On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 08:59:43PM -0500, Neil Johnson wrote:
Remember it only requires ONE high-quality non-watermarked analog to digital copy to make it on the net and it's all over.
And that is what this whole nonsensical scheme founders on. There are probably 300-500 million existing sound cards out there and at least millions of existing NTSC analog capture cards. Many if not most can do acceptable fidelity conversion of analog audio and video to digital formats if programmed correctly. And there are even a few tens of thousands (or more) of new generation PCI cards that capture ATSC digital video (including HDTV) direct to disk in the clear. The MPAA cannot will these out of existance. Sure some are obselete ISA based designs, but there are certainly enough reasonably current boards around so that it will be a long long while before the population of working systems capable of performing analog to digital conversion of either watermarked audio or video reaches insignificance. And without that point being reached, anything else seems pretty ineffective as per your point above. And telling the public that they face serious jail time if they don't turn in that Creative Soundblaster from the old PC in the attic closet isn't going to fly. The sheeple may be sheep but even they aren't going to accept that kind of nonsense from Hollywood or any corrupt congress. I'd even venture to say that if this issue breaks out into the big time and the public really is faced with crippled devices that don't work and mandatory obselescence of existing expensive computer and entertainment systems with potential jail time for use of old equipment that the backlash will be so intense that raw public votes will control over Hollywood money. -- Dave Emery N1PRE, die@die.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18