Those of us who follow such things have seen content producers (RIAA member companies, MPAA member companies, BSA member companies and others) push for ever greater "intellectual property rights" over the last 10 years. Many people feel current copyright law, allowing for ownership rights over artistic content long after the death of the original artist, is far more than that envisioned by the Constitutional provision for copyright. That provision drew a compromise between public domain and private ownership of rights to artistic and scientific products on the basis of public good.
If one looks at the lobbying, public-relations and legal actions of various large corporate entities involved in so-called "intellectual property", it is easy to conclude that they are interested in more than the innocuous and understandable protection of their rights. In addition to ever-lengthening periods of copyright duration, the penalties for violation have become ever more draconian. And as I write this, a large coalition of corporations are striving to basically lock down computers and the Internet as we know it through "Trusted Computing" hardware and software standards.
Such standards are ostensibly designed to prevent non-authorized media or software from running on a computer, to enable the disabling or deletion of non-authorized hardware or software and to make anonymity (and hence, online crimes) much harder to achieve. Many have noted that, in addition to protecting "intellectual property" holders' rights, such systems would be remarkably useful for locking competitors' products out of marketplaces by preventing actions we now take for granted (such as opening a Word document in other programs), facilitating tracking of consumers/citizens and the gathering of private information by corporations, enabling schemes to charge consumers for actions now allowed under "fair use"/Supreme Court decisions and the supression of political dissent.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/...
The corporations involved in lobbying for stronger "intellectual property" rights and developing Orwellian Digital Rights Management/Trusted Computing systems will say, of course, that they're mearly trying to protect their rights. If one looks at what has been going on overseas, however, one gets a preview of what may be to come.
I'll let Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing tell the story:
France may soon enact the worst copyright law in Europe, sneaking it through in a legislative session scheduled for December 22 and 23.
Europe's equivalent to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial directive called the EUCD. Each EU state is responsible for implementing the minimum set of EUCD restrictions (which are far from minimal!) but each state can exceed the minimum, and the entertainment lobby pushes hard to see to it that they do. They've run amok in France, subverting the lawmaking process with a farcical wish-list of penalties, mandates and software bans.
. . .
The French Department of Culture has also threatened to ban Free/Open Source Software:
Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.
This is extremely serious stuff. Not only will this insane, anti-public, anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-democratic legislation allow big-money corporations to sue those who write software and release the source code in France (the principles behind Linux, BSD, Apache and countless other quality products currently available for free), but could serve as a precedent for other countries to do the same.
It remains to be seen whether France will enact such a grotesque wish list of monopoly-protecting legislation at the public's expense. But when I see this sort of unbridled corporate power run amok, and consider just how many powerful people at home and abroad seem gleeful at the prospect of giving mega-corporations everything they ask for, I have a deep sense of forboding for the future.
http://www.eff.org