Well, my first (half)-week on the job at the EFF has come and gone, and I have something to show for it. This rant is a call to action for folks like you and me to drop a line to Les Vadasz, the only technology exec who had the chips to stand up to Senator Fritz's technology witch-hunt in DC last week. Bad Senator, no donut.
Technologists have always saved the entertainment industry from itself. From Marconi's telegrapher-reviled radio to Jack Valenti's campaign against the VCR, the entertainment industry has always fought to keep new technologies out of the marketplace. Again and again, new technologies have generated fresh millions for the labels and studios and publishers, and again and again, they've come back to bite the byte that feeds them, blustering in front of lawmakers for the right to control what technologists can build in the privacy of their own garages.
But this time, they've gone too far. The movie studios have cooked up a Congressional fire-drill whose objective is nothing less than total control over the computer and electronics industry. Senator Hollings' stalled one-law-to-rule-them all, the reviled SSSCA, is still lurking in the wings. In the meantime, the entertainment industry is intent on sneaking the SSSCA past Congress with a series of technology-specific "mini-SSSCAs."
