best anti-circumvention story from Slashdot this Monday

[Kragen Sitaker]

Slashdot had an article asking for stories about how the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA hurt the public.

I really like this one, by walker@msgto.com:


Here is a real world example for the EFF. 

This will require me to tell you all a little bit about my life: 

I share a house with two other people, one other computer programmer
and an air-conditioning repairman from Costa Rica I will call "John".
John lives with us because, like us, he races mountain bikes, and we
have built a little bike shop into the house for building and repairing
race bikes. He's a good mechanic, but his english isn't very good.

We have a really good A/V setup, but no DVD player. Last week, John
brought home a DVD player from Best Buy, and "The Matrix" on DVD. He
hooked it into his T.V., only to discover that the picture was, as he
put it, "shit".

I told John that the picture was screwy because of a technology called
Macrovision, hidden inside his DVD player. It's purpose was to prevent
him from criminally copying DVD's onto VHS. John said "but I don't want
to do that, I just want to watch it!". I told John that the MPAA had
assumed he was a criminal, and put Macrovision in his DVD player to
stop his crimes. Because John's T.V. only has analog input, he cannot
use his new DVD player. No one at Best Buy told him this. He has to buy
a new T.V., which he can't afford.

John got mad.

Then I told John that buying a "Macrovision scrubber" to clean up the
signal was against the law, as he would be owning a circumvention
device. And I went on to tell him that when he went home to Costa Rica,
he couldn't use any of the DVD's he bought there in his DVD player,
because they had put a special code in the DVD's in Costa Rica so they
wouldn't work, and he had to buy another DVD player when he went back
there. If he tried to get around the code, he would be a criminal,
because of a new law.

That's when John lost it. He got really mad. He threw the DVD player
back in the box, took it back to Best Buy, and got his money back, but
also got thrown out of the store for using his broken English to call
them "Stupid Bastard Fucking People" - as he puts it.

I tried to calm John down, but I think in his culture they don't have
the emphasis on restraint. When someone does something awful to you,
you get angry, and you go yell at them. He doesn't understand that in
America, faceless corporations do terrible things to people all the
time, and you can't get mad, because all your anger will be wasted on
some powerless teen-age clerk.

In America, the only way to do exert power is to spend money. That's
why I donate to the EFF.

"John" now understands why the two rich guys he lives with only watch
movies on VHS.

That's my real life example. 


-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
       -- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]