Skip to main content

MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations

A depressing and angering article by the same title: MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations

I don't have a whole lot to say about this, but it sure did make me angry. It is a little old, but I had filed it away and planned to write about. I feel strongly enough for it that I'll write about it, even if I'm writing about it late.

The basic idea here is that when the MPAA thinks of a home theater, they think in insane terms. If you have a TV over 29", stereo sound, and a couch, they are of the opinion that you owe them money and reporting of the use of your theater, just like the theater at the local mall. That is seriously just fucking crazy.

I use such strong language because this is something to feel very strong about and thus to express strongly.

My favorite quote is "Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn't give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That's a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends," said by MPAA head Dan Glickman.

Write your representatives, everyone. Even if you are out of the US, you might have similar things in the legislative pipeline. They like to attack of globally these days.
Labels:

Comments

Jay Camp said…
From bbspot.com:

Called "the world's greatest tech humour site" by The Register, BBspot creates entertainment for the geekier side of the world. BBspot produces a variety of features like fake news stories satirizing the tech and political worlds, the BBspot Mailbag which pokes fun at the Believers (people who believe our fake news) and much more.

Though they really shouldn't have given the MPAA the idea.
2:47 AM
Steve said…
That quote was really great: we are presumably supposed to make sure we buy our own copy of a DVD before we go and watch it at a friend's house? As I wrote some time ago, those Movie Moguls Need Control.

It really doesn't help that most politicians in America, as in most other countires, are seriously technically deficient, and will quite happily accept money from the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, then support their insane worldview with insane legislation like the DMCA.
4:06 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more