response 118 of 126:

Sep 28 20:27 UTC 2000

  re #116: 

    > and since few seem willing to abide by that, they are 
    > turning to technological means to enforce their opinion.

  It's more twisted than that..  Having failed to maintain their
  oligopoly on copying and distribution, as new technologies arose
  that allowed copying to become decentralized (as nearly everyone
  got access to a copying device..) they abandoned their primarily
  legal approach to containing copying in favor of technological
  means.  But then they also lobbied for (and got) legal weapons
  to use against the producers of technology, so we have things like
  the DMCA, a legal weapon to use against people who are producing
  technological countermeasures to circumvent the technological weapons
  they adopted because their original legal weapons weren't working..

  Any honest participant in the discussion pretty much has to concede
  that there aren't enough courtrooms in America to try every person
  who would illegally duplicate copyrighted material if it were made
  exceedingly easy to do so -- you need only look at Napster's subscriber
  lists to determine that.  The publishing companies know their only
  option, unless they want to relax their control on music/book/movie
  distribution and pricing, is to attack the infringement chain at its
  weakest link (or perhaps its narrowest bottleneck..)  That weak point
  used to be the few infringers who owned the heavy equipment needed for
  mass duplication.  These days the weak point is where there are
  (relatively) few people with the technological knowledge and skill to
  circumvent the publishers' technological protections.

response 120 of 126:

Sep 28 22:52 UTC 2000

  Ahh, but the two issues are naturally linked because in order to
  exert control in either case you need to have some way to deny the
  data stream to the end consumer and an intermediary of some sort,
  controlled only by you, to handle the translation.  Having gone to
  the trouble of designing (albeit poorly) such a system to fight
  the easiest sort of illegal copying, DVD publishers have recognized
  that they can use the same technology to control regional viewing
  and have chosen to do so..

  Expect to see more and more intrusive developments in this front.
  Recent posts in Slashdot have pointed to news stories about a dental
  school which is switching to time-limited digital texts -- students
  pay (a lot) for a dentistry text that comes on CD-ROM.  The contents
  are licensed to them, and them only, for a limited time and unavailable
  after their time-limited decryption key expires.  Textbook publishers
  must be drooling over this technology, which promises to cripple that
  pesky competition from the used textbook market..

response 122 of 126:

Sep 29 02:44 UTC 2000

University bookstores will hate that.  Most of their profit comes from used
textbooks, not new ones.

response 124 of 126:

Sep 30 18:54 UTC 2000

That doesn't just affect those who want to buy and sell used books.  I
generally like to keep stuff I've read, so that I can go back and look at it
again if I have a question.  It's a big part of why I always buy books rather
than checking them out of libraries.

response 126 of 126:

Oct 14 22:45 UTC 2000

Now linked to cyberpunk.