Copycat's nine lives

Senate passes scaled-back copyright bill

And thank goodness that it's scaled back. As a person with a very large music and video library, I like to make digital copies of some of my collection. I have some movies copied to hard drives as convenient backups, should the originals get damaged or destroyed somehow, and I rip almost all of my music to mp3 format for use on my iPod or to play over my TiVo (home media option).

I can't say that I've never shared music - I have. I don't do it any longer, but it seems to me that the punishment proposed in the copyright bill was way too harsh. 3 years jail time? For a "crime" that's roughly equivalent to speeding, on the morality scale? Heck, speeding can cause physical harm, and song sharing doesn't even do that.

I understand that making unauthorized copies of music and movies to sell is illegal. In many cases, I feel that it cheats the fans, because the quality suffers so much. Punishment for stealing something with the intent of making a profit is reasonable, it's expected, it's the way things are supposed to work in an ordered society, even - but sharing music for free? An even exchange of entertainment? It's just not the same kind of thing, and I'm glad that the sections of the bill that dealt with punishing file-sharing users were dropped.

Also dropped was a section that would have made it illegal to edit out commercials. *That* was just silly. Companies pay for the advertising, but there is no way on earth that they can make sure that I watch it. Even if it were not edited out, even if my excellent, excellent TiVo (I love that thing more than you can imagine) didn't have a fast-forward button, that would still be the time when I chatted with other people in the room, or went to the bathroom, or flipped through my mail. As it is now, if I see a commercial that looks interesting when I'm fast-forwarding past, I'll stop and watch it. That wouldn't happen if I was out of the room, now, would it? Making it illegal to edit out commercials would have made me frustrated with regular TV, and I would have started watching less and less of it, and I suspect that so would a lot of other people. How much would that help advertisers? Not at all; right in one!

I'll quote the article for the last bit I want to mention:

The bill also shields "family friendly" services like ClearPlay that strip violent or sexually explicit scenes from movies. Hollywood groups say such services violate their copyrighted works by altering them without permission.

Once again, silly. If people want to see movies watered down, let them. I actually think this is a great compromise between people who want their art as real as possible, and people who still want art, but find reality much too messy and imposing. You'd love to show your child a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" in order to demonstrate great patriotism and courage, but you don't want him hearing the naughty words from a program you sanctioned? Use ClearPlay and go, my sheltered friend, and do so with my blessing!