First off, this isn’t really an article. It’s more of an articlette. A mini-article/editorial, if you will, because I see a major problem with the whole SSSCA Bill that people haven’t touched on. For those of you who don’t know what the SSSCA is, it’s a bill being introduced by Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska that would dramatically alter the computer landscape we have today.
Properly called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, the act would outlaw production of computers that don’t have government approved methods of protecting copyrighted digital content, and would prevent computers that don’t meet this requirement from being conected to networks. Unlike so many bills, the problem here isn’t the intent of the bill, but the execution.
If you listened to the corporations (which isn’t always a good idea), they will tell you that they are losing billions of dollars in pirated software, music, and movies every year. This is certainly horrible… if it’s true. The problem is that the numbers probably aren’t accurate, or even close to accurate. Corporations can do funny things with numbers (Enron) and while I’m not sure how they get their numbers, I would imagine it goes like this:
There is a known number of Internet users, X. Of this total, the corporations look at some subset of the Internet, Y, and examine how much of that traffic is copyrighted material being illegaly traded. Then some subtotal value (W) is calculated on this subset Y by taking the number of copies of the materials downloaded, and multiplied by their respective costs. Finally, the subtotal (W) is multiplied by X/Y so that it is proportional to the entire Internet, and not just the subset Y.
Sounds great, right? Not quite. The problem is that people who download these things aren’t really paying anything for them, and so they’ll download anything they’re remotely interested in. If they had to buy them, would they still get them? In most cases, not bloody likely. So, really, the numbers the Media Giants throw at you are probably horribly flawed, which brings us to a second issue: Is there really a problem?
Is there? Hell yes. Even though the numbers are exaggerated, there are still plenty of people who don’t earn what they deserve for their work. This IS a problem, and even if it’s not as big as the MG’s want you to believe, it’s still large enough that it needs to be addressed.
Which brings us to the present situation. Since this is a problem, isn’t the SSSCA a good solution? Not really. It ignores several fundamental truths about the problem.
- 1 – The Problem isn’t just in the U.S. Sure, the US could try to prosecute people overseas, but we’d have as much success as some country that wanted to prosecute our citizens for posting pictures of naked people. South Korea, China, and the Philipines all have rampant piracy, but we’d have little success getting them to comply with our law.
- 2 – The Internet isn’t made to do this. The Internet was designed, from the beginning, to be non-centralized. Traffic gets flung around willy-nilly, lost, repeated, and broadcast all sorts of places it was never intended to go. Unlike the phone system, it was never designed to have a guaranteed, constant path from A to B that no one else could listen to. Trying to limit the where the content on the Internet goes is, in the end, hopeless. Legislation or not, people will still be able to “see” what they aren’t “supposed” to.
- 3 – The Problem is HARD. The US is a capitalist society. As the corporations are losing a good deal of money to pirating, it would make sense that they would pay a good deal of money for a solution. Thus, people know, if they can come up with a solution, they get mad bank, as the kiddies would say. So why isn’t there a solution? Because it’s a really difficult problem. The problem requires nothing less than absolute protection for media every step of it’s life. Once it gets into an unprotected form, it can be copied billions of times and sent all over the world. You can’t just patch a leak in this problem. One drop gets out, you’re screwed.
In the end, you and I will probably have very little to say about the problems here. I encourage you to write you Congressperson, letting them know of your stance. Hopefully, they will listen to reason, and come to understand that problem will not be solved through laws, but through the maturation of technology.
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