SSSCA is far from dead, it may have a good chance of enactment according to Mike Godwin's essay today, "Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet:" http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-net-mg.htm Here are his opening paragraphs: "If you have a fast computer and a fast connection to the Internet, you make Hollywood nervous. And Tinseltown is nervous not because of what you're doing now, but because of what you *might* do -- grab digital Hollywood content with your computer and broadcast it over the Internet. Which is why Hollywood, along with other content companies, from book publishers to the music industry, has begun a campaign to stop you from ever being able to do such a thing -- even though you may have no intention of becoming a copyright "pirate." That campaign has pitted corporate giants like Disney and Fox against corporate giants like Microsoft and IBM, but the resulting war over the shape of future digital technology may end up with us computer users suffering the "collateral damage." As music-software designer and entrepreneur Selene Makarios puts it, this campaign represents "little less than an attempt to outlaw general-purpose computers." Let's get one thing straight -- when I say there's war looming in cyberspace over copyright, I'm not talking about the struggle between copyright holders and copyright "pirates" who distribute unlicensed copies of creative works for free over the Internet. Maybe you loved Napster or maybe you hated it, but the right to start a Napster, or to infringe copyright and get away with it, is not what's at issue here. And in a sense it's a distraction from what the real war is. What I'm talking about instead is the war between the content industries (call them "the Content Faction") and the information-technology industries -- call the latter "the Tech Faction." That faction includes not only computer makers, software makers, and related digital-device manufacturers (think CD burners and MP3 players and Cisco routers). Allied with the Content Faction are the consumer-electronics makers -- the folks who build your VCRs and DVD players and boomboxes. The Tech Faction, which makes smarter, more programmabale devices and technologies than the consumer-electronics guys do, may count among their allies many cable companies and even telephone companies. But what's the "collateral damage," exactly? Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: at some near-future date - perhaps as early as 2010 - individuals may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2001. They may no longer be able, for example, to move music or video files around easily from one of their computers to another (even if the other is just a few feet away in the same house), or to personal digital assistants. Their music collections, reduced to MP3s, may be moveable to a limited extent; unless their digital hardware doesn't allow it. The digital videos they shot in 1999 may be unplayable on their desktop and laptop computers -- or even on other devices -- in 2009. And if they're programmers, trying to come up with the next great version of the Linux operating system, for example, they may find their development efforts put them at risk of criminal and civil penalties if the tools they develop are inadequately protective of copyright interests. Indeed, their sons and daughters in grade-school computer classes may face similar risks, if the broadest of the changes now being proposed becomes law."