Bill Patry hits hard

In the ongoing debate at Bill Patry's new blog, Bill Patry is giving a good overview of the robber-barons' contempt of the public interest:

when a few years ago my wife got me a video iPod, I discovered I couldn't upload my DVDs to it, even though I can upload my CDs, thanks to the movie industry's insistence that I not be able to. This has nothing to do with piracy (a term I will use here for massive, non-transformative copying). The Betamax case had nothing to do with piracy, nor did the industry's decision to prevent hardware manufacturers, via DRM, from including a record button on DVD players, thereby effectively repealing the Betamax decision through DRM. The Cablevision RS-DVR case had nothing to do with piracy. The suit against Redbox and the licensing issues with Redbox have nothing to do with piracy, anymore than the industry's earlier attempt to control the video rental market in the mid-1980s. The term of copyright protection has nothing to do with piracy. Then there is the music industry side, where I previous gave examples of MP3.com and Launchcast, but there are many, many more. Even book authors embarrassed themselves this year by complaining about the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle 2.

Read the whole thing here.