At brunch today with my women friends, after the unavoidable litanies of personal aches and pains, we, as usual, drifted into complaining about politics and government. Someone mentioned proposed legislation that would make it illegal to fast forward through commercials.
What!! No way, right?
Way.
Do you like fast-forwarding through commercials on a television program you’ve recorded? How much do you like it? Enough to go to jail if you’re caught doing it? If a new copyright and intellectual property omnibus bill sitting on Congress’s desk passes, that may be the choice you’ll face.
The IPPA (Intellectual Property Protection Act) is one of those Congressional mish-mashes of babies, bathwater, and slop. I have to believe that it won’t get passed without some careful scrubbing.
The following is enough to trigger some truly vocal outrage:
Here’s more of what’s included: a provision that would make it a felony to record a movie in a theater for future distribution on a peer-to-peer network. IPPA would also criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of iTunes, Apple’s popular music software program; the legislation equates that act with the indiscriminate file sharing on popular peer-to-peer programs. Currently, with iTunes, users can opt to share a playlist with others on their network. IPPA doesn’t differentiate this innocuous—and Apple sanctioned—act from the promiscuous sharing that happens when someone makes a music collection available to five million strangers on Kazaa or Grokster.
Are we scared enough yet?
Are we mad enough yet?
Well, yeah. But scared and mad enough to do what?
Do we hunker down, guard our privacy with our lives, hide in our attics with our remote controls and signal jamming devices? Do we form underground guerilla groups to share files? Do we stand shoulder to shoulder, backs to the technological tidal wave on which the whims of a gestapo state are riding?
We can allow government to corral us in with the magics of technology, allow them to fence us in with our own fears of being somehow “exposed”, or….
or what?
What if we all lived our lives out in the open. No secrets; no stigma. What if we shared our information about our DNA, medical histories, therapies, and tribulations etc, (you know, like lots of us do on the web already).
What if we redirected all of the energies that we put into hiding the things we have been programmed to feel are “nobody’s business” and free oursevles to unite against the fascism that’s already taking its toll on our lives. If we allow our “elected representatives” to keep doing the crappy job they’ve been doing, we are going to wind up wearing identifying patches on our sleeves and making sure that our “papers” are in order and on our persons at all times. (Not that those things won’t prevent our being hauled off to detainment camps.)
This government has become the enemy of its people.
It is all so truly REVOLTING.
UPDATE:
Thanks to Doug at The Alders (see comment to this post) for pointing to the truth of the matter.
I guess I have to make the effort and read the fine print of primary source documents. (Even though it’s so much more fun to ride a rant off someone else’s misguided assertions, it’s more important to learn — and share — what’s true.)
But I still think the government of my country deserves some revolting.