XKCD is probably one of the best comic strips ever. Certainly in the tech industry anyway.

The RIAA and MPAA already assume everybody is a criminal and stealing their imaginary property. That is why on all the movies you legally buy there are FBI and Interpol messages reminding you that copying is a crime. As well on the back of nearly every CD.

Update: Oct 14th 11:17am

On top of all that, we are now going to have now have a Copyright Czar in the Whitehouse. How Fascist is that?! It's like putting a ProIP lobbyist in the Precedent's cabinet. What am I saying Like for? That exactly what it is!

Currently the MPAA is negotiating a license to allow people limited rights to copy their movies for backup and media center purposes. Many people think this is a great idea, and that the lawyers are finally getting it. Well I think those people still don't get it. The part that they are missing is that we already have the right to do all of that, and more, with our movies.

It's called fair use. You see if you want to copy a piece of work that you bought for personal uses, it's perfectly legal. It's completely legal today for me to copy a CD I bought, to my computer. Then I can copy it again to play on a portable device, or make a new CD if the original was lost or broken. All of that copying is perfectly legal. The part that is illegal is defeating encryption. CD aren't encrypted. DVDs are. While copying your DVD is not technically illegal,it practically is. You can't copy a DVD with out breaking the encryption.

All of this now means that the MPAA passed a law that removes a write we have, and now they will sell it back to us. Screw that. I will copy anything I want to. I'm not saying I'll give or sell what I copy to others, But that I like having backups of my music. And when my computer has enough storage space, backups of my movies as well.