About the SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act), which was never drafted as legilation, but is the basis of this newer bill:
...it would be illegal to create or distribute “any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies” approved by the Commerce Department...
This, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the DMCA (for those unfamiliar, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows a content producer to order a content provider to remove 'infringing material' with no question asked. The DMCA has been used to shutdown 'infringing' websites in Europe, btw). Of course, this has a wonderful side effect. To sell any consumer electronics product in the United States, manufacturers will have to comply with US law. This can be used to keep foreign competitors out of the US market.
Another fun little detail in the SSSCA was that it calls for media corporations and digital device manufacturers to cooperate and develop a copy protection scheme. If one cannot be agreed upon within two years time, the federal government would mandate one. What's wrong with tihs, you might ask? Content creators (artists, writers, singers, musicians, GAME DEVELOPERS) are not in on the specification. They don't get any input. Zero. Zilch. None. Way to protect the rights of the people.
Of course, this year, the Honorable Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) brought out his lovely little hammer, the CBDTPA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Protection Act). He brought along with him five cronies: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). The lovely thing about this bill? Its SSSCA with some addons and a nice little smokescreen (the broadband/digital-television thing). Now everything digital has to be 'secured'. Fax machines, MP3 players, computers, software, the television, the vcr, the DVD player, your radio, your cellular phone, your pager, your printer, your PDA, your hard drive, your digital camera, your--heck, lets just say 'anything that can store and carry data in any form, be it read or write'.
Isn't that lovely? It means that Particle Systems has to write games that work with these copyright protection systems--else they can't sell in the US. Funny, I didn't think that a British game company--who is neither subject to US law nor party to making them--would be affected, because this stuff "won't spread". Most major content producer, to include game companies, enjoys the United States as one of its biggest sources of revenue. Most anyone smaller than a major corporation cannot get in on this to make or modify or use these laws to their advantage. Smaller content producers (like Particle Systems) will not be able to sell products in one of their major markets without joining up as a part of a corporation (Volition and Interplay anyone?). Doing so, they will lose the rights to their own products (Freespace, anyone?).
In Europe, I believe originally from France, content producers (those writers and artists and programmers and singers and songwriters and musicians I mentioned earlier) have so-called 'moral rights'. Even should a content creator give up his legal copyright, he or she still has certain rights to that content. Among these, and perhaps the most important, is the 'right of integrity'. Basically, the right of integrity means that anything that includes a piece of cannot be distorted in anyway that could harm the artist's reputation. 'Copy protected CDs' are an example of this, since the 'protect' the music by adding actual acoustic distortions that will prevent it being copied.
