I almost wish this would pass, and worse

I almost wish this would pass, and worse

Posted Jan 26, 2006 14:35 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66)
In reply to: I almost wish this would pass, and worse by felixfix
Parent article: Ugly legislation in the U.S.

In contrast, though, look at the DRM we've got right now: CSS and region coding.

The vast majority of people aren't even aware of CSS, because their DVD players and Windows machines handle it. Only those of us who run Linux and want to use free software to legitimately watch DVDs are (perhaps) aware of CSS, and need to do something that Hollywood considers illegal to work around it. Yet, it's a restriction, and a stupid one that's a thorn in our side.

Region coding more people are aware of, but not enough people care for it to be even a PR problem for Hollywood. I talked to my sister about this in the last couple of months; she spent a few years in Brazil, and only then became aware of region coding, *and* she was working around it before she even knew what was going on. Somebody told her how to get disks to play. I told her what was going on, and also warned her about the "only 5 changes" stupidity. It's only the people who move, or who move back and forth, across the Holly Curtain who are even affected by this. Many of them are quite inconvenienced and quite annoyed. The rest of us-- we're not affected, so we just pretend it's not a problem and keep buying our eye candy.

DRM can be slipped in there, as long as there are enough people who aren't bothered by it that Hollywood can keep getting away with it.

It's like a lot of free speech. Nearly everybody in this country has all kinds of speech that they wouldn't mind seeing forbidden. If it isn't something they wanted to say anyway, most of them won't object to it being squelched. If you're determined to censor, the clever thing to do is to figure out how to do it in a way that some will support you, and most won't notice. Very few people have thought about it enough to realize that free speech means other people being able to say things it wouldn't even occur to you to want to say, or that you don't approve of.

-Rob

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