The death of fair use is coming....

[dragoman]

...these bastards will never stop....

Bastards (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51245,00.html)

dragoman

[Emp3r0r]

prediction: they won't

[theReal]

Copies of TV broadcasts made for one-time personal use at home are also permittedThat's a joke, right??? ONE-TIME personal use? That means you're only allowed to watch a recorded TV programme one time, or you're breaking the law?? Now this is ridiculous!!

[Jay-C]

Maybe you haven't realised yet, but many many laws in the us and in other countries are just bullsh*t :-).

P.S.: Damn i gotta delete all my Whhel of Forune tapes before they bust me :-). Dear God, I'm toooooo young to die :)

[Markab]

How Ironic. There is currently next to nothing in place on our law books to protect consumers from big businesses robbing us with rip off prices and poor competition but they are the first to cry foul when anyone "robs" them of any of their riches. Perhaps if Hollywood and the recording industry didn't have greed at the top of their priority list they wouldn't find themselves in the middle of this! It looks good on them. Perhaps their top brass will only afford to buy 3 new mansions this year instead of 4.
Mark

[Ookami]

> ONE-TIME personal use?

Does that also includes commercials? :D

[hyc]

My reaction to this article:

Dear Senator Feinstein:

I am incredibly dismayed to see your name listed as one of the supporters of the new CBDTPA bill. This, like the DMCA, is allowing the entertainment industry to completely usurp the rights of the consumer. Remember that Copyright is only granted for a finite length of time, after which it expires. With the DMCA and this new bill such expiration is meaningless, because the technology will no longer exist to make copies of public domain material. As such, media owners are being granted infinite copyright of their works, which is not what the Copyright laws were intended for. This bill and the DMCA both run completely counter to the spirit and letter of existing copyright law.

As a software engineer and a musician, I of course have a vested interest in the protection of the software and music that I create. But even so, I recognize that these laws can only harm both the software and music industries. Even now, as a musician, I am unable to utilize typical consumer digital audio gear because the built in copy protection mechanisms prevent me from making unlimited copies of my own music. This is music that I created myself, where I am the rightful owner of all the rights to the work. These existing laws only benefit the large music corporations, at the expense of every one else including independent musicians and general consumers.

As an engineer and entrpreneur, I frequently create new electronic gadgets that I would hope to one day market. These are tools that help me in my pursuits of music and computer engineering. If the CBDTPA passes it will suddenly become impossible for me to produce my inventions, without paying heavy license fees to include someone else's copy protection hardware into my product. The heads of the large technology companies have already come together to oppose this type of legislation, but it's going to hurt the small-scale innovators even more.

California would not be what it is today without the work of small-scale innovators. Apple Computer and so many other successful technology companies got there start, here in California, because the state was conducive to small business innovation. Bills like the CBDTPA are going to put an end to that innovation. This will hurt the entire country as a whole, but especially California where so many of these businesses are/would be born.

I voted for you before, because I thought your platform made sense, but on issues like this I simply can't abide. I strongly urge you to reverse your position here and oppose this bill, it will cause more harm than help. History has shown, time and time again, that legislating technological solutions to social problems never works. All this will accomplish is major churn, drive up the cost of electronics commodities, and chill the introduction of new products. Tremendous resources will be spent on creating copy-protection systems, they will only inconvenience the consumers, completely marginalize independent content creators, and spawn an un-taxed unregulated industry in black-market copy-protection countermeasures.
No good can come of this.

Sincerely,
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support