Linux and fair use

Via Slashdot, here's a telling excerpt of an MIT student's interview with Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA. He's the bastard responsible for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

TT: But today, you still cannot on the market actually buy a licensed DVD player for Linux.
JV: I didn’t know that.
TT: So the question is, do you think people who go to Blockbuster, they rent a movie, they bring it home, and they play it on Linux by circumventing the access control, are those people committing a moral transgression?
JV: I do not believe that you have the right to override an encryption. Because if you have the right to do it, everybody can do it. For whatever benign reason you have, somebody else has got one even more benign. But once you let one person deal in a digital copy -- and I don’t have to tell you; you know far better than I that, unlike in analog, the ten thousandth copy is as pure as the original -- it is a big problem. So once you let the barriers down for your perfectly sensible reason, you gotta let it down for everybody. I don’t want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.
TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?
JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.
TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?
JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.
TT: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]

TT: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.
JV: You designed this?
TT: Yes.
JV: Un-fucking-believable.
TT: So the question is, if I just want to watch a movie--I rent it from Blockbuster--is that bad?
JV: No, that’s not bad.
TT: Then why should it be illegal?

[snip]

JV: But you’re trying to set your own standards.
TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They’re still not available -- it’s been four years.
JV: Well why aren’t they available? I don’t know, because I don’t make Linux machines. Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can’t fuss at people, because you’re one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?
TT: About two million.
JV: Well, I can’t believe there’s not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don’t know the answer to that... Well, you’re telling me a lot of things I don’t know.

I think a lot of people in the government have a very skewed view of intellectual property and its relation to digital technology. They pass laws like the DMCA, but are too computer-illiterate to know why it's an awful idea, and have Jack Valenti's lobbyists obscuring the truth.