Digital Rights Management, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are all about various intellectual property holders getting their share of your pocketbook, with or without your active permission and consent.
The DMCA was all about supposedly guaranteeing that just because the internet made it really easy to transfer data, you still couldn't do it without paying for it. Of course, *proving* you did anything wrong is the big stopping point there, and is where the Record Industry Association of America has been throwing its weight around.
Over the last year or so, RIAA has been trying to make ISP providers personally responsible for what anyone on their site does with their resources. That's why these ISP's are fighting the writs the RIAA is giving them demanding the identities of people who used ther service on such-and-such a date. This suddenly turns the ISP into a Big Brother-esque monitor on your internet activity. Where you went, what you did, your entire daily internet traffic. All up for grabs to the first person to come along with a signed warrant.
The ISP's refute this, stating that they simply provide a service, and aren't responsible for what the people who use it do with it. Like a terrorist placing a phone call to another terrorist, you can't expect Ma Bell to be monitoring the phone call and writing down names. But in the RIAA's case, that's *exactly* what they expect ISP's to be doing. And the ISP's are fighting back. Vigorously.
Supporting these DRM-based sites is basically another way to passively throw your vote in with organizations that want to restrict everything. Like the guy who copyrighted the "Happy Birthday" song (I'm not kidding. Anytime you hear that in a movie, he's getting royalties), the ambition is to turn any possible "intellectual property" into something someone somewhere can use to generate money with. And the DRM movement is designed to help make that possible.
So when the people who support DRM go to the courts and hold up the lists of their users as proof that *this* many people support Digital Rights Management, signing onto their service just adds one more name to that list. And you *know* they'll use you as a passive vote *for* the DMCA, and not pay you a dime for it, don't you?
So who's getting screwed here? Certainly not them...
The DMCA was all about supposedly guaranteeing that just because the internet made it really easy to transfer data, you still couldn't do it without paying for it. Of course, *proving* you did anything wrong is the big stopping point there, and is where the Record Industry Association of America has been throwing its weight around.
Over the last year or so, RIAA has been trying to make ISP providers personally responsible for what anyone on their site does with their resources. That's why these ISP's are fighting the writs the RIAA is giving them demanding the identities of people who used ther service on such-and-such a date. This suddenly turns the ISP into a Big Brother-esque monitor on your internet activity. Where you went, what you did, your entire daily internet traffic. All up for grabs to the first person to come along with a signed warrant.
The ISP's refute this, stating that they simply provide a service, and aren't responsible for what the people who use it do with it. Like a terrorist placing a phone call to another terrorist, you can't expect Ma Bell to be monitoring the phone call and writing down names. But in the RIAA's case, that's *exactly* what they expect ISP's to be doing. And the ISP's are fighting back. Vigorously.
Supporting these DRM-based sites is basically another way to passively throw your vote in with organizations that want to restrict everything. Like the guy who copyrighted the "Happy Birthday" song (I'm not kidding. Anytime you hear that in a movie, he's getting royalties), the ambition is to turn any possible "intellectual property" into something someone somewhere can use to generate money with. And the DRM movement is designed to help make that possible.
So when the people who support DRM go to the courts and hold up the lists of their users as proof that *this* many people support Digital Rights Management, signing onto their service just adds one more name to that list. And you *know* they'll use you as a passive vote *for* the DMCA, and not pay you a dime for it, don't you?
So who's getting screwed here? Certainly not them...