MS DRM OS Begets SSSCA

[John Young]

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."