Get ready to surrender your VCRs and DVD burners

[hot_pastrami]

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.