Hello,

sorry for making this post completely off topic.

I think I should comment on this from a European point of view:

>These media giants are dinosaurs on the brink of extinction and they
>know it.  Their survival instinct will kick in and they will stop at
>nothing to survive, including legislating away our personal and economic
>freedoms.

I guess that several people might be shooting themselves in the foot with
this bill, just take a look at what happened to similar nonsense in the
past:

- Some of you may remember the effect of prohibiting the export of strong
cryptographic software from the USA a few years ago: The producers went
overseas and reimported the software, thereby preventing all trouble.

- SCMS as used by consumer grade DAT and Minidisc was easily obsoleted by
the so-called 'Copy Bit Killers', sometimes the only thing you had to do
was to cut a wire in the device, but if you really want to be sure, buy a
sampling rate converter for less than $100 that solves the problem once and
for all.

- The region code on DVDs is quite useless given the amount of 'code free'
players around.

- Anyone remember the infamous 'Clipper' chip?

On the other hand, society should really rethink its behaviour, as far as
the consumption of so-called 'entertainment' is concerned.

Of course, I can only speak for myself, but when I turn on the radio, to my
mind all I get to hear is crap.

When I turn on the TV set, all I get to see is crap, interrupted by
annoying commercials the only intent of which is to make me buy just more
crap, because I'm supposedly so discontented with the crap I already have.
By the way, who _really_ needs cellphones?

To cut a long story short: All the copyrighted material that the spiffy new
cryptosystems would prevent us from replaying is stuff, that most of us
could easily do without, since we've seen/heard it all before anyway, only
performed by different actors and better instrumentalists.

Sony Music takes the copyright issue to extremes by explicitly forbidding
mail-order companies to publish short samples of their CDs, even when they
are only thirty seconds long and 24kbps mono quality. Then again, the
'Hooters - Definitive Collection' (even in the boxed set version!) comes
with ads for CD-Walkmen(TM) that you can't get rid of unless you rip the
booklet apart.

What I want to say is: Wasn't it time we put the final nails in the media
monopolies' coffins?

Regards!

	Alex

	Alex

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