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In an essay entitled "Convergence indeed: Picking cotton for Bill," Michael Fraase asks:

"Imagine that suddenly, all distributions of GNU/Linux were illegal in the United States. As well as Zope, Python, Perl, Apache, and all other open source software products. While that arguably may not be the goal of the Security Systems Standard & Certification Act (SSSCA), it would surely be a result. The SSSCA would outlaw any digital device—including personal computers—that did not include a copy protection mechanism. Right now the only thing keeping it from happening are the events surrounding 11 September."

A Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) -- chair of the Senate Commerce Committee -- with a lot of help from Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., would expand the scope of the already draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).

"It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates," observes Fraase, "...it’s really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property."

The proposed legislation also calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they can’t come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will impose a standard.

"Should we be surprised that four of Hollings’ top campaign donors are media conglomerates?" Fraase asks.

There's more. A lot more. Remember the term "digital serfs?" That will be you and me, brother, if these scoundrels get their way.

You can check it out at:
http://www.farces.com/farces/1002668279/

Dan Bricklin also weighed in on the topic this week with a screed entitled: "Copy Protection Robs The Future."

"Copy protection will break the chain of formal and informal archivists who are necessary to the long-term preservation of creative works," Dan asserts.                                                                

"As human beings," he notes, "we benefit greatly from the works of others. Artists, thinkers, scholars, and performers create works that we all enjoy, learn from, and are inspired by. Many works are timeless. Either standing alone or in the context of their time or other times, they are valuable periodically years after they are created. We often hear of authors, artists, or composers who only become popular or have their greatest impact after their death, sometimes many years later."

"For some works,... copies are what we preserve... The practice of constantly producing new copies before the old copies wear out has worked well. To increase the likelihood of long-term survival for a work, such as a religious text, producing many copies and keeping them in diverse places has also worked very well."

"With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable."

However, if the copy protection legislation being promoted by the greedy and avaricious RIAA, the motion picture cartel, and fellow travelers in government like Sen. Fritz Hollings and his corporate brown-nosing buddies is put into place, a lot of preservational copying will be prevented.

If content creaters could look beyond their immediate, perceived self-interest to contemplate their place in posterity, they would be fighting tooth and nail AGAINST these fascistic copy-protection iniatiatives.

As Dan Bricklin puts it:

"I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their "owners" (if they are still in business).... Without not-copy protected 'originals', archivists, collectors, and preservers will be unable to maintain them the way they would if they weren't protected... Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future....Copy protection is arising as a 'simple fix' to preserve business models based upon the physical properties of old media and distribution.... Trying to keep those old business models in place is as inappropriate as continuing to produce only 33 rpm vinyl records.

Amen brother.

Read more here:
http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

As I've exhorted here before, let your elected representatives know emphatically who their friends are likely to be or not be in the voting booth next time around if they support these outrageous, information-inhibiting iniatiatives being advocated by the RIAA, Sen. Hollings, et al.

Provisional boycotts against the music industry with respect to copy-protected CDs, the movie industry, and against the hardware industry regarding any media products that employ copy protection must also be organized.

like the war against terrorism, the struggle against corporate greed and top-down control of the flow of information will be a long and wearying one. However, if we lose heart and give up, the bastards win by default.

For more information on digital freedom issues, visit:
http://www.eff.org/

Charles W. Moore

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