Comments on: Politicos wary of changes to copyright law

Fearing piracy, they're reluctant to rewrite laws so people can, for legal purposes, bypass copy protection on goods like CDs.

[R. U. Sirius]

Who to vote for

>"It boils down to this: I believe that when
>I buy a music album or movie DVD, it should
>be mine once I leave the store," Barton said
>at the hearing, which featured a panel of eight
>representatives from a range of industries.

Exactly

>"I hope we can slow down the movement of (the
>consumer) bill or stop it entirely," said Rep.
>Mary Bono, a California Republican who
>described herself as a "staunch opponent" of
>the bill.

Some REPRESENTATIVE. I guess Mary Bono's district is comprised of the RIAA.

[m.meister]

Stearns afraid of rushing to legislate

Funny how they're afraid of rushing to legislate rights of
ordinary citizens. They certainly were fine with rushing to take
away those rights and grant giant companies with plenty of
lobbyists the right to do whatever the wanted (leading to the
Sony fiasco).

Technology is not the answer. Having some CD player/software
program decide that I've made too many copies of a song is
inappropriate.

I don't pirate music or movies, but I do make copies. I make
regular copies of music for my car because they get scratched
up easily.

The REAL pirates are PRESSING their CDs and DVDs. All that
DMCA (and most of these laws) does is punish the honest
people. The mom that would like to make a copy of that Disney
DVD that the kids destroy in a matter of a couple weeks time.
The son that wants to listen to his mix CD in his car.

DMCA does absolutely NOTHING to stop real pirates. It never has
and it never will.

If you are to believe all the RIAA/MPAA lies, you have to assume
that virtually everyone is spending all their time just making
endless copies of CDs and DVDs. In their eyes, everyone is a
pirate until proven otherwise.

[VI Joker]

Same ol stroy

Its all about money. The MPAA and RIAA throws a lot of money at politicians, especially representatives from California who are not in a rush to lose that amount of support come reelection time. This stalling has nothing to with seeing if the market will resolve this issue, which it will not, its about the entertainment industry waving some cash in people's faces. I am sure this change will be buried under other more "important" matters.

[Jerry Dawson]

Who will this hurt?

There are some odd angles to this business. I actually work in copyright management (music publishing).

The inability to burn a copy of a commercially available CD, or rip an mp3, will prevent the company I work for from getting material to ad agencies in useful time for ad campaigns (they usually want things the day before yesterday - not when they arrive by post from the USA).

Pity they shut WinMX. It was very useful to us in quickly tracking down real copyright infringements (where they sampled or copied part of a song written by one of our clients). Because, of course, you need to do this on a worldwide scale as the offending item frequently is not released in the territory you work in (meaning it cannot be tracked down through normal channels, including i-Tunes).

In both of the above cases, it is the songwriter/artist who loses out.