Ok, the geek in me is pissed. The House Judiciary Committee has introduced a bill that criminalizes the copying of video through an analog source. For those of you who don’t know what this means, here’s a good explanation. Basically, it would make a good portion of what I do for a living illegal. My institution could be fined (well, we’d be exempt from the fine, but we could still be dinged). Worse, there would soon be no devices that could circumvent copy protection at all. The thing is, all these kind of laws do, and the technology that gets developed in order to support the laws, is make it harder for us normal, law-abiding citizens to mix and mash our content. The criminals always find ways around the technology. I’ve written the committee for whatever good it will do.