The Null Device

Welcome to the Digital Millennium: John "gnu" Gilmore has written an excellent piece about what's wrong with content protection, and the myriad schemes and power-grabs hatched by back-room conspiracies of entertainment and computer industry figures to deprive you of your legitimate, legal rights:
Intel touts the wonders of their TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Architecture)... It exists to report to record companies about whether you have installed any software that lets you make copies of MP3s, or any free software to circumvent whatever feeble copy-protection system the record company uses.
SDMI would not allow EFF to join its deliberations, saying that we had no legitimate interest in the proceedings because we weren't a music company or a manufacturer. There are no consumer or civil rights representatives in the SDMI consortium.
What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. ..
If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars?

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