March 21, 2006

Weather And Ranting

Here in Cedar Rapids, "first full day of spring" means "wake up to an inch of snow." Good thing I haven't taken my winter snow tires off yet. There's still snow on my balcony, although it's mostly melted everywhere else.

In much better news, I got home from work and saw this:

Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Twenty-four pages on why the DMCA is evil, courtesy of the Cato Institute. They managed to make almost all the right arguments, and reminded me again why I hate the DMCA.

See, under the DMCA, I cannot, legally:

1) Play any DVDs on any of my computers, since I finally got rid of Windows, and I don't own any Macs. This includes, say, taking a DVD and my laptop on the plane to kill some flight time.
2) Buy any music or video from the iTunes store, for the same reasons.
3) Use Linux as the operating system for a home theater PC which plays DVDs or DRM'ed music CDs.

Any one of those is a federal crime.

And, as the paper points out so well, had the DMCA been around earlier, it would have effectively killed the PC industry in its infancy. We would all be running IBM machines. Likely, they would be 10x as expensive as they are now. And I highly doubt this whole mysterious 'Internet' thing would exist as it does today.

Yay for stupid laws, stupid Congressmen who write them, and stupid Presidents who sign them. Just let me play the movies that I spend my hard-earned money on in peace, without having to follow some ludicrously expensive industry standard first.

Posted by Ardith at March 21, 2006 07:03 PM | TrackBack