MS DRM OS Begets SSSCA
John Young
jya at pipeline.com
Tue Dec 18 20:57:57 PST 2001
SSSCA is far from dead, it may have a good chance
of enactment according to Mike Godwin's essay today,
"Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet:"
http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-net-mg.htm
Here are his opening paragraphs:
"If you have a fast computer and a fast connection to the
Internet, you make Hollywood nervous. And Tinseltown is
nervous not because of what you're doing now, but because
of what you *might* do -- grab digital Hollywood content
with your computer and broadcast it over the Internet.
Which is why Hollywood, along with other content companies,
from book publishers to the music industry, has begun a
campaign to stop you from ever being able to do such a
thing -- even though you may have no intention of becoming
a copyright "pirate." That campaign has pitted corporate
giants like Disney and Fox against corporate giants like
Microsoft and IBM, but the resulting war over the shape
of future digital technology may end up with us computer
users suffering the "collateral damage."
As music-software designer and entrepreneur Selene
Makarios puts it, this campaign represents "little less than
an attempt to outlaw general-purpose computers."
Let's get one thing straight -- when I say there's war looming
in cyberspace over copyright, I'm not talking about the
struggle between copyright holders and copyright "pirates"
who distribute unlicensed copies of creative works for
free over the Internet. Maybe you loved Napster or maybe
you hated it, but the right to start a Napster, or to infringe
copyright and get away with it, is not what's at issue here.
And in a sense it's a distraction from what the real war is.
What I'm talking about instead is the war between the content
industries (call them "the Content Faction") and the
information-technology industries -- call the latter "the Tech
Faction." That faction includes not only computer makers,
software makers, and related digital-device manufacturers
(think CD burners and MP3 players and Cisco routers).
Allied with the Content Faction are the consumer-electronics
makers -- the folks who build your VCRs and DVD players
and boomboxes. The Tech Faction, which makes smarter,
more programmabale devices and technologies than the
consumer-electronics guys do, may count among their allies
many cable companies and even telephone companies.
But what's the "collateral damage," exactly? Perhaps the
most likely scenario is this: at some near-future date - perhaps
as early as 2010 - individuals may no longer be able to do the
kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2001.
They may no longer be able, for example, to move music
or video files around easily from one of their computers to
another (even if the other is just a few feet away in the same
house), or to personal digital assistants. Their music
collections, reduced to MP3s, may be moveable to a limited
extent; unless their digital hardware doesn't allow it. The
digital videos they shot in 1999 may be unplayable on their
desktop and laptop computers -- or even on other devices --
in 2009.
And if they're programmers, trying to come up with the next
great version of the Linux operating system, for example,
they may find their development efforts put them at risk of
criminal and civil penalties if the tools they develop are
inadequately protective of copyright interests. Indeed, their
sons and daughters in grade-school computer classes may
face similar risks, if the broadest of the changes now being
proposed becomes law."
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