Akkam’s Razor

"Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of ‘Analog Hole’ legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it."

And what does it mean?

Everything with value has a price-tag. Today you can rewind TV, fast-forward it, skip the ads, move it to another device in your house, or stream it to your web-browser on the road. Tomorrow all of these features will only exist if they are permitted, on a case by case basis. The studios will "enable the business-model" of charging you money for the stuff that you get for free today. Here’s a quote: "Doing this stuff has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge money for it." They do indeed have value: you currently enjoy that value. Under this proposal, the value will be stolen from you and sold back to you piecemeal.

Nice. Charge me more money for stuff I can already do for free.