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A week full of horrible news regarding the Internet. Just check these headlines:
"Federal judge bans three New York programmers from posting DVD-cracking program". "The Recording Industry Association of America filed suit on Friday against digital-music portal site MP3.com Inc., alleging that the site's new Instant Listening and Beam-It services violate its members' copyrights". As far as the DVD decoding is concerned, the lawsuits, filed in federal courts in New York and Connecticut, followed a broader lawsuit filed last month in state court in California by a DVD equipment manufacturers group. ZDNet reports that "at issue is a program called DeCSS, written by a Norwegian programmer, that allows users to bypass the encryption scheme used on DVDs to prevent unauthorised copying. But many Internet users and programmers say the software had a simpler, less insidious goal. They said the program was needed to allow people to watch DVD movies on computers running the Linux operating system". And the score is, so far, a draw: The Studios won on New York but they lost in California (although the will try soon to bring the case using another Company as their vehicle). All this is despite of the fact that the said copyright infringement does not reproduces the superior quality of the DVD and excludes the interactive features of the new media. Can you imagine being yourself an owner of a Linux machine and as you are unable to read a movie or record on DVD you download a piece of software that is the only that enables you to read a DVD movie, and been faced as a criminal because of the potential of this product to be used for copyright infringement? I guess that even George Orwell had failed to predict such an event. The situation is getting quite critical actually since the Network Society that we are striving to build it seems that it will have a Network topology borrowed from other times. When talking about networks we are imagining a system where each node has a potentially equal contribution to the overall network. That was the case in the first years of the development of the Internet but it appears that this won't be the case for any longer. Well mind you that the Web now is such a big business that AOL afforded to buy Time Warner, for the largest merger so far! All of us who thought Internet as our own Far West to tame and build something new upon it (even with many shortcomings and delays as only my editor knows!) will have to think again. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Hi-End Law Gears to Limit the Freedom of the Internet. in Audio Equipment is owned by . Permission to republish Hi-End Law Gears to Limit the Freedom of the Internet. in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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