Diluting the DMCA
According to CNET, Congress is readying another go at the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Going against increasingly vociferous public sentiment, their approach is not to weaken it, but to strengthen it. The Bush Administration's draft bill, backed by key Republicans including Lamar Smith, will make it a crime to possess any software or hardware that could be used to bypass copy-protection. It's already a crime to to sell such devices.
You would think that Congress must have a strong reason to support such unpopular legislation, wouldn't you? The more cynical among you might suspect that it's the fat political contributions made by groups such as the RIAA. But it's more than that. According to Attorney General Gonzalez, proceeds from piracy are used to fund...(drum roll)...terrorism.
Yes, that's right. The monster under the bed for the new Millenia, the terrorist, raises his ugly head again. Just as the attack on P2P file sharing systems is ostensibly to stop trading in child porn, arresting kids who copy computer games or DVDs protects our country against terrorism.
Modern technological gadgets have separated the content from the wrapper. It's almost necessary for consumers to break the "copy protection" on CDs to use iPods and the same situation will shortly be repeated with DVDs as video servers become affordable.
I, for one, am tired of this greedy fear-mongering approach by the Republicans. I can just see Tom Delay in his future jail cell, requesting better accomodations because he had been threatened by terrorists.
The DMCA, bad is it was, allowed for consumer fair use copying that has in most part, been ignored by the escalating and very public RIAA lawsuits supported by their partners-in-slime, the Bush administration. And as bad as the Bush White House is, the Bush Justice Department is worse. Since Ashcroft, it has smelled worse than a stopped-up toilet in a sewage plant. They have effectively dismantled the 40 years of civil rights support and have flipped from being the defender of the defenseless to the enforcer for the elite. The best that money can buy.
Posted on April 24, 2006
