Aren't laws supposed to be enacted to benefit the population as a whole? Yeah, yeah, I know that's a naive thought, but all the copyright madness is getting utterly out-of-hand.

Copyright laws are supposed to be an attempt to balance the rights of the content creators to the rights of the population accessing that content. In no way should these laws be used as a club for the content distributors, who are turning into an aggressive media mafia, stomping on anyone who is seen as a threat to their turf. This is bad, because the content distributors don't give a rats ass about anything which benefits the content consumers, nor do they really help the content creators. They only care about maximizing their profit. Any law enacted to help an industry make money at the detriment of customer selection, access and convenience is an affront.

Remember when the music industry tried to kill the Rio? They didn't care if the technology was useful, or convenient for customers. They didn't think, "how can we capitalize on this?" They thought, "How can we stop this, like we did with DAT?" Remember DAT? I didn't think so.

Laws that help thugs are bad laws. The digital millenium copyright act is about as facist as you can get. I can write a web page telling you how to make ecstasy in your bathtub, because it's the act which is the crime, not the knowledge. If I write a web page telling you how the encryption works on DVD, not only is that illegal in and of itself, if someone else tells you about it (via a link), that's a crime too. Is this nuts? It just goes to show you how powerful the entertainment industry is.
posted 5:15 PM | link |