Slashdot Mirror
Entertainment Industry's Dystopia of the Future
renek writes "If you think the RIAA/MPAA's tactics have been outlandish, laughable, and disconcerting in the past, you haven't seen anything yet. From government-mandated spyware that deletes infringing content to border searches of media players, this reads like an Orwellian nightmare. Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see how far this goes and how under the radar it stays."
You can't possibly protect content without directly affecting the people who play by the rules. Things like the Patriot Act suffer from the same problem.
Living With a Nerd
That we citizen elect the politicians.
Yes, but we don't select them.
To be unnecessarily extreme, we can essentially pick between Hitler and Pol Pot. While it's a tough choice, it's not a choice I want to make.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
If they treat consumers as enemies they will become enemies.
crazy dynamite monkey
Surely this is more a case of haggling. Ask for an infeasible price knowing you then have more scope to haggle down to a still unfair price.
The Right to Read was written 13 years ago, and is still remarkably prescient.
I am officially gone from
Trouble is, cartels tend to work outside of the free market...
crazy dynamite monkey
A few times in copyright threads, while alluding to the insanity of the media corporations, I have testified that one of my big paranoid fears is legislation that requires content filtering software on all computers and related devices. Fine and dandy for Windows and Mac, but implementing that for all the Linux distros would be ridiculously hard. The solution? Outlaw Linux. "It's just a hacker's tool anyway."
*shakes head*
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media...
Wrong metaphor; It is not the government who is getting screwed here. On the contrary, congressmen are collect big checks from media corporations for selling off our rights. I think you mean.
Given the US government's willingness to force citizens to bend over for Big Media
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Look, the reality is that the U.S. economy currently depends almost exclusively on culturally created content/entertainment. Nothing gets made in the U.S. and exported anymore BUT movies, music, etc. So it's not a surprise that it's becoming more and more draconian in trying to defend those assets.
It's like if one country controlled all the oil. They'd jack up prices, but they'd also do everything they could to stifle the creation of oil alternatives. They'd start to insist changes in engine designs that used their oil, or else they wouldn't sell you the oil. They'd limit anyone trying to purchase the oil then refine it on their own, because they'd want to do all the refining themselves.
Every indicator I see says that this is going to get much worse in the future.
This probably isn't true. The point of the article is that the entertainment industry is trying to push obscene measures to stop "piracy." While in a normal market situation people would just stop supporting these companies and go to a competitor, such a scenario is unlikely to play out since there are no real competitors besides companies that will probably be squelched as illegal.
Think of it this way: would the automobile ever have taken off if the buggy industry owned and legally controlled all materials and technology related to the making of wheels? Sure the buggy makers could adopt the new automotive technology, and it would be better for the consumer if they did, but there is no immediate incentive for them to do so.
The music industry as a whole controls the vast majority of music, and are pushing laws to crush emerging technologies that might obsolete their main revenue source. There is no reason for them to switch and take advantage of these new technologies, because they don't have to. The average consumer of entertainment just doesn't have the self control to stop listening to songs or watching films for an unknown amount of time just to put pressure on the industry, and groups like the RIAA know this. Thus, they have every incentive to try and legislate the problem away, as the market has no way to correct. Only if their grip on copyright is loosened, or some form of piracy allowed to flourish, is there any pressure to adapt to changing realities in the world.
That we citizen elect the politicians.
Yes, but we don't select them.
To be unnecessarily extreme, we can essentially pick between Hitler and Pol Pot.
Or Kang and Kodos! (Simpsons did it!)
Bow-ties are cool.
I thought you could write whomever you wanted onto your ballot?
Nope. They have to be pre-approved (pdf in Google Docs) or they just plain won't be counted.
"The majority chooses who wins, and I'm not part of the majority!"
No, my objection is that the minority choses who the majority gets to pick. The US version of an "election" is a joke relative to modern systems.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That's "sudo apt-get install dystopian-copyright-protection" dumbass.
Also, "Couldn't find package dystopian-copyright-protection"
Package dystopian-copyright-protection is a virtual package provided by:
obscene-censorship
government-intrusion
corporate-greed
ubisoft-games
sony-rootkit-drm
You should explicitly select one to install.
E: Package dystopian-copyright-protection has no installation candidate
You seem to be confusing "upset with big media controlling the law" with "pirate everything under the sun". Personally, I believe in financially supporting my entertainment, but I'm still sick of the US government bending over backwards for big media by creating more and more over-restrictive IP laws. Copyright law was originally created to give authors a TEMPORARY monopoly on the rights to their works, in exchange for their works eventually entering the public domain. The fact that copyright law has, at the behest of big media, been extended from the original maximum of 28 years (assuming the author was alive to renew it after the first 14 years) to author's life plus 70 years means that once the work DOES enter public domain, it's completely irrelevant and forgotten by modern society.
Bottom line: copyright law was created to benefit SOCIETY, not big media, and we have every right to be upset with them removing any value we receive from it.
My sig can beat up your sig.
The PP will probably never win an election, it's just there to show them how many votes they lose when they support the RIAA.
(OTOH I'd bet the PP could get quite a few votes in today's America...)
No sig today...
When I was a child our house was heated by oil, a tank car came by every now and then and fueled up a tank in the back.
That no longer happened. The guy who drove the tanker, has lost THAT job.
Coal was used earlier, and a lot of people made their money mining the coal in Holland and shipping it to homeowners. The mines have closed. The miners are gone.
In Amsterdam and many an old city you can still see evidence of horse stables in the center of the city. Evidence that once horses were the only method to power transport and the industry that made it happen.
Gas lighters once went around, turning on each street light individually, a job typically given as a charitable cause for people who could not earn their money in another way.
Countless jobs are gone as companies claimed that putting them in other countries was best for society, for the world, for the future.
And now, it is the time of the artist to loose their job, to see their means of earning a living turned upside down.
Does that matter? Is it worth halting progress to keep some people earning money the same way they are used to?
We could have stopped the car from ever going faster and thereby saved the horse industry. But at what cost to our society?
But art is different. Why? Great art has been created LONG before copyright was added (the current copyright is a recent invention and was fought tooth and nail by the record industry) and that art will remain.
Will people stop performing Opera because the composer is no longer being paid... oh wait, the composer died centuries ago.
Then perhaps people will stop making new art... except unpaid art is produced all the time. Go to flickr.com for just a tiny sample. Nobody there expects to be paid, yet they are producing art.
Yes, some artists will perhaps die of starvation. Just as lost of coal miners lost their job and countless stable boys before them.
THOUGH LUCK. The MPAA/RIAA/Brein/Bumastemra all love to claim that our society will collapse when no more "play for cash only" bands will exist. No more spice-girls, no more backstreet boys. The end of civilization as we know it. I could just cry.
But does it matter? I am not going to argue that pirates buy more CD's because I am trying to make a far bigger point. If indeed the end of copyright means NO more music is produced. Will that matter? Or is it just another development of our society? Imagine a world without movies. Ain't that hard, movie tech is not all that old. One thing often miss about Star Trek is that it is a fictional world without money (ToS and TNG at least) but ALSO without art. Think about it, there are no paid for artists and content in the series itself. We watch on TV a TV-less world. They make their own content, for their own consumption and art is "merely" something that each does for the fun of it, not for profit.
The RIAA and the likes hate such a future. They want us to believe that the artist who works for profit, a Michael Jackson or Madonna IS the ONLY part of our modern civilization that is worth anything. Everything else is secondary to them. The Spice girls are the 20th century, and everything else just plays second role to it. If content is not paid for, it does not exist, it is not worth it and if it is content it must be paid for.
This goes to such extremes that copyright mafia's collect royalties for music for that isn't even subject to royalties. If I produce a piece of music and put it in the public domain and it is played on the radio (in Holland at least) then Bumastemra collects a fee for it. A fee I, the person who created the music can't collect, nor can anyone. They have a legal right to collect money for something they don't own and which they never have to pay out to anyone. It would be like giving Shell the right to collect a fee from anyone on the road, no matter if they drive a car or not.
And the Internet, personal liberties, common sense, artisic license, law, they all got to bend or be broken s
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But what protects that same guy from the RIAA/MPAA/**AA bankrupting him and ruining his life for (maybe) sharing a few songs?
That's more important to you than your civil liberties?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
The EFF isn't "pirate friendly". They just have different priorities: namely civil liberties.
Calling civil libertarians "pirate sympathisers" is a nice bit of Orwellian Newspeak.
Pirates are simply preferable to the alternative.
Although the real value of "eliminating piracy" is highly disputable. It's not a given that it would benefit artists.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You know what's entertaining?
Watching people argue for rights they don't have against people enforcing rights they don't have.
The market tried to sort out the banking industry, but the the goverment stepped in and handed a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the banks for no good reason, ensuring they wouldn't learn a lasting lesson from their foolishness.
The government certainly has a role in regulating the logistics of markets: creating a standard language for contracts, defining standards for weights and measures, enforcing contracts, and protecting against fraud. They had a serious failure in doing so with the mortgage derivatives market that caused so much hassle. But the regulation needed there was simple "look, trade this shit on the CBOT or another major exchange, so that everyone is using the same standardized set of contracts". This is required for most other financial intruments, and creates enough transparancy to keep the market functioning (without the government even needing to create the standards, just insisting that there are standards.
Plus, of course, the mortgage fraud was starting to get out of hand before the collapse, but we didn't need any new laws for that, just to stop turning a blind eye to it.
Rather than doing the simple, non-instrusive job the government is suposed to, it created a problem which it then used to nationalize a big chuck on the American economy. Ditto healthcare, and to some small extent auto manufacturing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.