Arts and Farces: Convergence indeed: Picking cotton for Bill

“Pretty soon all God’s creators gonna be pickin’ cotton
for Bill. Or maybe Rupert or Walt.

Imagine that suddenly, all distributions of GNU/Linux were
illegal in the United States. As well as Zope, Python, Perl,
Apache, and all other open source software products. While that
arguably may not be the goal of the Security Systems Standard &
Certification Act (SSSCA), it would surely be a result. The SSSCA
would outlaw any digital device — including personal computers —
that did not include a copy protection mechanism. Right now the
only thing keeping it from happening are the events surrounding 11
September.

The bill, written by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) — chair of the
Senate Commerce Committee — with a lot of help from Disney and
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., can best be thought of as a sort of
appendix to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). It is
clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital
content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.”

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