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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.
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
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
Sometimes the position of the pirate party looks more and more sensible.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
As Jeff Raikes (Microsoft buisness group president) said on the subject of piracy:
If you're going to be a software counterfeiter, then please copy and illegally use Microsoft products.
It's not just open source that suffers, it's smaller competitors. In the '90s, MS Office was probably the best office suite around, but there were lots of ones that were good enough for most people and cost a tenth of the amount. Given the choice between MS Office for $200 and SmallCo Office for $20, it was a trivial decision; MS Office was not worth $200 to a typical home user, or even a lot of small businesses. If you're pirating though, it's a choice between MS Office for $0 and SmallCo Office for $0. You pick MS Office, because it has more features.
The product that you're pirating comes from MS, but the company that lost a sale is SmallCo. This seems to be something that the RIAA and friends miss when they equate one download to one lost sale. Even if the person would have bought if they couldn't pirate, they often would not have bought the same thing that they downloaded.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Or we could just leave any nation stupid enough to pass laws like that.
It's not like those countries need us for taxes or anything, right? I mean, they have all those rich people. Rich people have to pay the greatest share of the taxes anyway, right? Right? Because that's the only sane way to do it. So all the decent human beings who are tired of being treated like they are somehow lower class leaving shouldn't have any effect at all. And since those rich people have so much money, I'm sure they can just pay people in other nations to do all the work anyway without those workers living under the stupid laws they don't accept but never had agency to change.
Seriously, now.
I've said this before. RIAA == ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY. E-N-T-E-R-T-A-I-N. You do not have the authority as an entertainment organization to fuck up millions of peoples lives. The government is tasked with law enforcement, military defense, et al, and they STILL don't have the authority to be tyrannical dickheads. They try, lord do they try sometimes, and hell, sometimes they manage, but they do not have the authority.
xxAA should not be thinking they've found a loophole in that system. If they are thinking they have a loophole, they should be shot, along with anyone in the government who is enabling them to do so.