Hopefullty this will not become law.(either this Usa thing or some European variant )
This whole copyright craziness comes imho from the fact that the (music/film/software) industry thinks it loses billions of income due to piracy, ok they will lose some money due to it but i know that I would never buy all the cd/movies/software that i have downloaded. i have some stuff i tried once and never touched since (photoshop, ms office amongst others ) but the industry would say that it has lost income due to that , yeah right !
ofcourse the industry has a right to try and make a living but laws like this are way over the top, trying to get consumers to pay as much and as often as possible and making it a law so you wont even have any alternative or the possibility to make/code one yourself.
I Wonder how clueless this Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) really is and what kind of home entertainment system he has at home (maybe a big sponsored one?)
Another large problem is that a lot of people really have no clue about laws like this (yea, it will stop evil hackers so it must be good) but what they dont realize/know is that it will hurt them too by making it impossible to share a piece of music between players ( no you can only play it at home, if you want to play it in your car too you'll have to pay again)
And there always is a way to work around it . how long will it be until there are tools that circumvent it ( by adding a false working watermark for example)
Yes it will be illegal, but people in general dont seem to care about that already (like downloading and sharing copyrighted mp3's is illegal).
Making and eventually (trying to ) enforcing laws like this is a waste of time,effort and money that could be better spent elswhere.
if this thing does become law then you better hang on to your old stuff and hope it never breaks because it will be the only thing that allows you to use it the way you want to.
Even DVD players (the stand-alone kind) are marketed here with a big sign saying : Regio code free.
This is in part why i dont trust politicians too much, they too easily make decisions in things that they dont have an understanding of ( and think this decision will make them get more votes), or are they influenced by companies with a lot of money?
Is America still the land of the free?
( i know, Europe is working hard on stuff like this too :-( :-x )
(permission to reproduce this post in entirety or in part is hereby granted to everyone in whatever form desired)
btw i dont really see the connection between amiga inc's copy protection/licences and this , this bill is far worse.
If the license is too restricting i wont buy it (like Windows Xp license and product activation, i'll use a pirated version because its easier to reinstall, if it wont let me update , then fine, i wont update), I like linux because it is free to copy, i can learn from it by copying other peoples code and use it and I will pay for programs(products) that i think are good. (like probably Aos4 / AmigaOne) that way supporting the company producing it.
(sorry about the long post , just wanted to get my opinion out while i still can)
