Great discussion. Reminds me of a couple things.
Back in the mid/late-1990s, I worked in the IT department of a large corporate retailer that sold numerous copyrighted entertainment products, including music CDs. This was, of course, during the early days of illegal file-sharing sites and the very early days of online retailing. At a large conference/"Expo" for retailers and vendors, I happened to sit in on an informal meeting that included reps from a couple major music vendors and execs and buyers from our company. One of those buyers (who had, informally, become my mentor in my early days with the company) was extremely technologically astute, as well as being one of the most powerful buyers in the industry. When the subject of the file-sharing sites came up, she made the point that they merely represented the tip of the technology iceberg, that there were even more "exotic" and efficient distribution technologies already in the pipeline and that it would be smart and profitable for these vendors to start working on adapting their business model to take advantage of them. The vendor reaction was derisive laughter followed by a pledge to "sue all these sites and the people who use them into oblivion." Apparently, the seeds of the DMCA had already been sown. Also sown, at that moment, were the seeds of my own understanding that major corporate industries want markets free from "government regulation" so that they can use their financial heft to regulate markets themselves, instead - including USING government to thwart technlogies that might enable new businesses who could threaten their staus quo.
Later in the discussion, I heard our own company's CEO claim, in all seriousness, "The Internet is just a fad, like CB radio. It will fade away on its own soon enough." This was the guy who not only refused to invest anything in an online presence for our company (until it was way too late) and also, fairly soon after this, was instrumental in getting the company board to turn down an offer to buy a 50% stake in a parallel (to our business) online startup for a relative pittance, less than a third of the annual budget for building out more brick-and-mortar locations. That same startup, within about three years, became the dominant player in our industry.
Similar to SOPA/PIPA, part of the problem with the original DMCA was technologically ignorant language. With the DMCA, it was vague language intended to make it illegal for anyone to "hide" their computer's actual IP address or to use/sell/develop/distribute technologies to enable this "hiding". As worded, it would have made, for instance, all in-home routers illegal. The wording also, apparently, would have made development of privacy technologies such as personal encryption illegal. IIRC, most such provisions were discarded from the final version that passed at the federal level (after a very vigorous campaign waged by tech folks to demonstrate the abject folly of the concept). However, the MPAA and RIAA later went on a state-to-state roadshow, lobbying individual state legislatures to pass "mini-DMCAs" that retained such provisions. Part of their sales pitch was the claim that such provisions could prevent child pornographers from being able to fly under the radar ("The more things change.....").
And, of course, many states passed such bills. IMHO, such travesties are possible because most elected officials are good at primarily ONE thing - getting elected. Expecting the majority of them to ALSO have a decent working knowledge of the things we're ostensibly hiring them to manage, such as technology issues, appears to be completely unrealistic. Anyway, among the states that passed such "mini-DMCAs" was the state where I had spent most of my adult life. An acquaintance back there, who was involved with and later married a long time close friend of mine, was/is an internationally well-known researcher in legitimate computer security and encryption technologies, working in affiliation with a major state university. When that state's bill passed, all his work effectively became felonious. To protect himself from prosecution, he was forced to immediately move all his work to offshore servers, end his affiliation with the university and move out of the U.S. for awhile (he eventually came back to resume his career in another state that hadn't passed such legislation).
Yep. Good times, all the way around. Not particularly thrilled to see that they're back.
