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Media Industry Wants Mandated Spyware and More
An anonymous reader writes "The joint comment filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) requests anti-infringement software on all home computers, pervasive copyright filtering, border searches, forced US intellectual property policies on foreign nations and a joint departmental agency to combat infringement during major releases." The MPAA would also like to have its rent paid a bit by Congress, with a ban on what seems to me like a useful tool (for those in as well as outside the film industry), the recently-discussed futures market for box-office receipts.
Indeed.
When are these bastards going to be prosecuted for racketeering?
When are people going to finally be fed up with being treated like criminals for the sake of a greedy cartel of Suits that have no morals to speak of?
When are people going to finally wise up and put these assholes in their place?
Yeah...I know. I'm delusional because they hold almost all the cards and have the gooberment in their pockets.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Simple, they bought it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
1. Propose something to Congress so wacked out it would never ever pass
2. "Negotiate" it down to "semi-reasonable"
3. Pass legislation, GOTO 1
They won't get what they want this time, but something bad will still likely get whittled out from this.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Yet another lost cause for MPAA and RIAA with failing to provide a legit and legal way on their own to produce and distribute digital content to the masses, so now you're going to hit up the government like every other 'Big Corporation' or 'Big Industry' has to help some failed quest.
Never once have I seen these two organizations do anything more than indictments, court battles and really lame 4 minute short films on why 'piracy of copyrighted material is bad'. Come up with a real solution. Software implementation will not even put a dent in this and it'll be worked around in 24 hours or less at best. More tax dollars at waste!
RIAA, MPAA - why don't you just sell your product for a reasonable price so that more people will buy it? Make it easily downloadable and hassle-free (standard formats with no DRM).
Wouldn't that be easier than the technical and legislative shenanigans you seem so enamored of??
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Well, if this happens, people who never before even considered running Linux will start installing it en masse on their PCs or Macs. People who never before would have made the effort to learn how to install it will become quite proficient at doing so.
I'm guessing nobody will bother writing such software for Linux. Even then, how do you ensure it's installed with every single distro? What are they going to do? Ban Linux? They'd have to either shut down or block every single site that offers a Linux ISO.
One way or another, this isn't going to fly.
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Correct. Corporations aren't human. But somebody thought it would be a great idea to give them the same rights as individuals.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Of course, if they want spyware on every computer, then you can no longer have control of your computer. Software development will have to be heavily regulated.
RMS saw it coming over a decade ago; go read his little parable The Right to Read , if you don't know it already.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Just wait, they'll 'compromise' on a 'reasonable' solution that's probably better than they wanted in the first place.
Exactly how is this proverbial scanning software supposed to tell the difference between an illegal file and a legitimate one? Based on file name? Based on hash? Easily defeated and ineffective. The only way to truly tell if a file is infringing is to have a Turing complete artificial intelligence to watch it, listen to it, read it, or play it. Nothing short will do. Since websites hosting questionable content are having such difficulty separating out the files when forced to we can only conclude that Turing quality AI is not available yet. So, although the design specs call for a magic wand none are available.
Shh.
Instead of just not paying for it, don't watch it at all. Or don't listen to it.
If you don't like their tactics, do not provide them with an avenue to distribute their products.
They want to be free doing what they want, operating from "land of opportunity"?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Seriously, this is all to be done in the name of protecting movies? Not nuclear secrets or D-Day invasion plans, but movies? I don't want whatever it is they've been smoking, as it's clearly too powerful and causes grandiose impairment of one's general reasoning abilities.
Puh-lease. They're acting like guarding the earning potential of Waterworld should rank right up there with National Security secrets.
But FUCK NO.
Who the hell do they think they are? Arrogant bastards.
You know what we need in this country? A presidential administration with the balls to dissolve the RIAA and MPAA and put their executives in prison, where they rightly belong. Any corporate executive who would sign off on an idiot statement like this badly needs a reality check.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
It's the American way to pay shittons of cash for the laws you want.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
In your position I would pirate everything, and send a couple of bucks straight to the artist I like. And for the artists, it might very well mean _more_ money, since they only get peanuts per sold CD anyway... For the record companies, though, it will mean _less_ money. I am not sure that is a bad thing though ;-)
Let me answer your questions:
1. It is not called racketeering it is called capitalism. The same things are happening in other places as well.
2. As long as people are frightened by terrorists, various diseases, house prices, jobs and each other, they will not have enough time or capacity to do that. Even more the TV is keeping their brains off. So they will not rise until we run out of oil.
3. When the oil runs out (same as 2)
I agree with number 2 and 3 but not number 1.
When what a corporation does would be called criminal under laws not within their control then they are criminals in everything but name. Sorry but calling it capitalism when the corporations are running the government just doesn't cut it with me.
As far as I'm concerned real capitalist make money within the system NOT change the system so they can keep making money.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
There won't be any spyware on my machine. The bastards can spy from my internet gateway, but that's as close as they get, unless they come in with a warrant.
Not having spyware will be considered probable cause, allowing them to get a warrant.
Only if you're not installing binary blobs, i.e. drivers (*cough* nVidia *cough*) in the kernel and closed source programs (*cough* Flashplayer *cough*). And who knows what's lurking inside your closed-source BIOS (both on the motherboard and in network adapters)? I'm not saying that those binary blogs contain spyware, but I have no way (short of reverse-engineering them) to be sure they don't... and never will on subsequent updates.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
RIAA - Music
MPAA - Movies
I don't want to excuse all of what the MPAA is doing, but I understand that an industry defends itself against its ennemies. For the RIAA, however, "racket" is the only word that comes to my mind.
And if there were a corporate death penalty, all the issues that came with individuality would be resolved.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And as much as you have thinking about it, Richard Stallmans way of life starts making sense. The thing I do like about stallman, is that unlike many ofther extremists, he doesnt push his ideals where they aren't wanted. If asked to speak on the topic he will, and at lenght, but he doesnt go around lobbying govertment to make sure all software development is open source and free, he just wants to make sure there is enough of it that you can create a "free" computer system if you want to.
The hardest stuff to do as open source is the hardware, becasue this does cost a lot of money to develop and reproduce, but guess what, Linux juns just fine on my Mac too, and even when using OS X, based on Unix, most of the software I do use is opensource. I dont need iWork, or MS Office, Open Office does the job, Handbrake takes care of video file transcoding and ripping my own DVDs, VLC plays nearly everything, GCC and other compilers still work in Linux and OS X. Infact lots of opensource stuff works better in OS X than windows because of a smaller number of different systems that might be running it, not like with Windows, which might be XP, Vista, Win7, Server2003, 2007, etc. Most of the intel systems would have gone 10.5 altleast, and most PPC systems will be there as the last stop before 10.6. (also PPC based Macs make good linux systems too)