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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.'"
The simple audacity of their intentions, or the idea that they think they will actually get away with it, or that it will even be plausible.
I know nothing
The people who are doing this illegally still don't care, but the *aa has managed to alienate yet more people.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Make lobbying illegal, punishable by hanging in front of the Capitol Building. Problem solved.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
And thus did the American cultural hegemony over the rest of the world collapse, leading to a world where India and China exported their values through their music and films while the Hollywood studios argued about whether consumers should be allowed to keep a taped episode of Will and Grace for 24 hours or only 12...
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
This whole piracy thing is so silly. It's wierder than "terrorist". Both terms depend on who they are working for. If they're working for the "competition"(so to speak), they're pirates and terrorists. If they're on "our" side, they're distributors and freedom fighters. Do you know who will be the first to go out of business when P2P really takes off? The pirates. The guys out there selling millions of bootlegs. Most pirates usually sell the top 40, RIAA stuff, so they also "controlled" who was distributed, but they are the most expendable. Hell, they're off the books, so who's gonna care? Most people understand that P2P will increase record sales and concert attendance manyfold. This isn't just about money. Control plays a bigger role here. Just like both sides use terrorists in a war, both sides use pirates to distribute their wares. It seems to be mutually parasitic. What I'm trying to say here is that piracy is a diversion, a smokescreen used by those who want to control distribution of information(text, audio, video). It's little different from those who use terrorism to create unjust laws.
(kind of offtopic)
I sure wish the ptroleum industry was as concerned about the leaks in their distribution system as the content industry is about theirs. (11230681)
Kills two birds with one stone. Copyright infringement becomes slightly harder, but more importantly, independent production of content comes to a stillstand. With no consumer hardware capable of filming and making arbitrary reproductions of the material, how will anyone make a movie? Yep, gotta have the pro hardware. $$$
I honestly wonder what historians will think of this time period, say, one hundred years from now. Think of how we view the Western European Dark Ages, where education slowed to a halt, an organization managed to secure society and manipulate it at will, while those in the East jumped leaps and bounds ahead of them. Gosh, sounds vaguely familiar....
Perhaps they are referring to old films and stuff that people have just started archiving with the advent of affordable telecine, etc. Or it could be that they are about to offically close the hole in digital using some ingenious new system and they want to remove the analog option completely first.
Soon, you won't be able to buy a new DVD or CD player, reciever, etc. that has analog inputs and outputs, since they won't be "certified". Another reason is that they (the big studios and publishing companies) really want to move over into video on demand style stuff as an industry and cut out the retailers and wholesalers and distributers who have acted as middlemen.
The ultimate goal, of course, is to control all information, entertainment or otherwise, for monetary and political gain.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
And approximately 0% of these cards/devices are produced in the US. The Chinese will still make them, and we will still be able to buy them in Canada. Not to mention this does 0 to stop movie piracy either; the professional pirates will still be around, operating in China like they have been for the past 20 years.
Are they trying to make life insanely difficult for student and amateur video makers?
What I don't get is that there is TONS of "analog signal" that is not RIAA-owned, so how can they legislate on it?
Or perhaps they won't, but apparently they'll make it very difficult to use the required equipment. Make life difficult for students, and you're cutting off your source of income 20 years down the road..
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. Therefore there are three questions that must be asked:
1) Which senators and congressmen submitted this bill for consideration?
2) When are they up for reelection?
3) Where do I send a check to support their opponents?
Bitching and moaning about Hollywood trying to pull crap like this is all fine and good, but unless we PUNISH their accomplices in government, this kind of crap will just keep going and going.
So the next time these turkeys are up for election, start sending their opponents money. When you send them the money, make sure you include a little note explaining exactly WHY you're sending them money. While you're at it, send the turkey a note as well telling him that you've just sent his opponent money and why.
This isn't limited to just the people from the districts in question. I live in Arizona, but there is nothing to stop me from making a contribution to a candidate in another state. I can't take part in the official election, but I can sure as hell vote with my money. Imagine if one of the turkeys who tried to pull this crap got tens of thousands of letters from accross the country that all said the same thing: "I gave your opponent X dollars because you supported the Analog Hole bill" Meanwhile their opponents get tens of thousands of letters saying "I'm giving you X dollars because your opponent supported the Analog Hole bill, don't make the mistake he did."
Freedom is precious and fragile. It is also one of the few things in this world outside of family worth dying for. You can either fight for your freedom, or you can sit by idly and hope that things don't get any worse. Hope that someone else will pick up the tab for your liberty. Hope that the ever-present forces that seek to deny you your freedom will go away. Well guess what, they won't. If you're not fighting against them then you're actively helping them. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and it is a price that we all must pay each and every day. If you're not fighting for your freedom then you've already forfeited it.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It isn't individuals in their bedrooms sharing albums and movies that scares the studios, it is individuals in their garages making albums and movies.
If people are free to create and distribute their own content, it does two things:
Of course, they also run the risk of small, independent producers creating content that is superior to their own. To use an analogy, the big media companies are in the same position now that the Big Three auto makers were in the early 70s. They've had a cooperative oligarchy for decades. Now there are smaller, cheaper,faster (and potentially better) competitors entering their market. Rather than compete in the new world of smaller cars and expensive gas (or, for the studios, independent content and cheap distribution), they react by lobbying for import restrictions and spreading FUD about unsafe foreign cars (or lobbying for content controls and spreading FUD about destroying the incentive to create).
They probably realize this, and they've seen what the failure to successfully lobby has done to the American car industry. Rather than choosing the alternative route and rapidly adapting to the new world, the lesson they've learned from the past is that they need to lobby more effectively.
Why, of course they are. Unless they are in an MPAA sanctioned film-school, using expensive *AA sanctioned recording technology. Because we can't possibly allow an independant film-maker to make a movie which does better than a highly expensive Hollywood flop. Witness, Saw II and Zorro from this weekend.
Do you have any idea of how much money they would lose if just anyone could release a better movie than they can?
And home movies are right out. You could be at home watching little Billy win the track meet again, instead of generating revenue for them or their advertisers. What are you, a communist?
Same way they've done this all along -- "we don't care what you're doing with it, someone could, in theory rob from us. Therefore nobody gets access to the technology". Sheesh, it would be like arming terrorists or something. They basically try to cut off any arguments about legitimate contexts in which you would so this -- it's clearly a smokescreen to actually Pirate The Day After Tomorrow.
Student film-makers are too pesky. You could get someone new Like Michael Moore who points out the wickedness of the studio system. All future film-makers will be genetically engineered to give us a steady stream of gruel which has been approved by the *AA's.
Face it, in the Draconian future the *AAs envison, any technology capable of recording/transmitting either video or audio is just too dangerous to be in the hands of consumers and needs to be outlawed and controlled. I mean, we don't sell assault weapons to children, do we?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't forget that Americans can only make stuff illegal in the USA. The rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck what's illegal there. Do I care about the DMCA? No, because I don't live in the USA.
If this kind of legislation continues to go through, the USA will end up back in the tehcnological stone age as emerging economies such as India and China overtake. Don't forget that these economies still make stuff for the west too. Does your Toyoya have all the dashboard icons in Japanese? Of course not.
There are a groing number of bands rejecting the copy protection that the labels are applying to their CDs. I'm sure the film industry will follow soon. How long before the next Hollywood blockbuster is produced by a non-USA company because they know the USA film industry's anti-consumer practices will actually harm the films success.
My only fear living here in Europe is that our brain-dead politicians will follow suit with the USAs practices. There's still a lot of work to do to make sure we don't.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
You're right to be confused. The music and movie industry, as far as I can tell, actually believe they have the god-given right to be the *only* producers of 'culture' -- our songs, our legends and myths, they want to own it all. In their ideal world, you wouldn't even dream of creating anything yourself. That's why it's up to individuals to keep creating culture and letting it out as copyleft, public domain, GPL, whatever.. just anything other than the frameworks they have constructed to lock our culture up.
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