Scary Laws

[c9]

Intellectual Property Law meets the greed of Hollywood. Be afraid!

"To simplify, any device that can record video will be illegal to import or purchase in a year, if it doesn't obey DRM." [Digital Rights Management, a category of anti-copying rules and software --Cam]

"In plain English, [Copy Prohibited Content] means that your recorded program, should you start watching it an hour after it's done recording, will start to delete itself 30 minutes later. Think of the fun you and your family can have trying to keep ahead of the deletion queue!"

We should all be worried about this because US copyright and IP laws inevitably appear in Canada as well, often in identical form. And we're not big enough to warrant special shipments of electronics, or different DVD releases... for all intents and purposes, Canada is merely another portion of the United States for Hollywood!

To quote simplisticton:

Your VCR: illegal. Your PVR: illegal. Like to watch movies on your PSP or your PDA? Illegal. Video iPod: you better believe that's illegal.

Comments

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

I don't have any figures to back it up, but I'm pretty sure that the US is the largest single importer of consumer electronics in the world. If their laws say that thou shalt have scary DRM built-in, the hardware companies will be forced to oblige, and they won't pour resources into "DRM'd for US use" and "non-DRM'd for everyone else's use" bifurcation of their product lines, especially when one of the major players, Sony, has a vested interest in supporting and "enhancing" DRM whenever possible.

Sony has been trying to lock people into their hardware products and out of their software products using DRM and hardware (in)compatibility since the '70's. That won't change now, and if this legislation were to pass, it would be a major win for them, in that they'd now have a legal basis on which to be evil.