Edited by author 03-25-2002 08:33 PM
well yes
that's the problem
there are customers and there are thieves
I don't want to walk into a wall about what theft means but it strikes me that the owners of intellectual property should differentiate between the two - serial copy management seemed about right but total lock down, treating everyone like thieves, would be commercial suicide for these guys surely

you know, if they charged $5 for a CD instead of $15, I could understand them complaining about 'thieves' . . .

I hope they lock everything down completely, right now. Then a thousand independent, low-cost, unprotected media sources will bloom. I hope.

That's a good attitude to have, MC. If there is free competition in the market, then different vendors can try different strategies for protecting their media. Some will try to lock things down in a way that some of us believe is customer-hostile and won't succeed, while otherswill try more open approaches. The ones that customers want will succeed, the ones that customers find offensive will fail.

But Hollings' Business Model Protection Act will shut down the choice. The big players at the labels will have the opportunity to specify exactly what systems will be used for media protection, and it will be illegal to manufacture devices that don't adhere to those standards.

IOW, if you want to release your media for free, you may *still* have to watermark it, still have to collect (and then, presumably, discard) privacy invading information about your audience, still have to wrap it in DRM that specifies that it may be freely copied.

The default, IOW, will change from open and non-invasive to closed and invasive.

When times get bad enough, thieves and revolutionaries become
indistinguishable. The proposed law may birth one of those
times. Viva la revolucion.