Good hello,

    Since the US government has no real ability to effectively protect the language of the American people, they have properly decided to subcontract the job to large corporations. One of these large corporations is the Recording Industry Association of America, or better known as the RIAA. This is evident by the passing of the long awaited, and needed, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) by the US legislature. What the DCMA entails is the fist step of many to properly preserve the rights of all written, recorded, broadcasted, digitized or any communication of any nature which could have copy write protection. Now, at first this may seem insufficient. After all, it’s only fair to compensate ones creative efforts. Artists need to survive, and if a company promotes an artist then it should have equal rights for compensation as well.

    The rights of large multinational conglomerates to properly collect their just due revenue streams should be protected, highly enforced and highly regulated. This protection may come in many forms. One of the current RIAA efforts is to collaborate with makers of hard drives to incorporate special proactive copy write protection features. These features would eventually impact the consumers benefit by reduced usefulness. However this measure is only needed due to lack of consumer participation in protecting the large multinational conglomerates property on the consumer’s hard drive. Another is by watermarking all music; weather digital or other. This would reduce the chance that consumers will make and distribute large quantities of copy write protected materials in America’s vast, and numerous, black markets.

    This type of communication control has been around for decades now and is prevalent in every day life. There are common every day words in the American language that are regularly controlled: Coke, AM/PM, Trans-am, Michael Jackson, and even numbers like 7/11. It’s only fair that they are strictly used only after receiving explicit written approval from the rightful owner. The only way to properly ensure this is to require all consumers to have any, but not limited to published, recorded, written, digitized, spoken and opinionated material checked and approved by these large multinational conglomerates prior to the act of any dissemination. This may seem a bit extravagant to the average person on the street. However, if you look at recent enforcement you will see that this is a much needed step.

    Such is the case for the recent situation involving the program called DeCSS. This was a small program that enabled the user to actually play and listen to their purchased DVD's under the Linux operating system. Such blatant infringements where not only limited to the playing and enjoyment of personal recording's. But, in fact, to a wide variety of printed articles, web postings and even a T-shirt with the code and comments proudly displayed. This obviously is a very excessive infringement against the rights of the RIAA. And swift harsh punishment was needed. The T-shirt Company was sued as well as a magazine company who printed the source code for the DeCSS. Web sites where ordered to remove all postings, opinions and links of the code as well. Even after those great measures taken by the RIAA. There are some citizens who escaped their just , and much needed, punishment. These citizens still believe that they can play and enjoy their purchased DVD's at their own leisure.

    Hopefully, in the near future, the RIAA and large multinational conglomerates will have their much needed equal rights. The RIAA has a dream, that one day all consumers will respect the rights of multinational conglomerates. However this dream will never happen unless we as consumers decide to protect these multinational conglomerates by strict adherence to the DCMA . Or any, and all, other laws that RIAA feels needed. Because it seems apparent that consumers have demonstrated a great lack of concern and empathy for these struggling multinational conglomerates for far too long.

This is taken from an article: here
(I can only  hope that this link will not infringe on any copyrights that are due.)
By: Someone who does not want to be sued cs301, Spring 2001