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November 20, 2004
But then there's this
hockeyman at Metafilter provides a link to this gruesome story. hockeyman's commentary focuses on the specter of laws against fast-forwarding through commercials, and I agree; it's outrageous. From my perspective, though, even worse is this little comment, made by Jonathan Lamy, spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America: "Intellectual property theft is a national security crime."
Oh. My. God. Now transgressive authorship is not only a sign of low character; a "violation" of the {putative} originary author's "soul" (see Malcolm Gladwell's piece for samples of this sort of discourse), but it's a violation of national security. Will music downloaders, plagiarists, and people who fast-forward through commercials wind up at Guantanamo, defined as enemy combatents? I'm only half kidding. I really never anticipated my concerns about Turnitin.com converging quite so directly with my concerns about repressive, imperialist government. But of course I should have seen this coming.
Eric Hellweg, who writes the report for Technology Review, reacts with more temperance than do I: "Anyone attuned to the machinations of Congress the last two years likely has become numb to the often overblown rhetoric on this issue. Both sides use hyperbole—usually in the form of calling a piece of legislation the death of an industry or the death of individual rights."
Posted by senioritis at November 20, 2004 08:10 AM
Comments
What scares me even more is that they might actually have a means of enforcing it. How would they know unless they were actually able to track your activity? Who knew that Orwell was writing non-fiction????
Posted by: Bender at November 20, 2004 10:37 AM
Umhm. Tom & I have just been talking about that. I guess the way they can track it is if you subscribe to one of those cable services that allows you to tape shows onto your cable box. I've also seen mention of some sort of black box that could be put into cars so that police & insurance companies could monitor your driving habits. I've also heard--and maybe this is urban legend--that in marijuana-growing areas, police monitor the computer records of grocery purchases (through those courtesy cards that the grocery store scans as you begin checkout) for people who are buying a whole lot of small plastic bags. --Which makes me a bit uneasy, since I do a lot of home freezing at harvest time, just when the pot harvest, too, would be coming in. I'm just waiting for the opportunity to show the police my freezer.
Posted by: senioritis at November 20, 2004 12:38 PM