Copyright problems? Not to worry. Washington’s on it. Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns, concerning the movie industry’s inability to limit copies: “I can’t think that this is not a solvable challenge. Why don’t we make it the copyright equivalent of the race to the moon. We went to the moon almost 40 years ago - it seems to me technology should afford a means of limiting the number of copies we can make of a protected work.”

Tim Lee of The Technology Liberation Front notes: “Files are just strings of 1s and 0s. Computers manipulate 1s and 0s. There’s no such thing as an uncopyable 1 or 0, so there’s no such thing as an uncopyable file. If you’ve got one copy of a file, you can make as many copies of it as you like. That’s just the way computers work.”

Encrypt till you smoke your hard drive. As long as a file is destined for human consumption, it must reveal itself to speakers and/or video display. In that process, the file can be easily intercepted.

Then one person with an Internet connection anywhere on Earth can drop it to BitTorrent and the world.

Don’t even consider pulling the plug on BitTorrent. It’s been tried. As a great statesman once said, “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

That is the Power of One, over which no law can prevail. Perhaps the People would be better served if Congress stopped fighting the Tides of Change regarding copyright, and spent more time where they could do some real good. Like helping creators by cleaning house at the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Jason Schultz at LawGeek is doing his part by exposing USPTO nuttiness. In just the last twelve months, he points out, USPTO geniuses have stamped a number on:

  • an online suggestion box;
  • Amazon’s buyer feedback collection method;
  • a way to send educational content over a school network;
  • command line macros (Microsoft’s)… and;
  • an anti-gravity space vehicle.

Really.

Patents like these force the real innovators to waste billions covering their rear ends to avoid spurious lawsuits.

Of course, that anti-gravity space vehicle patent was probably issued late on a Friday.

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