Bill Would Fight Web Music Piracy. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hollywood escalated its fight against Internet trading of movies and music, successfully urging key lawmakers to consider letting the industry use hacker tactics to stop Americans' exchange of songs and films they didn't buy. By The Associated Press.
And I quote:
"Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecedented new authority to secretly hack into consumers' computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material. ...
Berman said his bill would not allow industry to spread viruses across file-trading networks, destroy files or hack into a consumer's personal data, but experts said its language would permit intrusions into a consumer's audio and video files and attacks that would knock a computer off-line. ...
Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, warned that the bill would allow zealous copyright owners to employ ``all kinds of technical measures that will interfere with the functioning of the Internet.''
Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the legislation "provides a hunting license for copyright holders to seek out legitimate users of the Internet.''
I hate to point out the obvious, but this would probably be seen as a declaration of war by the online file trading community. A couple of points:
A) There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and as a community we probably have more technical skill than they do. It's probably not a good business strategy to get your customers -- and ultimately that's what we are -- riled up.
B) They are motivated by arrogance, greed, and fear. The image I get is of a dinosaur thrashing around in it's death throes, inflicting damage on anything that comes near, consequences be damned. These people (and corporations are not people, natural or otherwise) have no love for art, for joy, for the passion of being alive, or so it seems to me. 90% (and I'm being kind) of what they want to sell us is musical mediocracy; why are they so surprised that sales are down?
C) We are motivated by love of the music, and we're tired of being herded into convenient marketting categories by soulless corporate scumbuckets, tired of being told we can't share some tunes with our friends. I've been making mix tapes (now mix CDs ) for myself and my friends for many years now. Suddenly I'm some kind of criminal mastermind? I wish. Then I might be running Enron or Price Waterhouse, or dare I say it, this great country of ours. I read magazines, I haunt the bins of my local CD shops looking for excellent music to buy, I go to movies, I read books and put them on my shelf. I am a customer, an informed consumer of cultural artifacts, and a pretty good one at that, spending far more money and time than I probably should surfing the datastream, looking for art that moves me. I expect to be treated like a valued customer, not a common criminal. Keep it up and I may meet or exceed your expectations.
I know it's not that black and white: there are grey areas, and things can get complicated and ugly real fast. I have a couple of friends that suck down every new song and CD and movie and software they can lay hands on and they don't pay a penny. They think that since America is the land of the free everything should be free. I can't say I respect them for their choices, but I am by no means innocent in these manners. I use some shareware I probably should pay for, and I've downloded the occasional song from P2P networrks, generally stuff I've never seen anywhere else. But when there's a software package I use a lot, that I see value in and want to support, I purchase it to make possible further program development, to get the manuals that come with shrinkwrapped software, to reward the people that did the work. When there's an artist whose work I like, I try to support them by buying their CDs, directly from the artist whenever possible. These are the things that keep poor record executives up at night crying in their caviar. This is what is happening: we're cutting out the middleman, going straight to the creative source. And this trend is unlikey to go away, especially since we're not being served by the mass media as it is currently constructed. The old guard needs to figure out a way to change with the times, and find a way to serve their increasingly disatisfied and disenfranchised customer base.
OK, here's where I get all bloggy: It's late, I'm going to bed, I will continue this diatribe at some future point. Hasta la vista, baby. (Did I just infringe the Terminator copyright?)
10:14:51 AM 
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