US: Stop Congress from making iPod or VCRs illegal

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Solymr said:
This whole copyright infringment issue could have been avoided years ago if the Music industry and Hollywood caught on instead of putting their heads in the sand. The idea of iTunes is probably the best way to "overcome" priacy. I say "overcome" because its reasonable to assume piracy will never full stop, it'll always happen in some shape or form no matter what technology we may use to try stop it.

However, if we follow the idea of iTunes and make it easier for these people to buy the product and download it from a site for a cheaper price then going out and buying a packaged Version from a store, it'd at least move us in a direction that would discourage piracy. From iTunes, a movie company could create a site where you can download movies for a certain price each. Then you could also have a similar site where you could purchase CD Image files for a price each and then download them. All this could be controlled by an encryption key, allowing only ones with the key use of each file. While this isn't a fool-proof idea, I believe it is a step in the right direction which can't be as bad as just putting heads in the sand and hoping the nasty pirates will stop/be caught/die horrible deaths or so on.

It's funny, I said almost exactly that to the UK music industry six years ago when I worked in a gov't-industry liaison role. Better later than never I guess ....

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