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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

1. I'm disappointed that the Government is working so closely with special interests like the RIAA to set legislation.

2. I'm glad that it is possible to FOIA it.

People do lots of things to cover up unpopular news. It seems that for whatever reason, the people in charge wanted to brush this under the rug. If the government does this and we don't like that, let's exercise our right and vote them out.

That there is no one who you'd actually want to vote in to public office to replace the scoundrels that screw the people over and over again is another issue.

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> I'm disappointed that the Government is working so closely with special interests like the RIAA to set legislation.

If you're disappointed about the above just wait until you read about the blank CD tax which you pay every time you buy a blank CD. A federally mandated tax that goes directly to a private corporation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Who buys CDs? I think you're stuck in another decade.

1. It's not just CDs. While the specific laws vary Country-by-Country, the gist of it is that anything that can store music is open to this tax.

2. The crimes committed so far should not be forgiven/forgotten just because we now have cloud storage and CD sales are going down.

In Canada alone they've already collected a cool quarter billion due to this: http://cpcc.ca/english/finHighlights.htm

"This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. The royalty also applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers. Most recently, portable satellite radio recording devices contribute to this royalty fund. [13]."

I've never seen one labeled for use with music. I doubt that's by accident.

I have, in stores like Target. It's confusing because the packaging tell you it's the "best" one for music, when I'm almost certain those CDs are identical to the ones next to them.

Some very, very old CD players won't accept "non-audio" CD-Rs.

> Physically, there is no difference between the discs save for the Disc Application Flag that identifies their type: standalone audio recorders will only accept "music" CD-Rs to enforce the RIAA arrangement, while computer CD-R drives can use either type of media to burn either type of content. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

It really depends on how it's implemented, in Canada we've had that since the 90s, but file sharing cases tend to go like this:

http://www.canadiancontent.net/commtr/file-sharing-legal-can...

I'm disappointed that the Government is working so closely with special interests like the RIAA to set legislation.

It'll be a while before every voter has heard of public choice theory. Public choice theory

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm

in political science predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy. In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority has less voice than a noisy minority on ANY issue, so there is nothing unique about the political tactics of music copyright-holders in this regard.

> That there is no one who you'd actually want to vote in to public office to replace the scoundrels that screw the people over and over again is another issue.

Ron Paul is running for President on a platform of drastically reducing the size of government and eliminating the Federal Reserve. He would definitely change things.

While I agree with you, I don't think HN is for debating general politics.

I'm just pointing out that there is at least one candidate who want to change things. Rather than complain that things will never change, one could go to work supporting and promoting politicians who would fix things. An example is http://www.revolutionpac.com/ which is basically a bunch of regular folks, political outsiders, getting together to produce and air commercials for Ron Paul. It's never been so easy to organize and communicate. Declaring that "there's nothing we can do" has never been more false.

Personally, I support Ron Paul. While I don't agree with all of his policies, he seems like the sanest guy up there. Still, HN is for discussion of tech, start ups, and cool new things in our world; not politics. Any political discussion will quickly devolve into ad hominem attacks, and provide no interesting commentary. If you want to discuss politics, head over to one of the many forums, subreddits or discussion boards about politics, but this is not the place.

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