Felten on Senate Hearings
Ed Felten writes:
Today I testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The issue under discussion was whether (or how) the government should require the inclusion of DRM (anti-copying) technology in digital TV equipment. Here is my written testimony. [...]
You would probably be disappointed as well at the quality of the debate. It's not that debate doesn't occur; and it's not that the issues at hand aren't important. But much time is wasted on posturing that is irrelevant to the nominal topic of the hearing and seems designed only to show that one side is purer of heart than the other. An example was the repeated references to porn on P2P networks. This had no connection to the hearing's topic, and nobody even bothered to connect it to the topic. And none of the witnesses had any connection with P2P technology.[...]
Mr. Valenti, characteristically, hit the P2P porn meme the hardest, even, in a surreal moment, inviting the Senators' staffers to go download some porn from Kazaa and see for themselves how vile it is. As a parent, I had to chuckle on hearing the American movie industry complain about the distribution of inappropriate sexual content to kids. But then again the whole room seemed at times to be an irony-free zone.
Ed's testimony is also particularly good.
posted Thu 9 Oct 2003 in /issues/copyright | link
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