It is dead obvious that this bill is a power grab by someone, who intends to become a heck of an abusive monopoly in anything resembling software.

Once we have realized that, then we only need figure out whose power grab it is. After that our natural allies are anyone and everyone in that monopolist's way. The bigger, more powerful, and more influential, the better.

I think I make a pretty good case that the company which stands to seize power here is Microsoft. And AOL happens to be one of the biggest companies standing in Microsoft's way. That makes AOL a powerful party with a vested interest (if they only realize it) in blocking this bill.

Does that make sense?

FWIW, it could be a cabal of service providers trying to become the only ones involved in ecommerce. So MS plus the RIAA is possible. MS Media Player already has some of the security features mentioned to prevent piracy of RIAA goods.

Personally I think the RIAA is into it somewhere already. The bill mentions devices as well as software (IIRC). Software only laws would allow portable mp3 players to be used to pirate songs. This bill clearly prevents any device capable of doing that, whether it has software or no.

Plus it feels more like a RIAA grab. MS has never really cared about laws (UCITA aside and many more companies than MS benefit from that one). MS just does what it wants to, when it wants to and how.

The RIAA, OTOH, has a history of changing laws to accomodate their own plans (eg copyright extensions). This really sounds like their old 'ban video players, they'll destroy the industry' line, but with knuckles this time. ____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.