Wow, here's just a quicky for ya. According to
an article at BusinessWeek.com, Congress has passed a law that makes it legal for people to use devices that will allow them to screen out "objectionable" material from DVDs. For instance, if you wanted to watch a 5 minute version of
Robocop you could use a device to screen out all of the violence. You'd also have a pretty shitty movie. But I'm cool with anything that gives the consumer more power over the media they purchase. Of course, in an ideal world, we could all be grown-ups and simply
not watch movies we think might contain objectionable material. As an artist, myself, I don't like the idea of a device that can recut my film to be less "offensive," whatever the hell that means. I guess as long as everyone understands that I wrote my projects a certain way to create a certain effect that will likely go away once the average joe starts monkeying around with it.
Speaking of purchasing media (or not purchasing media), there's a catch with that there law that just got passed. It turns out that the full title of the bill is "The Family Entertainment and
Copyright Act." I added the bold there. See, this law also makes using a video camera to record a movie off a movie screen a
federal offense punishable with 3-6 years in prison. It also will put anyone who shares a movie or song(s) before their commercial release behind bars for ten years.
There's government protecting the rights of
citizens I mean,
corporations. I think this could be described almost exactly by the word "fascism."
Huh, NEAT.
The combination of corporations and government working together to excessively punish people for committing non-violent civil crimes, while not a technical definition of fascism, is certainly close enough for me.
A wise man once said:
"There it is...
take it."
A free Gmail invite to the first person who can tell me what famous Angeleno said that.
UPDATED 4/27/5 5:41pm PT:
Here's
an article from NewsDay.com if you want to read more about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment