Beating a dead horse - Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act

[Alan Dayley]

I must be dense today.  I'm not sure I follow you.

According to "fair use" I am able to make a copy of a DVD to VHS without 
violating copyright.  According to copyright "fair use" law and case law, I 
can rip a CD I purchased to copy it to a cassette tape so I can listen to it 
in my car as long as I don't sell or give the copy to someone else.  It is a 
copy only for my use.

This CBDTPA will not eliminate fair use by law but will probably eliminate it 
by implementation of the technology.  I don't see how it could be possible 
under current market conditions and technology to make every possible digital 
device allow "fair use" of digital content.  If I download a book, how can it 
be locked to my computer, my PDA, my laptop and perhaps my printer (it's a 
digital device) but not let me transmit a copy to my friend?  I don't know 
what cheap technology could be used that would prevent copies to my friend 
(violating copyright) but at the same time NOT prevent copies to my own other 
devices.  Every device would have to have the same, unbreakable ID that is 
also encoded into the content.  How do all the devices get the same 
unbreakable ID?  This leads straight to the national (international?) 
electronic ID card.

All this invasion of privacy, expense and infrastructure because Disney et. 
al. want to charge for every bit they have copyrighted and assume everyone is 
a pirate?  I have to pay for every digital copy?

It is impracticle nonsense.

Alan

On Sunday 31 March 2002 09:20 am, you wrote:
> Oh, like trying to make a VHS copy of a DVD?  The DVD player won't
> allow it without getting trick with extra equipment.
>
> Gotcha.
>
> George
>