Readers of the political rants on this page know I'm no fan of Republicans, but let the record — thanks to Declan McCullagh's Politech — show that Democrats on Capitol Hill have pocketed more contributions from the entertainment industry and seem more eager than their GOP brethren to undo "fair use" rights and force consumers to suffer from Hollywood's deranged obsession with trying to put the digital-content genie back in the bottle.
As Steven Levy notes, greedy tyrants like Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner — who simultaneously makes millions from tacky cartoon versions of public-domain classics and fights to restrict small publishers' access to literature for the sake of extending Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse — are screaming loudly and donating richly enough to persuade technically ignorant legislators that PCs and the Internet will put music and movie producers out of business (just as they warned decades ago that TVs and VCRs would, just as they told us that CDs cost pennies to produce and would sell for less than vinyl records).
EarthWeb columnist Vince Freeman points out what's at stake: not just your right to listen to audio CDs from your computer's CD-ROM drive or move the music you paid for to an MP3 player or custom CD, but the Hollywood moguls' attempt to tear down the entire infrastructure of computing and the Internet, wrecking a U.S. tech industry that's far larger than the entertainment industry and risking damage to all U.S. business, instead of actually addressing why fewer consumers are buying their crappy and overpriced product.
Price-gouging monopolist Microsoft is guilty of this with its Product Activation copy protection, but the music and movie hucksters are perfecting the message: "Dear Customer: Don't try to deny you're a thieving pirate, you scum, just be grateful for the chance to give us your money. In fact, give us more before we get mad." That's an attitude for success in business only as long as you can bribe Congress to forcibly keep consumers from going elsewhere.
9:39:11 AM 
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