From now on, I will actually check if any DVD I might buy has DRM in it. If it does, I won’t buy it. One of the things I’m going to press my “congress critters” to do is to pass a law requiring manufacturers to place a label on anything they make stating if it has DRM in the product, including stating what kind.

Thanks for the term Harsan.

And Ryv, I think you’re right. I’m not sure if our congress people have any idea at all what they are doing, or how they are creating a generation of people who, more and more, see the government’s laws to be not only oppressive, but irrelevant. I think that any that do, don’t care, and are on the side of the corporations, rather than of natural citizens.

Content doesn’t “want to be free” but when you make it impossible for a person to use the content they purchased, and then make it illegal for them to circumvent what is making it impossible for them to use they way they want, people actually come down on the side of the “real criminals” you want to catch with the law, rather than on the side of the government.

The music and video companies liken pirates, and honest users who are activists to terrorists. I agree with them… they are terrorists in the same way that Robin Hood was a terrorist. And we all remember what happened to Prince John.

First of all, the problem with the trap of “balanced” news that journalists have fallen into is that when you have the truth on one side, and someone who is lieing or delusional on the other side, in order to give ‘balanced’ news coverage, you have to present lies, or delusion as a valid view point, and people believe that the truth is really somewhere between the truth and a lie.

Further, if you have an opinion on a matter that is a matter of opinion, it is unlikely you will be capable of presenting balanced coverage, as is evidenced by the alternating liberal and conservative hosts on fox news.

So, when I have a strong opinion, I don’t even attempt to present “Balanced” coverage in my opinions and editorials.

I am, however, willing to let those in favor of DCMA present their opinions. I am also willing to post what I understand their opinions to be. That just won’t be masqueraded as being my opinion.

In fact, I intend to present those opinions in my next main post relating to this particular topic.

As to the old ‘wants to be free’ slogan…that’s where the technology is. Digital communication goes hand in hand with all the technology that makes media easily reproduced and distributed. The industry needs to change, not try to turn the clock back to the 90s.

Cliff Notes Version is as such: You can use your recording device to record something to view it at a time more convenient to you. That’s what the court ruled on. That there is at least one legitimate usage of the VTR device
Tape recorders and digital recording devices are similarily covered under an actual copyright law called the Audio Home Recording Act, which was passed in 1992, which allowed for people to make copies of audio or video and store it, even change its format or location which was called in Recording Indus. Ass’n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. “space-shifting”. it’s what allows you to take a song, put it on your hard drive from your CD and have it be legal. To my knowledge the DMCA doesn’t prohibit that.

That’s the 90’s, though. To the overzealous copyright holders the 90’s must have sucked. Now we’re in the technological age, computers are everywhere, and now tape and recorded songs can make their way to a P2P network. Sucks more, that. Great thing about our modern era we’re in now, nobody seems to think more laws are gonna hit. Which is why everyone was shocked when the Induce act was defeated by a call-in campaign from the Save Betamax group. The Induce act would have given copyright owners and their representatives (The RIAA, the MPAA, any other AA’s out there) the veto power over any new technology they thought might infringe on copyrights. It would have made your DVD player, your DVD recorder, your VHS recorder, all that, illegal because the manufacturer, by selling it, was inducing the infringement of copyrights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induce_Act wiki link.
That’s our modern era, it is, to say, a far cry from the 90’s.

But, really, the fact that those laws were even needed factors into my main point; technology has been moving steadily to the point where the action of viewing media and the action of recording media are interchangeable, and the communication technology of the interweb has made distribution trivial. Trying to uncreate the technology, limit it, or anything else in that regard is doomed to failure.

The sad thing is that the state of our education, the state our technology is in, and the state of the freedom to use that technology are all tightly interlinked. Legislators are simultaneously trying to improve the education of our young, especially in the area of technology, and are also calling our talented young people with technical competency, and the will to use that competency (which are also linked) criminals!