Battleangel

Cory over at BoingBoing comments on the new US Family Copyright Bill, which imo represents in a nutshell what is wrong with America, both corporately and socially.

The House just passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which is a classic DC compromise bill: on the one hand, it panders to the Hollywood filmocrats by promising mandatory beheading for people caught videotaping movies in theatres, and on the other, it throws the tiniest, most noncontroversial of bones to the copyfighters by legalizing tools that automatically fast-forward, audio-mask, and otherwise munge DVDs during playback, a technique largely employed by Christian companies that sell paranoid parents players that guarantee nipple-and-cussword-free playback of movies from the corner Blockbuster.

Me, I can’t wait to see the reverse: you can already buy guides to film-nudity that provide you with film names and timecode to skip right to that moment in some actor’s past when she or he bared all — a “good-parts” version, if you will. I would happily patronize a “FilthyFlicks” service that promised to lop out all the non-cussin’, non-naked parts of the movie, leaving me with nothing but pure, degenerate rot.

Ditto!

So in essence you get the worst of both worlds. More corporate might. More self-righteous and hypocritical moralism. Obviously no “copyfighter” I know of will have any use for fast-forwarding, audio-masking in any least way. What we want (legal decryption for instance) has already been made impossible by the DMCA in the US and soon the EUCD in the EU.

See also: CNET Prison terms on tap for ‘prerelease’ pirates