Since the dawn of the Internet era, people have condemned the big American entertainment industry players for failing to meet the challenges of the new age with a spirit of innovation. But that ignores the tremendous amount of creative energies that the RIAA (music) and MPAA (movies) have put into crafting new ways to squash the spread of digital content. They try to sell those inventions to lawmakers, and over the years, a symbiosis has developed where the lobbies lob an extreme, if clever, technological scheme into Congress,. The scheme gets a polite hearing -- Hey, maybe we should think about blowing up people's computers -- but is then either forgotten, or seriously toned down.