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Hollywood's Hail Mary Pass: Skipping A Commercial To Be Illegal
from the good-luck-with-that-plan dept
It looks like Hollywood is making one last ditch lame duck hail mary pass to try to get all of the legislation they want passed while Orrin Hatch is still head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. There's an effort to quickly push through the Intellectual Property Protection Act, which basically rolls up all the bad Hollywood legislation into one. The idea is to get it approved quickly without too much discussion as everyone's attention is elsewhere. Among the features of the bill (many of which you'll recognize from previous ridiculous bills) are giving the Justice Department the ability to file civil suits concerning copyright infringement (basically playing the role of Hollywood's private enforcement agency with public money), banning any kind of unauthorized file sharing and throwing anyone caught with a video camera in a movie theater into jail for three years. Then, of course, there's the personal favorite: banning commercial skipping. Considering that one entertainment exec accused anyone who got up to go to the bathroom during commercials of stealing TV, apparently Hollywood really does believe that the government should force their obsolete business model back into place. What's scary, is that some politicians seem willing to do so.
Reader Comments
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What's REALLY scary ...
"What's scary, is that some politicians seem willing to do so."
What's REALLY scary is we put these boobs in office !
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It keeps getting scarier
Consider that these boobs set the policy that is often copied by other first world countries, so that they/we get equipment made for these bad bills also. Yes, we're victimized by boobs we never even had a chance of not voting in.
I'm just glad we have no oil or we'd be invaded.
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What's More Scary ...
Is the majority of the general public are dumb enough to let it happen. Simple solution, stop watching TV. Soon or later, the existing business model will change when advertising dollars evaporate.
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Back to VCR's. Re: What's More Scary ...
Guess I'll have to go back to VCR's in order to skip my commercials.
Don't think I won't, either.
Surely someone is working on a non-TIVO plain ol' recordable DVD or hard drive for your TV, so you can skip commercials and record things that way?
Make it illegal to skip commercials seems just ridiculous - you'd think advertisers would experience some backlash - perhaps someone will organize that via the internet...
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No Subject Given
Sounds like a way to get at TIVO to me. There are loads of anti-TIVO sponsered politicians around, yeah thanks DirectTV.
Also, we already have the ability to skip trailers in DVDs disabled (unless you rip or use hacked firmware).
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potential for hypocrisy?
Someone should make this idiot sit through a whole evening's viewing from 6-11pm, adverts and all.
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