Ladies & Gentleman, it appears you can stand down the missiles again, however remain vigilant. You never know when they will try again. Moderators could probably "unstick" this thread. Good job everyone.
Dave McOwen
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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50784,00.html
House Cool to Copy Protection
By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) and Robert Zarate
2:00 a.m. March 4, 2002 PST
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives doesn't seem willing
to intercede in an increasingly bitter dispute over embedding copy
protection controls in all consumer electronic devices.
Key legislators in the House have indicated they're skeptical of the
government mandating anti-piracy technology, an approach that
Democrats of the Senate Commerce Committee endorsed during a hearing
last Thursday.
Fretting that online piracy of digital content will imperil sales,
Hollywood studios have asked Congress to bypass their negotiations
with Silicon Valley firms by requiring that all PCs and consumer
electronics sport technology to prohibit illicit copying. Senate
Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) has championed
this approach.
"Mr. Coble believes Hollings' approach would have the government
mandate specific software standards governing encryption or access
to copyrighted works, which are transmitted digitally in lieu of
negotiated industry standards," said a spokesman for Rep. Howard
Coble (R-North Carolina), the chairman of the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Intellectual Property.
Spokesman Terry Shawn said: "He is concerned that this approach is
too interventionist and could lead to standards which favor certain
brands of software over others, and which could quickly become
obsolete as technology improves or changes." [...]
"Hollings' bill would mandate copy protection chips on all sorts of
hardware and machines in the same way that the V-chip was mandated
on television sets," said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for House
Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).
Diamond said his boss, one of the more vocal members of the
Republican Party's free-market wing, doesn't like the government
requiring standards: "Rep. Armey found the V-chip inappropriate
too."
[...]
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