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."

Comments

It's simple.

[Pojut]

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.

Re:It's simple.

[Gerzel]

I dunno about you but www.eff.org just got another donation.

Seriously if you don't like this kind of thing happening then:

1. SPEAK OUT
    >Not only to those around you but to
  a. Your Congressmen and Senators - Letter writing, and phone calls are simple, fairly cheap and CAN make a difference but only if you do it.
  b. Signing Petitions - Online petitions are good ways of building support for causes you like and are quick and easy to do
  c. Talk to those around you. Let your views be known you might help someone else realize how important this is.

2. Donate and Support good causes
    Unfortunately our legal system is a pay for service setup where lawyers cost money. You can send a few bucks to places like the EFF or ACLU to help support your rights online and off. Their websites are easy to find and often have good information on what else you can do to support civil liberties. If you are not a US citizen then the organizations may be different but the idea is the same.

3. VOTE
    It is your right and it may be a drop in the bucket, but that bucket will never fill if you don't put it in. If you don't like either of the two-party candidates vote for a third party. Even if they don't win, a third party getting a higher percentage of the vote DOES help them and other parties in the next cycle.
    Voting is not just a right it is a duty. Yes YOU by living in a representative democracy have a duty to vote, and that doesn't mean just showing up at the polls on election day. You also have a duty to do what you can to RESEARCH and LEARN about the candidates and to THINK about who will be getting YOUR vote.

Democracy is hard and demands the most of its citizens compared to any form of previously tried government. ALL citizens have to work in government because all citizens ARE PART of the government.

Re:It's simple.

[aaandre]

This is not about protecting content. It is protecting content "owners" desire to perpetually sell the content by creating laws that support that desire at the expense of the general public.

Human nature is one of sharing, remixing, co-creating. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

In business, like in war, the party with the least compassion wins.

People who lobby for draconian IP laws are not creators, inventors, artists. They are the middlemen, trying to squeeze maximum profit and lock in their ownership of others' creations forever. Any politician that votes for such laws is by definition not serving the people, not doing their job, and deserves to be immediately removed from their position due to their being corrupted.

Simple.

Disclosure

[Heed00]

Customs authorities should be encouraged to do more to educate the traveling public and entrants into the United States about these issues. In particular, points of entry into the United States are underused venues for educating the public about the threat to our economy (and to public safety) posed by counterfeit and pirate products.
Customs forms should be amended to require the disclosure of pirate or counterfeit items being brought into the United States.

[x] One eye patch.
[x] One peg leg.

To paraphrase Star Wars...

[decipher_saint]

"The more you tighten your grip, the more control will slip through your fingers"

If they treat consumers as enemies they will become enemies.

RMS described it well

[dkleinsc]

The Right to Read was written 13 years ago, and is still remarkably prescient.

You ain't seen nothin' yet

[Wolvenhaven]

I met a devil media, they took my music away
They said I had it comin' to me, but I wanted it that way
I think that any music is good music
And so I took what I could get, mmm
Oooh, oooh, they looked at me with big brown eyes
And said

You ain't seen nothin' yet
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
Here's something that you never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet

And now I'm feelin' better, 'cause I found out for sure
They took me to their lawyer and he told me of a cure
He said that only their music is good music
So I took what I could get, yes, I took what I could get
Oooh, and they looked at me with big brown eyes
And said

You ain't seen nothin' yet
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
Here's something, here's something that you're never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
You need educated

Any music is good music
So I took what I could get, yes, I took what I could get
And then, and then, and then they looked at me with big brown eyes
And said

You ain't seen nothin' yet
Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
Here's something, here's something,
here's something, mama, you're never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nu-nu-nu-nothin' yet
You ain't been around

You ain't seen nothin' yet
I know I ain't seen nothin' yet
I know I ain't seen nothin' yet
Baby, Baby, Baby
You ain't seen nothin' yet

Re:Market balancing itself

[Troggie87]

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.

The new War on Drugs

[Hatta]

This is the new War on Drugs. Think of all the freedom we lost fighting the war on drugs. If you're within 100 miles of a border, you can be stopped and search for any reason without a warrant. It's a common occurrence to piss in a cup in front of a stranger as a condition of employment. Anyone carrying moderate to large amounts of cash can have it confiscated by the police, with no trial of any sort. And so on.

But the war on drugs is old and busted, we need a new enemy. As the U.S. loses its economic dominance of the world, anything that threatens (whether in theory or fact) the cultural dominance we've had is going to be attacked vigorously. It will be a scorched earth policy. We can expect to lose as many, if not more of our right under this new War on Copyright Infringement. It's just ramping up now, but we'll be seeing people who speak out against the new laws branded as anti-American. Copyright infringement will become a jailable offense.

Sure, it sounds preposterous now. But once upon a time jailing someone for Cannabis would have been preposterous. The American propaganda system is the best in the world. If they can sell a 70 year war on a substance that's factually safer than aspirin, if they can manipulate us into an optional war in Iraq for absolutely no reason at all, they'll have no problem turning copyright infringement into the next witch hunt.

Artist will starve. The non-existent problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

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