"If you have a fast computer and a fast Internet connection, you make Hollywood nervous. Movie and TV studios are worried not because of what you’re doing now, but because of what you might do in the near future: grab digital content with your computer and rebroadcast it online.
Which is why the studios, along with other content providers, have begun a campaign to stop you from ever being able to do such a thing. As music software designer Selene Makarios puts it, this effort represents "little less than an attempt to outlaw general-purpose computers."
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. At some date in the near future, perhaps as early as 2010, people may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools today. They may no longer be able, for example, to move music or video files easily from one of their computers to another, even if the other is a few feet away in the same house. Their music collections, reduced to MP3s, may be movable to a limited extent, unless their hardware doesn’t allow it. The digital videos they shot in 1999 may be unplayable on their desktop and laptop computers.
Programmers trying to come up with, say, the next great version of the Linux operating system may find their development efforts put them at risk of civil and criminal penalties. Indeed, their sons and daughters in grade school computer classes may face similar risks if the broadest of the changes now being proposed -- a ban on software, hardware, and any other digital-transmission technology that does not incorporate copyright protection -- becomes law." [Hollywood Vs. the Internet by Mike Godwin, Reason Magazine via AlterNet.org]
