New law could prohibit the playing of homemade media

Reports keep coming about new laws in the US that try to forbid the breaking of copy protections. The one that I read today beats them all. The law's purpose is to prevent the breaking of technology used for DRM. If this law passes you could get punished when you trick a device to play music or a video that you have made!!!

Biden's new bill would make it a federal felony to try and trick certain types of devices into playing your music or running your computer program. Breaking this law--even if it's to share music by your own garage band--could land you in prison for up to five years. And that's not counting the civil penalties of up to $25,000 per offense.

"Say I've got an MP3 collection and I buy a new nifty player from Microsoft that only plays watermarked content, and I forge the watermark to allow my legal MP3 collection to play," says Jessica Litman, who teaches intellectual property law at Wayne State University. "It is certainly the case that if I pass that around, I could be trafficking (in violation of the law)."

This law looks really fantastic. When are the camera's going to enter our houses? We all know those family parties where some uncle is filming everything. With all these watermarked media, we might not be able to see it anymore. Unless we break the watermark protection and then we risk to be punished. I understand that intellectual rights need to be defended, but so do our civil rights! Take a look at the entire article here.

Source: ZDNet