On 18 Dec 2001, at 20:57, John Young wrote:
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:"
I know he's theoretically one of the good guys, but for some reason Godwin pisses me off.
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."
More likely Finns just won't come to the US, and the software industry will move to Hong Kong or Thailand or Costa Rica or basically anywhere but here. Stupid fucks. Software can be written anywhere, so why is so much written here in the high cost of labor USA, in particular in the San Fran Fucking Cisco bay area? Well, people do kinda like it here for whatever reason, but writing software is one of the few things that you can do that is still (for now) almost completely unregulated. Anything remotely resembling the SSSCA would be the kiss of death for the American software industry, and worse. The day the SSSCA passes is the day I tell Tim May, "I'm sorry I once considered you an extremist, if anything you weren't extreme enough. Fuck it to death, and keep fucking the corpse." But I don't think that day will ever come. George