All ports secure?
I love it when legislatures pass anti-consumer regulations that treat average people as criminals. Why? Because it means the war on terror must be over! Yay! Why else would we completely ignore real security gaps in order to track personal information on people who trade used CD’s? [link via BoingBoing] Oh. Right. Money.
New “pawn shop” laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won’t spend any time in jail, but you’ll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don’t want to pay a $10,000 bond for the “right” to treat their customers like criminals.
Yes, more information is now collected and tracked when you resell CD’s in Florida than is collected and tracked when you get your driver’s license.
Supposedly, this will defend us from people passing off counterfeits and bootlegs as the real deal. Which is a real problem. I know that the other day I had to buy myself a ticket to Tokyo so that I could catch a train and go see the live Back to the Future show in Disneyland Osaka. So I bought a bunch of CD-R’s – jewel cased, not spindle-packed, donchaknow – for about $0.75 apiece. Then I burned a bunch of counterfeits of music I paid $9.99 for. I was surprised when the store didn’t bother to look past my laserprinter labels, which is good since I didn’t have a labeling system for the CD’s other than my Sharpie. Man, considering the paper and the CD-R (plus jewel case), that $0.85 they gave me made my initial investement totally worth it.