The CBDTPATADPTABDTA (SSSCA)

While I was home over the weekend, I mentioned to my mom that I was writing letters to our Senators. She, naturally, asked why, and I found myself trying to explain the former-SSSCA to her. I had a bit of a hard time getting her to understand it in the first place, then a harder time making her understand why it is bad. Perhaps I wasn't explaining it well, or maybe I'm not familiar enough with the text of the bill, but my inability to explain to her why it is bad got me thinking that the letters I am writing do not explain well enough.

This post sums up the "badness" of the bill in what I think are reasonably simple terms. BASIC is easy enough for most non-programmers to understand (it's what I used to use on our old Apple ][gs), but here's an annotated version of the program contained in the post.

10 INPUT A$ | Get input. It can be anything. Store it in a variable that we will call 'A$'
20 PRINT A$ | Remember the input we just got? The thing we called 'A$'? Print it

And that's it. The reason the CBDTPA bans this program is that I could type the entire text of, say, James Patterson's latest novel. The little program will then dutifully print the entire text right back to the screen, effectively "reproduc[ing] copyrighted works in digital form," a CBDTPA no-no.

The CBDTPA says that any hardware or software that has the capability to reproduce digital information (which is just about everything) will be required to implement FCC-mandated standards to prevent the copying of copyrighted works. It also effectively limits my First Amendment rights. Any questions?

March 27, 2002 - 09:33 AM