www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1474613,00.html
The Guardian Interesting battle lines were drawn with the family entertainment and cop yright bill, 2005, signed into law by President Bush last week. American drafters habitually smuggle in tough regulation under the skirts of som ething beguilingly innocent. On the face of it, the "Family Movie Act" ( which the new measure incorporates) is all motherhood and apple pie. Specifically, the act opens the way for companies like ClearPlay legally to sell their product. The firm operates out of Utah (the most straitlac ed state in the union). You get a DVD, from Blockbusters or wherever, an d ClearPlay's little black box, sitting like a benign leech on your DVD player, sucks out "objectionable" material of a violent or sexual nature .
Teams of "movie professionals" h ave pre-identified questionable scenes and dialogue which are duly muted or skipped. ClearPlay monitors all the latest releases and most in-stoc k titles. The black box can be fitted, like a chastity belt, on junior's bedroom TV. It can be programmed to peremptorily block anything certifi ed PG13 or harder. There was anxiety that the bill might open the way to ad-skipping - somet hing that Congress (at the behest of commercial lobbyists) dislikes. The last thing lawmakers want is to keep the honest salesman from getting h is foot in the door. Senator Orrin G Hatc h (Republican, Utah), the moral dinosaur who had introduced the measure, hailed it as a mighty "shield" for the American home. The Brady Bunch c ould sit down of a night and watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mysterio usly, of course, the movie might only last half an hour - but, early to bed, early to rise. Hatch noted in passing that there were, attached to his family bill, some piddling "intellectual property" provisions relating to "rampant piracy " from the internet. In fact, tagged-on clauses now make illicit downloa ding and file-sharing tantamount to domestic terrorism. It is now a federal crime to use a video camera to record films in cinema s, punishable by up to three years in prison for the first offence. It i s 10 years for sharing a movie or a song prior to its commercial release . These draconian penalties were clearly the result of lobbying by the M otion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of Amer ica. Without the smokescreen of family protection, such excessive penalt ies would never have passed into law - at least not without opposition. Technological advances in music-delivery systems have developed at bewild ering speed over the last five years: from Walkman, through MiniDisc pla yer, to iPod. Apple's device is itself increasing in power by 20 gigabyt es a year. The latest models can hold nigh on 10,000 tracks: all instant ly retrieved, shuffled, and playlisted. Where can you get a thousand albums' worth of mus ic to fill the iPod's vast archival capacity? And there is all that time and hassle involved in the loading procedure. One loaded Apple laptop in a college dorm will stock any number of iPods in neighbouring bedrooms. Crossloading of this kind, without charge, is, I think, not illegal. My iPod could contain the whole of the Vogu e, Blue Note, Vanguard, and Verve catalogues.
Alternatively, they'll customise your iPod with a package of 100 tracks in some preferred style (blues, classical or what ever) for $119. For the more freebootingly inclined, pre-owned and pre-populated iPods ar e appearing on eBay. How long before "faux" pre-owned iPods appear, artf ully customised for a whole spectrum of tastes, at budget prices? Nor will it be long before the lawmakers realise that copyright is b eing massively evaded. Before the legal chopper comes down, perhaps I'll get my 50s jazz archive.
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