Get ready to surrender your VCRs and DVD burners
 

Things are getting to the point that all of the threads about the erosion of freedoms in America need their own forum. It would see a lot of activity these days.

The latest, introduced by one of freedom's toughest opponents, Senator Orrin Hatch, is the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act (IICA). This new act seeks to criminalize not only copyright infringment, but anything which is capable of (not necessarily designed for) infringing copyrights, directly or indirectly. VCRs, DVD-Rs, iPod, file sharing software... all fall under this category. Theoretically, so would any website where one can download a file-sharing client. What's worse, this bill is seeing a lot of support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

The EFF wrote up a mock complaint against the Apple iPod, which would be a legitimate complaint under the IICA. Pretty spooky.

So why is it that the "rights" of a company and/or industry are more important than the individual? And where will the trend of outlawing anything which is capable of being used in some illegal way, in addition to many legal uses, stop? Will IRC chat and e-mail be made illegal, because people occasionally share music through theose mediums? What about Internet Message boards? IM clients? I know it's unlikely for any of those things to br criminalized in this way, but we're on a path towards having those things crippled and monitored in the name of copyright protection. Ugh.

Orin Hatch is a complete idiot. And, he was caught red-handed running unlicensed software on his web server.

Fortunately, for every senile, paranoid bought and paid Senator like Orrin Hatch, there is a calm, reasonable sensible weigh-the-issues, consider-the-facts Congressman like Richard Boucher.

Senator [sic] Hatch also wanted to make it legal for the MPAA/RIAA to hack into your home PC and trash it (literally destroy it) if they thought you were downloading media files illegally - due process be damned.

Orrin Hatch, I believe with all sincerity, has lost his mind.

Disney, Sony, etc. have more money than you or I. They are not afraid to buy a politician or two hundred.

I don't know what the answer is.

Posting about the outrage on the internet is certainly the first step. We need a real Consumer's Union to fight these giants. Of course, Consumer's Union (TM) will probably sue me for trademark infringement for using their name.

Sadly, it's mostly the 35-and-under crowd who download MP3s, burn their own mix CDs, use iPods, and share information on the Internet. None of the dinosours in the Senate care about that sort of thing. It doesn't affect them positively to preserve those rights, but it does (as in $$$) to discard them. The grandkids might whine, but a Senator can afford to buy the little rugrats all the DRM-crippled CDs they want.

So where's the problem? Oh yeah... it's isolated safely in the middle class. Whew, that was close.

If they ban all these 'potential' copyright infringement hardware and software products, they are also going to have to ban the photocopy machine because the same stupid 'logic' applies.

I'm about as big an intellectual property hawk as anyone out there. I believe in aggressive prosecution of those who copyright laws, and in any reasonable measure being taken by IP holders to protect the means of distribution (protected CDs, ACC codecs, whatever)

This is an untenable overreaching though. To ban something that is designed and built for legitimate purposes because it offers the possibility of illegal use smacks of prior restraint. I prefer the current method of determent, where companies hire subcontractors to flood the networks with corrupted and incomplete files, to make the illegal usage frustrating and time-consuming.

-sm

Hey man, don't give them any ideas. Besides, Big Brother wouldn't ban the copy machine outiright, they'd just require the manufacturers to build in logic that checks anything you attempt to copy against a database owned by the Publishing Industry (PIAA?), and disallow duplication if it's a copyrighted work. Naturally the police would be dispatched to the location the copy machine reports.

Of course there are any number of valid reasons to copy a book you've legitimately purchased, but such rights aren't as important as the publishers' right to charge you inflated prices in an oligopy.

Yes, my words paint a ridiculous scenario, and I hope the sort of thing I described doesn't happen. But when it comes to the rights of the American people, a lot of things are happening today that would have sounded ridiculous ten years ago.

In related news, and this wasn't reported as widely :), Sen. Hatch has also introduced a new bill that outlaws potential drug paraphenalia. As a result, the sale and/or possesion of a metal spoon will be illegal. Plastic spoons will, however remain legal.

Keep in mind that this is the same Senator who suggested that people who download copyrighted materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed. Doesn't that make you just want to give the man a big, wet, sloppy hug?

Yeah but the difference (so the argument goes) is that a digital copy of a digital original is a perfect copy. When you photocopy something it's a less than perfect copy, and besides, if you're talking about a book, photocopies of all the pages are not as useful/valuable unless you have them bound.... etc. etc. etc.

Of course as H_P points out they'd do it if they could get away with it!

I don't know about yours, but my photocopier will three-hole punch things for me ...

If it was set up properly, ours would email me the document digitally, with perfect duplication after only one generation of analog to digital conversion.

Mine staples.

Rainbows are pretty. I don't know why I shoot at them.

OCR software can theoretically give you a perfect digital copy of the data the paper contains. It can, in fact, be used to produce a printout of BETTER quality with very little effort.

Honkey, can i borrow your email capable copier so i can send this senator a digital image of my ass doing a pressed ham impersonation?