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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.'"
is go to your 3 elected representatives (in the US, each citizen is represented to the Federal Government by 2 Senators (per state; sorry, D.C. and Territories) and a Representative (per Congressional District)) -- seriously, call up their offices and arrange a face-to-face meeting -- explaining why any legislation that in any way restricts the current "fair use" of copyrighted material is so basically wrong. Join the EFF. Explain how all "survey papers" would be made illegal if this restriction of fair use is permitted (remember, as soon as it applies to one medium, it will shortly follow that it will apply to all media).
The MPAA & RIAA are both mired in a business model that is out of date, unfair to most of the participants, and robs blind all the consumers. Ask any so-called "indie" producer. We must put a stop to this.
RHCE; are you certified? Karma: ambiguous.
At least not until all electronic parts vendors require all purchases of each part to be bought in $1000 bulk purchases. And it's already happening: the only local vendor for a part to fix the power connector on my Joust machine would only sell to me if I bought $1000 worth of the part.
Go to mouser.com or digikey.com. They sell in small quantities and surely have far greater selections and far cheaper prices than any place local to you.
The parts will be kept in the hands of those trusted to assemble them into compliant devices. Individuals will still be able to get soldering irons and solder; just not anything to solder with them. (It will become harder and harder to harvest parts from existing devices as well. Entire circuit boards will be covered in black epoxy.)
Well that's just great; we can then kiss our entire electronics industry good-bye in this country. There's an enormous number of companies (most small ones) in this country that make and sell electronic devices using component parts. These items are designed in-house by engineers, and then prototyped, frequently with parts from Digi-Key and other such distributors, sold in small quantities. The prototypes are debugged, and then eventually the completed design is manufactured either in-house (if the company is large enough), or out-of-house by a contract manufacturer. I used to work as a component-level design engineer, doing schematic design and PCB layout at a small company, so I know a little about this.
Eliminate the ability to buy parts in small quantities and you wipe out virtually all prototyping of electronic designs. The effects of this on the economy are incalculable.
And lest you think all lobbyists are evil, Public Knowledge and the Home Recording Rights Coalition will also be testifying at the hearing.
There are no representatives from my state (Arizona) on the committee, and they get so much correspondence that they essentially ignore anyone who is not their direct constituent, but if your congressman is on the list, then now is the time to let them know how you feel, especially if you are from Texas or California.
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Tell me again when the DMCA was passed? Oh, right, 1998. Telecommunications act, which resulted in massive cosolidations and generally screwed users? Oh, right, 1996.
Yep, passed by a Republican Congress. The same shady individuals who are still running the legislative branch of the government....