MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations
The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be commercial settings or at home.
MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things start getting too far out of control, “We didn’t act early enough with the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we’re not making the same mistake. We have a right to know what’s showing in a theater.”
The bill would require that any hardware manufactured in the future contain technology that tells the MPAA directly of what is being shown and specific details on the audience. The data would be gathered using various motion sensors and biometric technology.
The MPAA defines a home theater as any home with a television larger than 29″ with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon. Anyone with a home theater would need to pay a $50 registration fee with the MPAA or face fines up to $500,000 per movie shown.
“Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn’t give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That’s a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends,” said Glickman. “Ideally we expect each viewer to have their own copy of the DVD, but we realize that isn’t always feasible. The registration fee is a fair compromise.
The bill also stipulates that any existing home theaters be retrofitted with the technology or else the owner is responsible for directly informing the MPAA and receiving approval before each viewing.
I’m all verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.
One of the great things about being a woman working in the IT industry is that the public restrooms are practically private since the men vastly outnumber the women. When I first started here I was one of 4 women in the office. Then they hired a new finance girl, but that coincided with the replacement of our fem VP by a man (with a woman’s name coincidently enough, but that’s irrelevant). Then I was promoted and they brought in another girl, but she’s hardly in the office, so we were still averaging 4. Oh yeah, then there’s the recruiter, but again she’s hardly in the office. So technically 6 women - 4 fo which are in on a regular basis and one public restroom with 4 stalls. We rarely run into eachother there, which is fine by me, I hate forced restroom collegue conversations.
Well then they went and hired 2 more finance people. Putting us up to 8 women total.
I hate sharing the restroom. I hate peeing in public restrooms. I’ve gotten better at it, but I generally avoid them as much as possible. As a result I have a very strong bladder.
I want my private public restroom back 
So we went and saw Happy Feet in Tulsa at the IMAX this past weekend. It was cute. Good music. Since Happy Feet was previewed on the “March of the Penguins” DVD it got me wondering if they used the footage from it to create a lot of the scenes from Happy Feet. It would make sense. Has anyone out there in BlogLand heard anything about that?
No HP trailer in tulsa though.
So I’m sure you’ve all seen the esurance commercials with the pink haired cartoon chic running around doing superspy stuff, fighting off robots etc. all the while sharing the wonders of esurance for the spy on the go. The other day/night I saw a commercial while some savvy techno music was in the background and realized that all their commercials go great w/ techno music. So I need someone who is far more technologicially/musicaly inclined than I (Dre do you still read these?) to put together a nice little loop of the esurance videos sans sound. Then I can play it on a loop at my next party with random music in the background and it’ll look faboo!!!!
Here you can find all the commercials.
Just trying to keep my blog from going blank - I don’t boycott so well.
i do have a bit more down time, but only because I’m avoiding things i should be doing.
mom may come down this weekend, though she has given me an out of course, that out is dripping with guilt, but she brought it up. This weekend we’re building a fence. w/ mom down I won’t be able to help - not sure i could really offer much help anyway, but there’s the stress of cleaning house and entertaining her while she’s here. w/out her i can go out to dinner at cheesecake factory friday night with the whole crew, and if i so chose, i could go out saturday night as well. if it’s just mom and I, i think she just wants to hang out. she mentioned her tight finances, so she’s staying at the house with us, meaning that we can’t spend much money.
here’s the tentative plan if she does come down:
* Dinner friday night, then hang out at the house
* Saturday late morning take the dogs to the dog park so the boys don’t have to worry about them while working on the fence. Plus when they come back from the park they’ll be all worn out, and will just lay around for the rest of the day.
* I guess dinner out again on Saturday night, or just order pizza in - I know Phlome plans on bribing folks w/ pizza and beer if they help with the fence, but I’m not sure if that is a lunch or a dinner thing.
* Sunday she heads home after lunch
That’s still a lot of unaccounted for hours.