and more importantly, the motivations of the members of congress who are helping them."
The insane thing about it is the fact that no one supports the bill except a handful of entertainment companies. Probably not even the employees of the entertainment companies. It's bad enough they want to break our televisions, but the way that they are subverting democracy is just astounding.
Are we to believe that companies support something but their employees (whould would benefit from the additional revenue by keeping their jobs) somehow do not support the idea? How long could any of us stay at a company if we consistently opposed our bosses ideas?
Subverting our democracy? Free network television is not in the bill of rights. And there is always short wave radio for us to enjoy!
Cogito Ergo Sum
OK, now do the RIAA/MPAA/whatever-AA really lose that much money due to fileswapping, piracy, video-taping, etc., that it is even financially worth all this bad PR? Or are they just run by a bunch of outright bastards who like being thought of as professional killjoys?
More power to them.
Today's TV is just a nuisance. It makes people dumb, fearful and lethargic.
20% of US-Americans are functional illiterates - it wouldn't hurt if they switched off the TV-set and took a book in their hand.
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I don't care if Linux *is* more difficult to get going at the moment, its built with dedication and a desire for openness..
It is ironic that with it's pervasive
openness Linux is too painful for the average user to understand yet with all it's closedness (if that's a word) so many (advanced users) claim to hate Windows and so many commoners love it.
Cogito Ergo Sum
If slavery and civil rights were held to a popular vote, there's a good chance the laws never would have passed.
:) Prohibition is missing though.
Great examples of some of the better laws in the country
So please, before you trash Congress for against "the will of the people," bear in mind that is exactly why Congress exists; so that when the time is appropriate, Congress can go against the majority of the people in order to protect the minority.
So, these poor rich people get protected and everybody else gets punished. I think that this is the subverting that the gp was talking about.
Because the law and decades of court decisions explicitly give them that right.
So as software developers, we can tack on licenses such as the GPL to determine how our works are used... but networks cannot tack on restrictions to how their media is used.
There is nothing in the GPL that attempts to restrict your standard fair use rights, such as making a backup copy or loading the program into RAM. The GPL only deals with redistribution rights. The GPL gives you broad redistribution rights with some conditions attached. It is well understood that for a TV show, the producers give you zero redistribution rights. But redistribution has nothing to do with you taping a show.
This proposed law is about revoking rights that you already explicitly have, such as timeshifting shows, and transferring them to the content producers. These particular rights are not addressed by the GPL; the GPL simply assumes that you retain the standard rights that you already have under the law.
Last time I looked I was'nt suppossed to be able to view DVD's outside my region. Funny thing is the manufacturer left some "test functions" around which allowed me to do this.
Even if the broadcast flag is made legal, it won't be worldwide so manufacturers outside the US(i.e.99% of them) will have to support both modes and therefore there will be a loophole and a way of turning it off.
Unless the RiAA and MPAA are going to go around raiding houses to find these illegal devices I cannot see this working
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
The truth is that history is repeating itself here, I know this sounds off topic - but a few paragrapshs down I'll explain some more. The speculative industrial stock bubble in 1850 is very similar to the speculative internet stock bubble in 2000. The "war against indians" is very similar to the "war against terrorisim" - back then advances in transportation technology exposed us to indian culture in a very fast and dramatic way causing a culture clash, today the internet has exposed many unfree cultures arround the world to US culture in a very dramatic way to them and some have reacted by lashing out at us.
.... Second, there is no nicely divided north and south. Instead it is more like a division between tech and content industries. Third, copyrights are not the only information people are trying to controll - "money" is a way of storing information about value and transaction costs. The Fed and some large financial institutions are definitely trying to controll it, and all hell is about to break loose in the market place as well as the copyright space. Fourth, there is compelling reason to believe that no government will be on the side of freedom this time until the battle is all over. A flaw of democratic government is that it is often more accountable to the media than it is to securing freedoms.
Back then it was about controlling the labor market (slavery) in the industrial era, today it is about controlling information in the information age. Back then they screamed bloody murder that people were stealing their property rights as industrialists wanted to use available labor without giving a damn about who alledgedly "owned it". Today many industires and individuals want to just be able to use information at their disposal to provide effective services, without being microregulated with a zillion tons of content restrictions. (like google's guntenberg project, apple's ipod, to name a few out of thousands)
The speculative advances of the industrial revolution also caused a period of growth followed by a deflationary adjustment. Today, the housing and every other market is way over saturated in debt - and the writing is on the wall. (watch out for a major economic "adjustment")
There were even people who desperately tried to get the slave states to get along with the free states who naievely didn't understand the nature of slavery or that the forces that would drive the industries apart were far greater than the ones that bound them together. Today there are all these people who are desperately trying to cling to the copyright system, even though any sincere thought will show it's pretty much DOA, and should be DOA.
So yes, the way congress is acting shouldn't be any supprise. Renember how they extended slavery to last forever for all colored people, renember how they punished people for simply teaching others how to read. Funny how copyrights have effectively been made to last forever, and copyright violations can be punished worse than rape.
There are some important differeces though. First you can't controll information with physical violence, but you can attempt to controll it with BS, threats, lawsuits, brow-beating, etc
I think this would be great. As long as the people in power push to make your existing TV unusable, it would end up making less people waste time watching this horrible television that we have. This can only be a good thing for society.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
I predict that if the broadcast flag gets passed, it'll be far enough in the future before it really takes effect, that the broadcasters will have a fair chance of claiming, "but it was always there, we just didn't turn it on"...
This is an ideal use of "the politics of personal destruction."
If they want to play footsy with the RIAA, this is what we must do: Find out about these politicians' families. What jobs do their wives have with lobbying firms ior law firms? Who are their clients?
Call their clients and badmouth them. Lie if you have to. They will. Don't be fair. They aren't. Destroy them if you can. They would not hesitate to let the RIAA do it to you.
One half a dozen of these snakes have been crushed under the wheels of a smear campaign, the rest will not be willing to accept the odds that go with supporting the RIAA.
if I forgot to set up the VCR and grab it off a torrent somewhere
If you forgot to set up the VCR and get it off torrent then somebody else recorded it and illegally offered it up for uncompensated distribution.
The thought is that some folks, maybe not you, but some folks might have instead gone to Best Buy and bought the DVD of the same program off the shelf.
You insinuated that they might think of you as satan--- maybe not satan, but definately someone in possession of bootlegged conent. And that is a no-no.
Cogito Ergo Sum
Just a nit pick, it isn't Congress's role to go against the will of the majority. They are supposed to represent this will. Protecting of minority from the majority is the job of the judicial branch.
There is no law requiring a congressman to represent the will of his/her constituency. The definition of what would constitute adequate representation would be too subjective to capture in law. Instead, what motivates politicians to be in tune with the people's will is mostly their desire to be re-elected.
First, very few households get broadcast TV any more. I have seen numbers as low as 20%. Most housholds have cable.
Second, what about the mantra that if you don't want people to record things, then don't send it on the radio spectrum? Cable companies can ask you to sign terms of agreements for viewing their broadcasts. They could put broadcast flags in their transmissions if they so choose --and there isn't much that anyone can do about it except not subscribe.
Ultimately I don't think producers and broadcast networks realize that it is their very own throats they are cutting. Those people who have a life do not schedule them around television broadcasts any more. That's what VCRs and TiVO are for. If too many programs have this flag, those who sell advertising will notice that the circulation isn't as wide as it used to be. And then guess what: It will not get used.
Television shows aren't free. If the distributors choose to stop airing this stuff because they can't get the broadcast flag, that's their business. Are we so far gone that we're back to bread and circuses to keep us passified? I say let Congress pass this bill. It will be an interesting experiment. I can't wait to see how much illiterate hate mail the congress critters get because kids can't watch their cartoons on TiVO, housewives can watch their soaps, and those with little imagination can't watch their gussied up game shows we call "reality television"...
I think this is a lot of hooey over nothing. Nobody's got the guts to use a broadcast flag. I dare these guys to do this to this to a program for one year. It'll never survive.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
The internet knows no boundaries, there will always be countries that will sell you/us what we want,
Check that, Bones.
Have you seen what it costs to get the programming you want over the internet? The programming I want is horrendously expensive for the quality. On a per show basis I'd be better off with cable or satellite. As it is I don't have either because what is available for basic package just isn't what I want and I won't pay for it, month in-month out.
There are some weasels out there making a lot of stuff free, but I won't put their software on my computer because I don't know what the hell it does besides give me the show, could be spy-ware or such, you know. And these people will eventually bring about on the internet such controls and limitations as we are already lamenting being on the old free domain of television.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Athens demonstrated the many, many problems with direct democracy in a world power. A country with many international interests can go to ruin very badly without a strong charismatic leader in a direct democacy. Of course, the many Shashdot isolationists who would like to see the US act more like the Swiss would no doubt be happy.
I'm glad the Framers distrusted the common man as much as any other embodiment of power. Everyone - king, common loser, wealthy intellectual elite - gets it wrong eventually. The system should account for this.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We have the same direct democracy here in California. We have a voters guide that often tops 200 pages, plus local voting guides ranging from 50 to 200 pages. And it is kind of fun getting to vote on all the nit-picky details of how the state is run. We've given ourselves plenty of tax cuts :)
Unfortunately, when people in the rest of the country need an argument against direct democracy they simply say "California" and everyone on the other side shuts up. Pity, they're missing out on the fun of figuring out what all the school funding formulas and bond measures and criminal statute amendments and auto insurance regulation schemes mean.
Plus, 95% of what Congress does is mind numbingly dull and uninteresting for normal folk. I mean how are the "masses" supposed to vote on the regulation of the prices of Lettuce?
I read the internet for the articles.
It's not about the proportion of work you put out, it's about the proportion of work you force the office to go through in dealing with you. If you hand write a letter, you are pretty much going to force some low pole staffer to send you a letter back. If you call, you are gonna take up 10 - 15 minutes of a staffers time answering your call. Email is a quick skim and a delete. Maybe an autoresponse. A fax gets a form letter back.
I work for a non profit here in the DC area, have quite a few contacts on the hill, and this is the norm. I've seen congressional and senatorial offices that have had to turn off their phone switches because they were getting so many constituent calls in outrage over a given topic work ground to a total halt. Officials have called our office near begging us to call the dogs off because they were getting overwhelmed by constituents.
Another thing of import is that a whole lot of congressmen do not have real opinions on many issues. A good majority simply have their pet projects, things that impact their districts, and everything else they deal with in one of about three methods. They set the number of letters for on one side, the number of letters against on the other side and which ever side has the most letters, that's the way they vote. They vote along party lines if it's a devisive is issues. They vote in a way that down the road they can get political capital from another congressman/senator for a favor for their district.
No, Anonymous savage Coward, in comparison to the American socialized medicine. And any talk about the "higher mortality and wait times" in Canada better deliver some facts - people without goldplated health insurance in the US, not to mention the 40 million uninsured Americans, get screwed harder than any Canadians. Which I saw firsthand in the years I lived in Canada. And when I tried to get a specialist just to interpret an enzyme test outside my healthplan, and I got a 3 month wait in New York City which could easily have seen me die, if I didn't have other options. So go feed your braintumor somewhere that someone will endure your corporate disease rantings - I'm immune.
--
make install -not war
If a country like the US switched to true democracy yes in the first decade all hell would break out because people would vote based on silly ideas. HOWEVER, after people realize that their vote counts people will vote differently.
That's a nice thought, but it isn't even slightly true for the USA.
You do not understand how spoiled we are here.
In just a couple of years, our country would be in ruins. We'd have new laws that cap gas prices, lower taxes, public lynchings, zero unemployment laws, no space program, $10/month cable bills, authorization for the federal government to declare martial law on a whim, yadda yadda yadda. Sure, the supreme court would retroactively fix that until someone comes up with the bright idea that the supreme court is holding us back from making 'good' changes.
Please don't give us what we want because we want it all with the least amount of effort and cost.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
Nationalizing the healthcare (like in Canda) isn't going to fix the problem: that a pressure group has gotten special powers from the government and is using them to benefit it's supporters at the expense of the public. If we take away the special power, the problem would largely resolve itself.
Before someone mentions "tort reform":
While it is true that in SOME states, the loose tort laws have driven the cost of insurance so high that doctors can't get insurance (decreasing the supply further). This is neither a national problem, nor in and of itself can account for the high cost of health care. Real tort reform is a good idea, but GWB style tort reform is a waste of everyone's time.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
These type of comments annoy me to no end. How does TV make people any dumber or lethagic than reading a book? So is it better if I sit back and read Harry Potter for 2 hours a day than if I watch TV for 2 hours a day? If so, why? Is learning about witches, warlocks and whatever else all that useful? Yes, some books may be educational, however, some TV shows are also educational. At one point in time, people looked at novels as people look at television today, a complete waste of time. People enjoy different ways of entertaining themselves.
From the open letter:
"The broadcast flag protects free, over-the-air digital television programming from unauthorized redistribution over the Internet without restricting the consumer's ability to copy programming or enjoy it anywhere within a personal at-home network."
From wikipedia:
"Possible restrictions include inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials."
So is the open letter lying outright? There seems to be a conflict here... what am I missing?
"providing an education to everyone". Ugh. Those vegetables aren't getting an education - they're being entertained and kept alive at everyone's expense because it's cruel and heartless to ignore any random thing that appears to be human. Sure, it makes everyone feel good to care about the poor wretch born with a problem or who fell out of a tree. Meanwhile, a big chunk of the smart kids get depressed and kill themselves because school offers them nothing. Hooray for the future of our country. I'm not blaming the schools, though. I know full well that their hands are tied on lots of issues. However, maybe if I gripe enough in irrelevent forums, someone will notice that we decided to forsake the wrong group - leave the "special needs" kids in an asylum (use whatever PC word sounds best there) until there's so much money to throw away on education that we can afford to literally throw educational resources down the toilet. Even if those dead smart kids realy weren't that smart, they could probably run a cash register *or* the deep fryer at the local Wendy's. Right now, the focus is all on the person who won't ever progress beyond a token job emptying the trash - if they can be left partially alone in public at all. That person does need personalized attention, but not at the expense of everyone else.
Too bad everyone's worried about "being mean" instead of making worthwhile investments.