EFF Alert The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted an alert that Congress is asking for feedback on proposed legislation that would make new digital media technology illegal until expressly approved. Visit their page and learn how you can send feedback to Congress before this legislation becomes enacted law.
Here's what I sent. It's not great, but I didn't have a lot of time to write it.
Providing the media industry with the abiility to stall US implementation of new technology will fail to create any additional protection for copyright holders, while irreperably crippling the ability of our country to maintain its leadership in the worldwide technology business, a far larger and more crucial concern.Most piracy on large scale takes place overseas, and those individuals can afford the time to circumvent hardware blocks. It has already been proven that software and hardware copy-protection such as CSS in DVDs only serves to hamper consumer rights, while not providing a significant obstacle to copyright violators. This will be no less true of any other technology-based solution.
As an ex-journalist, trained in copyright law and intellectual property rights, I understand the importance of protecting intellectual property, particularly creative works. However, I disagree that the best solution to a social problem (copyright infringement) is a technological solution (copy protection.) This has never been true in the hundreds of years where technology solutions were used on sociological problems. The simple fact is that technology is not infallible, and anyone promising you that a system will be "perfect" or "unbreakable" is lying, both to themselves and to you.
I am a professional technology architect and project manager working within a leading telecom firm. In my experience, adding arbitrary obstructions to the user experience merely serves to disrupt user adoption and the ability for new media technologies to proliferate and become financially successful. They do not stop illegal copying of media any more than previous "unbreakable" attempts such as CSS and Macrovision did, but they will cause great harm to our ability to lead the world in technology solutions.
Sincerely,
Tom Karlo
