Copyright

      In today's reading we saw a lot of information about the pros and cons of how copyright came into being for our digital age, and how it has many faults that fall through the cracks. In "Lockdown, the coming war on general purpose computing" We are shown that from the get go, media publishers and producers have been striving to keep content locked down. Although I agree that this is warranted to a degree, sometimes they go well above and beyond what is necessary to protect their product. These unfair rules, regulations, and coding are then stripped apart by those with the knowledge to do so, and thus create bigger problems for these company's. In Lockdown, we are given a good example of how regulations put in place to protect copyright might also consequentially negatively effect other things that have nothing to do with it. In the reading by Doctorow, he states that if we saw a robber using a wheel on his getaway car, would we ban wheels all together? No, we wouldn't because that would effect the larger masses way more then deter those robbers. We would not be able to create a wheel that is effective for the masses but not for just robbers. The same holds for some copyright law.

      I feel disheartened when I think about the way that SOPA almost passed through our nation, It would have broke the very fibers that our nation was built upon. I don't blame the entertainment industry that backed the bill and helped push it through, I blame the government officials who have no knowledge of what kind of damage this bill could have done, nor care that it even made it that far. Our government officials are so out of touch with the technology of this era that it baffles me. I fear for our nation if we continue to elect people who have no knowledge of how our world is evolving into the digital age.

     My favorite quote from the reading was found at the end, it said "We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks." This to me is the most important statement of the whole reading. For us as a society to survive and flourish, we need to be able to maintain and monitor our own computers without depending on the government to play big brother with their own set of programs that limit what we can and cannot do. If the day ever comes when we as a nation are required to have or not have certain programs on our computer, then that will be a dark dark day for American society.