More Stupid Legislation
from the son-of-DMCA dept
Ugh. I had hoped that maybe the SSSCA would never see the light of day, but Senator "Disney" Hollings won't be stopped. While the new bill has changed its name to the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act, it's still the same old thing. It's as if the bill has been written by the entertainment industry to make sure that all of our fair use rights now become criminal acts. The entertainment industry has gotten used to calling all of its customers criminals - and this law may make that even more true. If anything, this bill (if passed) would basically harm the technology industry greatly - by forcing them to work with a technology they don't want to deal with - without doing very much to stop real piracy. Someone really ought to buy Senator Hollings a clue. There's also the obligatory quote from Hilary Rosen saying that this is obviously the best thing for the consumer. How's that? By taking away our fair use rights? Yeah, that's wonderful. Just what we wanted.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
