[humorix] Message From The Future: The MCAA Sucks!

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Message From The Future: The MCAA Sucks!
Timm Murray, admin@madtimes.com
August 15, 2000

ROSWELL, GEORGIA -- The Anomolous Sewage Lagoon #5
continues to spit out items from the future.  Everything
from kitchen sinks to neural implants have found their way
through this space-time singularity. Now we know why.

Yesterday we received a small device that our Humorix
Research Lab Of Doom is calling a "trancendental anti-light
temporal filtering beam receptor".  Those labcoat-wearing
dweebs can call it any name they want.  But it's really
just a glorified fax machine -- except that it spits out
material from the year 2022.

Now we've seen the future... and it's patented.

Somebody living the future has gone to a lot of trouble to
warn us about what's going to happen.  Or maybe I should
say, "might happen". Or whatever.  The English language
just doesn't handle time-travel issues very well.

Slashdot will become yet another corporatized portal
belonging to the ABC-NBC-CBS-Yahoo-AOL-MSN Media
Conglomerate, Inc. formed in 2004.  Ironically, it will be
Jon Katz who causes Slashdot.com to be dominated by Pointy
Haired Bosses.  Meanwhile, Kuro5hin, which will recover
from its DDoS attack sometime in 2003, will then become the
de facto watering hole for geeks, nerds, hackers, and
geek-wannabes.

But the demise of Slashdot isn't what our Anonymous Coward
>From The Future is worried about.  His beef is with the
MCAA, of the Matter Control Association of America.  In
2015, patents will be issued on the emerging field of
matter replication.  Several large companies will "invest"
in some Senators, and before long Congress will enact a law
that extends copyright protection to matter patterns. 
Within two years the MCAA will control the entire industry.

Richard M. Stallman will publish the GPPL (GNU Physical
Public License) and commission the YAM Project (YAM Ain't
Matter) to create a collection of free-speech matter
patterns.  The project will succeed at first with its
GNU/Steak pattern (described as "tasty but hard to chew"),
but eventually it will bog down when GNU matter-hackers
become embroiled in a GNU/Cola vs. GNU/Coffee flamewar.

Kuro5hin will quickly become the focal point for anti-MCAA
protests. One group of hackers will create "Mnapster", a
peer-to-peer network for sharing matter patterns
copyrighted by the MCAA.   Slogans like "Computational
algorithms representing material objects want to be free!"
and "Think free speech, not free beer patterns!" will
become commonplace on Kuro5hin.  (But not Slashdot.com,
where every anti-MCAA post will be labelled, "Score -5,
Communistic Troll Who Doesn't Support Capitalism".)

It should come as no surprise that the MCAA will hire an
army of lawyers that exceeds the entire population of Rhode
Island. These attorneys will then file charges against all
Mnapster users under the "Won't Somebody Please Think Of
The Shareholders? Act of 2017", which makes copyright
infringement a crime punishable by Chinese water torture.

The Kuro5hin community will react by spearheading the "Open
Wormhole Project" to send warnings and matter patterns into
the past in the hopes of rewriting history. It seems to be
working.  Thanks to the terraforming device that Humorix
received from the future, we were able to create the
independent island nation of Humorixia.

And we're not finished yet.

Stay tuned to this unfolding plot-line as we continue to
make up the details.

-
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