White House wants new copyright law crackdown

CNET News

 

Oh brother.

I knew Biden was big on copyright issues before he was even elected. But Obama's really been a huge disappointment on this front. It seems like no matter who's elected to office, we always end up with the exact same guy.

Since 2001, the list of offenses that may be subject to wiretapping may potentially be expanded to include:

a. support of terrorism
b. use of weapons of mass destruction
c. copyright and trademark infringement

I can't quite put my finger on it, but one of these doesn't seem to fit with the other two. Hmmm. Which one could it be?

And would this streaming also include the person who's watching the stream or just the person who provided the stream? This isn't mentioned.

So, if I'm travelling with my laptop and I have a copy of "DVD Decrypter", if Homeland Security discovers this, they are permitted to help bring civil actions against me. TrueCrypt anyone?

I'm becoming numb to this stuff. All I need is Tor and TrueCrypt, and I'm beginning to not even care what the law is anymore.

 

Watching a streaming movie will now land you in jail next to murderers and rapists, with a sentence likely longer than theirs. Ain't Congress great?

 

Obama "IP czar" wants felony charges for illegal Web streaming.

-- Tom

 

Well, actually, it goes down better when its dubbed "economic espionage," especially when trying to intimidate foreign ISPs.

I think that's what the czar's worried about.

 

Quoting from CNET again:

 

I see a lot of people who presently stream Broadcasts being forced to start encryting their broadcasts and a market for Black Market Decoder modual market for for already existing software.

 

Indeed, good luck living outside of jail in USA.

 

CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood's "PATRIOT Act"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...tm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

 

They've already (both Hollywood and the government) proven how ineffective they are at fighting infringement. Hollywood and the music industry keep draining their own pockets losing lawsuits, and the government can't take down a handful of infringing websites without taking out several thousand completely unrelated and innocent ones. Sure, they took out Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Pirate Bay, Mininova. But, those were all doomed to begin with simply because they were too big. It taught the P2P world a lesson, but not that illegal downloaders were destined to be busted and jailed. No, the lesson they took away from the "giants" being cut down, was that small operations were the key to thriving. Small websites, especially hosted on foreign soil, are much harder to find and target.

 

Pirate Bay is still on as far as I can tell. And it was probably the biggest of the sites dedicated to file sharing. And let's not forget that conglomeration of newsgroups that begins with a "U" that's been known to host a binary or two (the first rule of "U" is don't talk about "U").

Then there's Google. Just search for a torrent, fire up utorrent, and off you go. Google is probably the biggest hindrance to them. Then there's rapidshare, megaupload, mediafire, etc. And let's not forget the filesharing sites hosted in Russia. Good luck ever getting a file removed from there.

They just need to modify their business model because they'll never take down all of these sites. These sites have plenty of legitimate uses anyway, and I personally don't use them in a way that I would end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit. Trying to take down all of these sites is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Unlike the rest though, the big "U" for the most part requires monthly $, which leads to more records/evidence. As far as Pirate Bay, it's "alive", but many torrent sites have banned the tracker. So, it's all but useless now. By the way, throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a specialty of governments and now Hollywood/ the recording industry. Governments will kill internet development if they don't change tactics. Hollywood and company will just go broke. Governments will never learn, I suspect Hollywood and the music industry will when the well truly does run dry.

Their reliance on the government to solve their issues will eventually backfire on them. They are perfectly capable of partially solving the piracy problem (it will never fully go away) themselves. It doesn't require laws, like you said, it just requires changing business models and tactics. As it stands, piracy isn't killing them, they're committing suicide.

 

What is ironic is Hollywood, the largest thief of intellectual ideas, which they turn into movies that are protected from thievery.

 

Yes, it hurts bad when your consumer$ just aren't not "buying it", on any level, anymore