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The RIAA's Halloween Tricks
deus42 writes "BoingBoing has an interesting article about a joint RIAA/MPAA move started yesterday on Capitol Hill. From the article: 'Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of Analog Hole legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.'"
You don't *have* to have streaming video in front of your face all the time. You could enjoy a quiet lunch in the park.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Not only can we not utilize a CD in art, we can't edit it to a new form and re-sell it with the same profit rules that we apply to any other physical property. How exactly is this fair?
Copyright history lesson: Fair stopped happening when a guy named Sonny Bono decided to give up an honorable job as pimp to become a member of Congress. Sonny had been dumped by his ride, Cher, but continued to lust after the tons of money that those neat recording contracts gave him for the use of her voice. Pimp to the end, Sonny legislated himself a lifetime (plus 90 years) piece of the unwilling Cher. Then in a sad twist of fate, instead of dying horribly in a flaming mousse incident, the clown became the ultimate tree-hugger while skiing. His new wife took up the grand cause by taking his place in Congress and is valiantly protecting her ass..., I mean his assets. Sometimes life is not fair - for the rest of us.
This is just another example of how the US just continues slide backwards whilst the rest of the world moves forward.
... 2 ... 3 ...)
I'll stick with Europe and Asia, and sit back and watch as the US slips furthur into irrelevance.
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