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I never had a single problem with it from day 1 :)

I'd like to mention that with the -overburn flag I can squeeze a bit more of data (above 4.7 billion bytes but below 4.7 million Kbytes(Kbyte=1024 bytes)) when needed.

In addition I update my dvd burners firmware with PXUpdate for UNIX http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/firmware.html, something which is very important for people that don't dual boot.

As demonstrated in https://expressivefreedom.org/Projects/PVR/Firewir e-Methodology.html a 4gb+ single file (ie a backup tar/bz2ball) can be squeezed in dvd, which is something that propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages) can't be done in windows.

Chris. PS Use the above at your own risk

Copyright only insures that businesses have an interest in writing, making music, and movies. Music has been made since the dawn of man, almost all of that time before copyrights were imposed by the British Crown as a censorship measure in reaction to the emergence of the printing press. Books were also written, as were plays. Movies post-date the existence of copyright, but the number of free movies available online, whether traditional, animated, or machinima creations, indicate that copyright and the profit motive play little if any role in the creation of many of those works.

Yeah, that'd be great. No one would write books anymore.

Really?

Here is a free book that was written, and would have been without copyright, as the author is releasing it under a GPL-style license. Or perhaps you are confusing laws against plagerism (conviniently missing from the rolls) with laws restricting copying. Almost no one would create art without recognition, so we do need laws that encode academic rules against plagerism to insure an artist or author is given credit for their work. But clearly, many people, myself included, are perfectly happy to create art sans the profit motove the copyright presupposes, and clearly an enormous amount of art, in all kinds of media, was created prior to the existence of copyright in any form.

This online book seems to do what you're asking for.

For a great piece of fiction concerning nanotechnologies, patents, RIAA, virtual reality, quantum computing (e.g. everything people around here love/hate :), read Autonomy - Freedom of Thought. It basically talks about a groups of scientists that 'escaped' to a virtual world to flee drastic copyright and patent laws that crippled their research in the 'real' world.

For my work I prefer the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (you can make any derivative works you like so long as they, too, are Free, and you must cite me as the original author). Essentially Public Domain without the ability to take and not give, and with the requirement you do not plagerize.

To date no good solution exists to entice authors into creating and preserve freedom at the same time. Street performer protocol and similar things do work in some cases but only in "niche" cases. For instance many authors have only written one good work in their lives (e.g. Steinbeck). They would starve with SPP. Many singers have had one or two hits (e.g. Billy Ray Cyrus (sp?)). Those guys would starve too.

Nonsense. They would work day jobs like the rest of us, and practice their craft as a hobby. The best authors are those who do it for love of writing, not for cash. The downside would be that they would spend less time working on their writing ... but arguably that would be a good thing in some instances as well (consider the dreck produced by the paid writers in the last two Star Wars episodes and the last Star Trek movie, and contrast that with some of the excellent, and vastly superior, fan fiction that has been circulated for free, at no cost, with no profit incentive whatsoever.

Worse, people would not go to the trouble of creating stuff if they knew in advance that they would have to sustain their production over long stretches of time.

You mean, be productive over long stretches of time like every other working human being on the planet? Why is it content creators, and their purveyors (the publishers, who are generally the ones receiving the vast bulk of the profits) feel they are entitled to rest on their laurels forever, and never work another day in their life, or at least only as much as they deign to choose, for creating one work, while the rest of us accept that we will work, and work hard, until retirement?

This entitlement mentality must end, and the notion that we should destroy the internet, hobble libraries, shred the constitution, and turn every digital device in our homes and on our persons into a governance device that monitors and reports our usage of digital data is not only offensive and appalling, it is simply, flat out asinine.

The myth that people will only create valuable and worthwhile art is not only provably wrong, it has already been proven wrong countless times, not only by myself, but by many, many others. Peruse USENET or any number of Free Media and Free Literature sites ... much of the best work is available online, at no cost, with no profit motive. Whether it fits your particular taste or not, the allegation that "people would not go to the grouble of creating stuff" if it were free (the assumption implicit in your statement) is simply false.

Content creators will have to give up the notion, and assumption, that they are entitled to be paid for creating content if we are to have anything other than a draconian, Orwellian society in the digital age, in which a police and surveillance state is instituted in order to enforce digital copyrights (and even that will likely prove insufficient, though I'm sure the effort will further overpopulate our prisons and destroy thousands, perhaps millions of lives in a misguided effort that will make the War on Drugs, and the former Communist East, look like a liberal , democratic picnic in comparison).

Copyright initially reduced the number of books printed to 1/3 of their former numbers ... this is not the consiqence of a regime designed to foster creativity and productivity, it is the result of a regime designed to facilitate censorship and foster a profit motive above love of the art, and we as a culture have paid a heavy price in seeing our culture diminished and privatized to a point where singing "Happy Birthday" to your child is a technical violation of the law, punishable by fine and, if you send such a greeting to your college bound child over email, by 5 years imprisonment.

From the article on Salon: "Lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court that the stay was needed to keep Pavlovich from reposting the decryption program on the Internet."

Too bad for them the constitution still provides a modicum of protection of my right to write, and publish if I so wish, a novel that just so happens to contain not one, but TWO encodings of DeCSS (including the inspired haiku you point out).

The entire document is shared freely under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, with paper copies having already travelled throughout the world, and digital dissemination even wider.

Cry me a river for the DVD CSS thugs ... arrogant enough to thing that US law applies to the world, that the constitution doesn't apply to them, and that their parasitical industry's interests should outweigh those of the computer and electronic industries which dwarf theirs, and the interests of the people, which dwarf all of those interests and which the government had better stop ignoring.

Re:Who will use this?

I will, for one, and many others already have.

Although this seems like a fine idea in theory, I am having difficulty imagining many situations where people would use it, which would be useful to others.

There is already a bunch of material licensed under their licenses, and numerous other efforts to achieve similar results under which a great deal of good music and prose is licensed. Clearly there are many others who are having little difficulty in finding these sorts of free licenses useful.

It is not going to replace copyright for music or books (I realise these aren't mentioned, I'm just trying to think of some possible use - theirs are pretty crap and unlikely) for example - the industry wouldn't touch it for obvious reasons.

It isn't "replacing copyright" (though drastic copyright reform eliminating the government monopoly entitlements it grants with a more balanced "sales tax as creator royalty" scheme would be highly desirable), it is creating a license that, similar to the BSD License, the FDL, and the GPL, will facilitate a growing commons of material all creative people can use and build upon.

Finally, who gives a fuck about the "industry" as such. Their purposes are already served, and have been so by a century of corrupt copyright legislation bought and paid for from our inexpensively purchased "representatives" in congress. The cultural squatters of New York, Nashville, and Hollywood, and the cartels they have formed, are the reason that the "vast cultural wasteland" of television and the lack of cultural depth in modern society have become so obvious, and such obvious truisms that they have become cliches.

These free licenses aren't intended to benefit the entrenched "industry" any more than the GPL is designed to Benefit the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft's of the world. It is intended to benefit ARTISTS and CREATIVE PEOPLE, not cultural squatters and an industry that has denigrated the art into a mere product of mass production, filtered down to the lowest common denominator.

If it takes off at all, it would be for the benefit of amateurs only, but then, what's the point?

First this is nonsense. One could have made the same inane (and in retrospect obviously incorrect) argument against the GPL, which has benefitted both amateurs (such as Linus Torvalds when he first began writing the Linux kernel) and professionals (such as IBM).

Likewise, the Creative Commons will empower amateurs (such as myself) and professionals. No, it won't empower Time Warner any more than the GPL empowers Microsoft, but it will empower Indy music and film makers (who are often professionals and not amateurs, though they often serve as a bridge in getting new and talented filmmakers noticed).

Second, every professional was at one time in their career an amateur. A great deal of amateur material is crap, but a great deal is also excellent. Having that material available as part of a commons, free to be distributed, improved upon, and incorporated into other, grander works is a very valuable thing to artists, to society, and to the health of our cultural heritage itself. No, it doesn't benefit Disney and Time-Warner, it benefits the tens of thousands of talented artists Disney, Time-Warner, and others of their ilk have traditionally trampled under their feet, and in addition it benefits the rest of us who enjoy and admire such works.

And that is very, very good thing, tripe and propoganda from the "industry" at its shills and astroturfers notwithstanding.

Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?

I find whenever I am coding that it is a profoundly creative process, and while it may not always be poetry, it often is very akin to writing prose (as I have done). Indeed, in at least one case code is literally poetry, in an inspired implimentation of DeCSS as haiku:


How to decrypt a

DVD: in haiku form.

(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)


see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/wsj-04- 12-2001.html for the rest ... slashdot's asinine lameness filter won't let me include it here. It concludes...


Have mercy on me,

Lord, and lesser judges, and

on Jon Johansen.


You are correct in part: coding also has very substantive aspects of engineering to it. You are incorrect to differentiate it all too greatly from architecture IMHO. Coding is actually very, very similiar to architecture: a blending of art and engineering in the creation of an edifice that is expected to be both beautiful and functional.

You are wrong to assert some sort of "universal" agreement on what is and is not good code. My experience (admittedly only 15 years or so) is that there are many disagreements amongst professionals on these very points. Indeed, just like architects and artists of one school or another do tend to agree on what is "good" and what is "not", so to with programmers, and so too are there different schools which disagree with one another's aesthetics and argue vehemently amongst themselves as to what does, and does not, constitute good code.

Yahoo is right to do this. They provide a service at some expense and have to recoup their costs.

This is true of anyone offering a service. Now, perhaps the costs (e.g. for my own web page, http://expressivefreedom.org) is low enough that the cost is simply donated, but in that sense that cost is recouped from my day job.

The current client server architecture of the web (which BTW stands in start contrast to the underlying peer-to-peer architecture of the internet itself) places almost all of the cost burden on the publisher. The more popular a web site (or email service, or IRC server, or IM servcie, or what have you) the more bandwidth they need to buy, the more servers they need to cluster together, etc. They have no choice but to recoup their costs or stop offering the service, and if advertising is no longer sufficient (costs have outstripped that line of revinue), then customers will start to have to pony up.

But what is often ignored is that there are architectures where the costs are shared and distributed.

USENET was an early implimentation of this (still costly, because ALL the data is copied to ALL of the distributed servers), where everyone doesn't go to ONE server, they go to ONE of THOUSANDS. USENET still carries more data than any single website (even groups.google.com, which is merely an archive, not a stream of information).

FreeNet is a better implimentation, where data which is in demand is replicated to caches closer (in terms of routing metrics) to those wishing to see the data. The originating site bears only the cost of making the inforamtion available (and providing a small portion of their local drive and bandwidth to cache other unrelated data) ... the more popular the data becomes, the more widedly it is distributed, the more available it becomes, all the while adding no additional cost to the providor. The cost instead is shared in tiny increments by everyone, in a barter system of essentially perfect effeciency.

Restructure the web on a P2P basis, as FreeNet is doing, and you don't just get the Anonymouty and Uncensorability it was originally designed for, you get the scalability and low cost (regardless of popularity) of participation which the web in its current, client server form, will never enjoy.

FreeNet does dump old information no longer in demand (least popular, oldest first), a la USENET, but that is easily corrected by the one intersted in providing said information ... for there is nothing preventing a static copy being preserved on your own system, to be reloaded into the net when the old copy expires.

Were Yahoo running on such an architecture, it is likely that their add revinues alone would be more than enough to cover all their costs, and there would be no need to begin charging for their other free services. They might choose to anyway ... greed seems to know no reasonable bounds these days, now that we've elevated it to diety status ... but the bar would be very low for hobbiests and enthusiasts to step in and offer a free alternative. Adopting such an architecture would go a long way in keeping the net free, in both senses of the word.

Unfortunately, there are powerful media interests who do not want to see a world of peers exchanging information, they want to see a new channel by which they can dump their dreck into our minds, while keeping us placidly on the couch where we belong. So, if such a change is going to occur (and with the release of FreeNet 0.5 the software is certainly available and usable), it will have to be because people like us, at the grass roots level, prefer an even playing field to the centralized, "read what we tell you" architecture cable companies, media cartels, Microsoft, and large content providors are tryig to foist upon us instead.

Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source.

That piece of code was the TCP/IP stack. You know, the thing that let the Windoze users join the rest of us on the internet without having to download and install a third party, shareware application (trumpet). It was taken from FreeBDS, whose license allows its code to be incorporated into proprietary products.

In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.

I can and I have, and your argument [yes, I know you're arguing from the cartel's perspective, to underscore the very valid point you make thereafter, but nevertheless it] ignores some facts that become apparent to most people who sit down and think about it: no book, no piece of music, no painting, no film, no play, no poem, nothing is created in a vacuum. Everything more complex that 'gah gah goo goo' builds upon the works of others, either directly (Walt Disney's remake of the Brother's Grimm) or indirectly (George Lucas borrowing heavilly from classical literature (including elements of Greek tragedy) in star wars Episodes IV and V, movies, from Christian Mythology in Episode 1, and from Teletubbies in Episodes I and II. Copyright grants artists (or, more commonly for everyone but print authors, and even many of them in Hollywood, their employer, a corporation) an absolute monopoly on their work for a period of time greater than most people will ever hope to live. This stifles the creative interaction that culture relies on, and is responsible in no small part for our limited choices in music, entertainment, and the fact that our modern culture has, in many ways, become a "vast cultural wasteland." It isn't because the people are inherently without aesthetic taste, or like it this way, it is because mass production produces for the Least Common Denominator, and everyone else is forbidden to improve upon it for the next 90 years (or life+75 if an artist retains personal possession of their copyright)!

The argument you present vis-a-vis barter also ignores many fundamental aspects of free software (and other collaborative commons) ... what is taking place isn't some simple, ineffecient barter economomy. In contrast, it is a very dynamic and effective collaboration that has shown itself in nearly every respect to be more effecient and more productive than its proprietary equivelent. RMS and Torvalds together put together a complete Unix-like operating system for the Intel architecture by 1993 (RMS, to his credit, actually had his stuff compiling on a dozen or more architectures, and only a few years later Torvald's kernel was compiling on several other platforms as well) while several other company's efforts languished and ultimately failed, despite their having taken even more time to develope that the free software folks did. Other, similar examples abound (Apache, FreeBSD after the source was freed, etc.)

They have even outstripped Microsoft on technical merits, by orders of magnitude, despite the immense wealth Microsoft brings to the table, and the fact that nearly every hardware manufacturer donates their device drivers to Microsoft's efforts, something they are only now starting to do in large numbers for GNU/Linux (and more commonly they provide specs, or in the case of Nvidia and others, not even that).

Even you can contribute. If you read my novel and offer constructive criticism, you have played a part in that process. If you use a piece of software and report a bug, you have contributed something back. If you're savvy enough to fix the bug and submit a patch, so much the better ... but a bug report even without a patch is a very worthwhile contribution.

You're second point, however, is dead on: the copyright cartels will have absolutely no shame, or compunction, in taking from the public commons and then pissing on it in turn. Perhaps our "fifth column" of enthusiastic CGI artists will help some, but I wouldn't count on it (most people tend to chose their jobs over political idealism, and many over personal ethics), and I certainly wouldn't be so foolish as to bet it will be enough to prevent the digital dark ages Hollywood, the Recording Industry, and Microsoft are trying to ram down our unwilling throats.

Raymond described a model of collaborative software development in which a large, geographically dispersed group of programmers worked together in a seemingly chaotic way. This bazaar model was to be contrasted with the cathedral model, in which everything is done according to a detailed, preexisting plan.

[...]

The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete failure in the world of free books, although not for want of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix Programming[7], which appears to be languishing.

[...]

The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not seem surprising

This depends largely on where one draws the line between bizzar and cathedral, or put another way, with what granularity one considers a project or body of work. The Star Trek and Star Wars universes are examples where there is a large body of Cathedralesque work, as well as an even larger body of "fan fiction." While many stories (perhaps most) are themselves written by a single author (as, in fact, my own (soon-to-be released under a free license) novel has been), the overall, net effect of the body of work which comprises the fan fiction of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes (and undoubtably other settings as well) is in many ways more remeniscent of the Bizzar than a Cathedral approach. The Linux kernel is a bizzar-type project, yet within that kernel are modules and subsystems that are quite 'cathedralesque' in how they were managed and written.

The definition in many ways becomeds one of granularity, and while I agree with much the article writes, I think the author overlooks the bizzar aspect of the cultural commons from which all authors draw inspiration. This is readilly seen in the collections of fan fiction which abound and, were it not for the often extremely repressive aspects of copyright in limiting how and when a person can incorporate another's work in their own project (no, I'm not advocating plagerism, I'm advocating broader definitions of fair use that including giving the original creator credit for their contribution, if not exclusive use).

How about Art of Illusion [...] It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D [...] gives you a complete Open Source animation package.

I use blender and love it, but you (or someone else) had pointed out Wings3d before as a better modeler that could be used in conjunction with blender, and I had lost the link (and slashdot's search function is next to useless for digging up worthwhile information in older threads).

Thanks for reposting that info, and may I suggest Wings3D should list their project on freshmeat (it wasn't there, and I couldn't recall the project name. I'm sure it is buried on google somewhere, but after wading through several google pages having searched on 'free 3d modeller linux' I gave up). I have added links to the packages you mention on my website (under the Free Tools sidebar) to help out, but getting that project listed on freshmeat would go a much longer way toward getting the word out.

Thanks for the post, you saved me a long search I'd decided to put off, and deserve every +1 mod point you got.

Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare. I'll bet no science fiction novel you ever read prepared you for this.

Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.

A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.

Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.

Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy.

This escalation will likely claim even more victims, fill our prisons even more with people even less inclined to violence than the many drug offendors who account for half our inmate population today.

Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines "but these fans are stealing bread and milk from the mouths of Lars and Britney," and "we'll win the war on copyright infringement! These pirates will never see the light of day again! God Bless America!"

What's next, a broken egg on a frying pan with the words "This represents your Life on MP3?"

Make no mistake, this is intergenerational warfare, waged by the parents and grandparents upon the children who have chosen to live differently than their elders, indeed, differently than their elders can comprehend. As we draw closer to the technological singuarity I think we can expect ever more extreme examples of the same.

Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel set in 2057 that depicts exactly these sorts of events. How close is one to the Singualarity I wonder, when real world events overtake science fiction faster than it can be written?

While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray(TM) source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works other than fully functional versions of POV-Ray). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray(TM) was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.

As people contributed code to POV-Ray(TM) over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray(TM) license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray(TM) will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.

• Protect the freedom of the content (the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation refers to, applied to content and media)
  
• Insure the freedom of derivative works (no BSD-style loopholes to allow the MPAA, RIAA, or Microsofts of the world to lock down derivative works and thereby deny their use by future generations of artists)
  
• Insure that creative credit is given the original artist(s) ["enforced citation"]
  
• Protect the good name of the author by requiring derivative works to clearly differentiate themselves from the original work
  

• Protect the freedom of the content (the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation refers to, applied to content and media)
  
• Insure the freedom of derivative works (no BSD-style loopholes to allow the MPAA, RIAA, or Microsofts of the world to lock down derivative works and thereby deny their use by future generations of artists)
  
• Insure that creative credit is given the original artist(s) ["enforced citation"]
  
• Protect the good name of the author by requiring derivative works to clearly differentiate themselves from the original work
  

Come on, people. This is nothing to get bent out of shape about -- this is exactly what the free market is for! Yes, it might be a kewl product, but if you don't agree with the license, don't purchase the product.

The problem is, there really isn't a free market. The copyright cartels, and their goons, are strongarming ReplayTV, TiVo, and other PVR manufacturers into disabling features they don't like (commercial skipping) and possibly even requiring features they do like (embedded commercials, coming to a PVR near you?).

Those that want to make a kick ass PVR and sell it face the daunting certainty of being sued into oblivion by such household cartels as the MPAA and, if the device allows the sharing of music, the RIAA. So long as these monopolists can send their IP lawyer/thugs around shutting down businesses they don't like, intimidating the rest, and even absorbing the more successful (mp3.com), no free market will ever really exist because consumers will be prevented from having the choice of buying what they want altogether.

The invisible hand of the free market doesn't work when this sort of coercion is in play, and whether the terms of this particular license are to protect Replay from the copyright cartels (and whatever court orders their copyright priveleges may result in), or to take advantage of their customers down the road is quite irrelevant. Either way, it is the customer, that's you and I folks, who gets screwed, and the only viable alternative is to give up a little convinience and roll your own GNU/Linux based PVR (it is with pleasure I hear the screaming and wailing of the naysayers now, as I watch my Max Headroom episodes in resolutions they can't even dream of :-).

As for me, I will not be buying this product, but I will be writing Sonic Blue to tell them just exactly why I won't be buying. To make it easier for you, here is Sonic Blue's contact page [replaytv.com]. I urge you to send them a similar letter if this policy bothers you.

That is excellent advice ... and about the only way a consumer can wield any power in an oligarchical market: vocal boycott of the entire product. (It is the copyright cartels, not the PVR makers, who are the oligarchs, but since they effectively decide which PVRs are legal and which are not it amounts to much the same thing.)

For somebody who seems to want his entertainment for free or very little cost, you sure do bitch a lot about commercials. You can't have it both ways, man.

Commercials, through ongoing repetition, indoctrinate. This means that your ability to make conscious decisions, as opposed to reacting to unconscious conditioning is affected, possibly severely if you are a chronic television viewer.

So I too object to commercials, and I have edited them out of my life, without giving up any of the television I pay for each month ($50.00 cable bill). Turner's CEO, Disney's Eisner & other cartel leaders may be trying to modify the already prevelent 'newspeak' into considering commercial-skipping (or, in my case, editing) theft, but not only is that clearly not the case, I am taking back my own self-determination by no longer letting these people condition me for their own petty profits.

How, you ask?

Like so:

I have a $300 firewire A/D converter (you know, like the one the media cartels want to cripple?). However, you could do this with V4L or V4L2 and a video capture board just as well.

I use dvgrab, cronned up to record Max Headroom each Friday, Enterprise each Wednesday, and SG-1 each Saturday. SG1 is nice because no commercial editing is required.

I use kino (a simple NLE for dv video) to quickly snip out the commercials, and This entire process takes about 3 minutes to do. Then I export the result to another directory, again as dv video (but now without the commercials).

At this point I can either record the result onto dv tape via my camcorder, or convert it to the video format of my choice. I typically convert it to high quality xvid format using a smart deinterlacer plugin for transcode, then burn the result to dvd-r or dvd-rw. The exact procedure I use is detailed here.

The files are typically larger than 2 GB, so I use ext2 filesystems rather than UDF or ISO9660 to get around the 2GB filesize limit. Then it goes into a binder with all my B5 divx recorded episodes (which, alas, are much lower quality, but still quite viewable and better than VHS). The newer stuff I'm doing in xvid format is typically broadcast quality and looks fantastic even on my 1080p capable monitor (I actually watch it in 1200p, since my 1920x1200 resolution allows that).

The transcode step is the only step that takes any real time ... on my dual 1 GHz P3 system it manages around 8 frames/second encoding, so I typically fire it off in the evening, go out for dinner, come back a couple of hours later and enjoy my program, commercial free, before going to bed, either on my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 240T, or via the video out on my NVidia card on the television itself.

If you don't require instant gratification, and schedule your time intelligently (do the capture while you're out, do a quick edit and start the export before grabbing a shower, and do the transcode while you're out to dinner or for drinks), your total involvement in doing this is typically 5 minutes / episode, and your result is a very high quality, commercial free, timeshifted program you can watch once and delete, or burn to DVD and put in your personal video library.

The only catch is you have to use your computer to watch it (my videos require GNU/Linux because of the filesizes and filesystem I use, but you can do this all under Windoze too if you're so inclined, though that may require more supervision, and possibly more than just 5 minutes of your time) ... but in this day and age, if you want to have control over your audio-visual media, you have to use a general purpose computer, as opposed to the already horribly crippled consumer video products out there. Why do you think the cartels are working so hard to neuter your computer?

I urge you to respond and defend your positions a bit closer.

Since my position is that any discussion of improving the IP situation must include a discussion of alternatives to IP altogether that might achieve the same (purportedly) desired result, the only reason I can think that others would argue that such a discussion should exclude any consideration of alternatives to IP laws such as copyright would be because they have a vested interest in copyright as it now stands and don't want anyone to consider any alternatives whatsoever. Such a stance would hardly be a good starting point for an honest discussion of the issue.

That is one defense of my position, that we need to be discussing alternatives to copyright. Thus far, our society hasn't tried any alternatives of note, at least not until Richard Stalman's recent "social hack" known commonly as "copyleft". Now, as to some of your other points.

That is a flawed statement, because there was no way to easily copy these works when they were created (with the possible exception of Van Gogh who did suffer problems with copy cats and poorly made copies).

In a smaller world, it is easier to maintain control of one's intellectual property.

Your argument is flawed, in that you assume the artists had any need to "control" their works, or, even if they have the desire to control their works, that society should in any way grant that desire at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

Quite the contrary, often a musician such as Bach or Mozart would become more widely known, more in demand, and hence more successful, the more widely their works were copied and performed. They may not have liked it if their work was performed in a country with which their sponsor was at war (for example), but that doesn't mean they didn't benefit from it, nor does it mean that their desire should have been the paramount factor in whether or not to allow it.

Your entire assumption assumes a need and desire to control copying, a restriction inherent in copyright but not necessarilly inherent in the requirement that artists be compensated for their work, or even in their best interests. It is, almost without exception, in their publishers best interest, but the interest of an artist and their publisher are very often not the same at all.

I believe that copyright law is neessesary to protect intellectual property, though I do not support recent changes in the law. I believe that Walt Disney should enjoy some protection for his mouse (but not for enternity). I believe that I should have certain rights under law if I choose to express myself artistically to protect me from others unlawfully gaining profit from my song, painting, movie, computer program, etc...

This is a circular defintion. You are essentially saying "I believe copyright law is necessary to protect copyrighted works. I believe I should enjoy rights under a law making it illegal for people to copy my work without my permission, so that I'm protected against people violating the law that says they cannot copy my work."

Can you justify your stance without resorting to a circular definition?

This would be the argument of the non creative who seek to make money from other's achievements. If you produce a song, should others gain money from your achivements? What if you are not strong enough (politically or physically) to demand payments that are yours? If there is no copyright protection, who ensures that you will receive due payment?

Nonsense. This is the argument of creative people who are tired of having their work held hostage by publishers, record companies, and studios. It is the argument of creative people who want to be able to contribute to a creative commons without having their work then taken by a private firm and incorporated into a restricted work that diminishes that commons.

And if you are a creative person that feels that these laws are too restrivtive, then by all means, release your intelletual property to the public domain without demand or setoff.

I am such a creative person, and can easilly point out the fallacy of your argument. If I release my work into the public domain under current copyright laws, anyone from Hollywood studios to Time Warner records to Joes Publishing could take my work, restrict it from use by others by simply putting a wrapper around it and claiming copyright on the whole, and thereby make my own work less accessible for use by others by, in effect, surrounding it with copyright landmines.

Simply pouring stuff into the public domain doesn't work when someone, like Disney, can pilfer the public domain and excersize such tight copyright over the derivative works (e.g. Grimm Fairy Tales) that others are put off from doing similar work for fear of legal retaliation (justified or no). It doesn't work because copyright lets people take from the commons without giving back, in effect making the entire exchange a one way street.

As for alternatives, I have suggested several in this thread which are at least as workable as copyright from an artists and societies point of view ... indeed, the only losers are the aforementioned middlemen: publishers, studios, and recording companies.

As I understand it, an artist will be able to tailor the license. Perhaps an artist could make the art free for noncommercial use. If a big buyer comes along they have to pay for alternate licensing terms.

It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.' One of the reasons Free Software was able to succeed so well, and so quickly (a blink of an eye in historical terms) was because there were relatively few free licenses: X, BSD, and the GPL initially, around which a critical mass of software was able to evolve.

In a creative commons, one would ideally be able to incorporate the work of any project into their own, so long as their work is also released into the commons for others to use. As an example, I might want to have a Star Trek episode that is particularly apropos to my project, running on a television in the background in one of my movie's scenes. I cannot do this now because of draconian copyright regimes, nor will I be able to do this within my lifetime because of copyright's no longer (practical in human terms) limitation in duration.

But, if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.

Maybe, for example, I do want to sell my movie on custom burned DVDs, so I can make a little money to cover my filming expenses. But, I plan to release it under a GPL-like license (GPL-like so that Hollywood movie moghuls can't take my work and then steal the freedoms I offer from their customers by making it proprietary and css-encoding it onto their DVDs, for example, which public domain and BSD-like licenses wouldn't prevent), so it is free as in freedom, but commercial in that I'd like to get a couple of bucks selling my CDs. Or perhaps commercial in that, I've become successful and well known, and coca cola is paying me a bunch of cash to place their logo in a few key scenes in the movie.

Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.

What is needed is a relatively few number of licenses, as compatible with one another as possible. Ideally they would boil down to a GPL-like license, a BSD-like license, and public domain, so that, depending on one's philosophy, one can license ones work, and use the work of others, in a relatively straightforward approach. Whether one is using my Free Media License (still being drafted, not ready for use, and if a better, more widely accepted one a la the GPL comes along I'll use that instead), or one of the other licenses out there, as great a degree of compatiblity as possible is needed for a commons like this to work at all.

What is really missing from the entire Free Media and Creative Commons movement is a good, solid licensing framework we can all use to license our contributions. My Free Media License is one attempt to fix this, but I'd much rather be writing a novel than writing a license, and most other creative people probably feel likewise, which makes addressing this deficiency difficult.

Unfortunately, the Creative Commons website seems a little short on Licensing information as well ... a deficiency I sincerely hope will be corrected in the not too distant future. :-)

As I understand it, an artist will be able to tailor the license. Perhaps an artist could make the art free for noncommercial use. If a big buyer comes along they have to pay for alternate licensing terms.

It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.' One of the reasons Free Software was able to succeed so well, and so quickly (a blink of an eye in historical terms) was because there were relatively few free licenses: X, BSD, and the GPL initially, around which a critical mass of software was able to evolve.

In a creative commons, one would ideally be able to incorporate the work of any project into their own, so long as their work is also released into the commons for others to use. As an example, I might want to have a Star Trek episode that is particularly apropos to my project, running on a television in the background in one of my movie's scenes. I cannot do this now because of draconian copyright regimes, nor will I be able to do this within my lifetime because of copyright's no longer (practical in human terms) limitation in duration.

But, if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.

Maybe, for example, I do want to sell my movie on custom burned DVDs, so I can make a little money to cover my filming expenses. But, I plan to release it under a GPL-like license (GPL-like so that Hollywood movie moghuls can't take my work and then steal the freedoms I offer from their customers by making it proprietary and css-encoding it onto their DVDs, for example, which public domain and BSD-like licenses wouldn't prevent), so it is free as in freedom, but commercial in that I'd like to get a couple of bucks selling my CDs. Or perhaps commercial in that, I've become successful and well known, and coca cola is paying me a bunch of cash to place their logo in a few key scenes in the movie.

Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.

What is needed is a relatively few number of licenses, as compatible with one another as possible. Ideally they would boil down to a GPL-like license, a BSD-like license, and public domain, so that, depending on one's philosophy, one can license ones work, and use the work of others, in a relatively straightforward approach. Whether one is using my Free Media License (still being drafted, not ready for use, and if a better, more widely accepted one a la the GPL comes along I'll use that instead), or one of the other licenses out there, as great a degree of compatiblity as possible is needed for a commons like this to work at all.

What is really missing from the entire Free Media and Creative Commons movement is a good, solid licensing framework we can all use to license our contributions. My Free Media License is one attempt to fix this, but I'd much rather be writing a novel than writing a license, and most other creative people probably feel likewise, which makes addressing this deficiency difficult.

Unfortunately, the Creative Commons website seems a little short on Licensing information as well ... a deficiency I sincerely hope will be corrected in the not too distant future. :-)

As I understand it, an artist will be able to tailor the license. Perhaps an artist could make the art free for noncommercial use. If a big buyer comes along they have to pay for alternate licensing terms.

It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.' One of the reasons Free Software was able to succeed so well, and so quickly (a blink of an eye in historical terms) was because there were relatively few free licenses: X, BSD, and the GPL initially, around which a critical mass of software was able to evolve.

In a creative commons, one would ideally be able to incorporate the work of any project into their own, so long as their work is also released into the commons for others to use. As an example, I might want to have a Star Trek episode that is particularly apropos to my project, running on a television in the background in one of my movie's scenes. I cannot do this now because of draconian copyright regimes, nor will I be able to do this within my lifetime because of copyright's no longer (practical in human terms) limitation in duration.

But, if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.

Maybe, for example, I do want to sell my movie on custom burned DVDs, so I can make a little money to cover my filming expenses. But, I plan to release it under a GPL-like license (GPL-like so that Hollywood movie moghuls can't take my work and then steal the freedoms I offer from their customers by making it proprietary and css-encoding it onto their DVDs, for example, which public domain and BSD-like licenses wouldn't prevent), so it is free as in freedom, but commercial in that I'd like to get a couple of bucks selling my CDs. Or perhaps commercial in that, I've become successful and well known, and coca cola is paying me a bunch of cash to place their logo in a few key scenes in the movie.

Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.

What is needed is a relatively few number of licenses, as compatible with one another as possible. Ideally they would boil down to a GPL-like license, a BSD-like license, and public domain, so that, depending on one's philosophy, one can license ones work, and use the work of others, in a relatively straightforward approach. Whether one is using my Free Media License (still being drafted, not ready for use, and if a better, more widely accepted one a la the GPL comes along I'll use that instead), or one of the other licenses out there, as great a degree of compatiblity as possible is needed for a commons like this to work at all.

What is really missing from the entire Free Media and Creative Commons movement is a good, solid licensing framework we can all use to license our contributions. My Free Media License is one attempt to fix this, but I'd much rather be writing a novel than writing a license, and most other creative people probably feel likewise, which makes addressing this deficiency difficult.

Unfortunately, the Creative Commons website seems a little short on Licensing information as well ... a deficiency I sincerely hope will be corrected in the not too distant future. :-)

... even with the same video signal. Whoever modded the parent post up as "insightful" has shit for brains.

In answer to the question posted: Why not just get an el cheapo dvd standalone unit for your TV. You get a remote and probably a bigger picture. Why would anyone watch DVDs on their computer, Gnu/Linux or Windows?

Television looks like shit. It is interlaced, with only 480 lines of resolution (NTSC) or 576 lines (PAL). This means that each stroke of the electronic pen only writes 240 lines (288 lines PAL) per stroke, with each stroke happening 60 times / second (50 times / second PAL). In short, the image is low res, flickery, and fuzzy.

Contrast that with a 1920x1200 24" LCD monitor, which can play DVDs in progressive, rather than interlaced mode (meaning each swipe of the electronic pen across the screen, 60 times each second, writes all 480 [PAL: 576] lines, rather than just have of them), and can do so at resolutions most consumer televisions simply cannot match, such as 720p.

Hell, you can take analog video signals, captured with either V4L(1|2) or firewire, encode and compress them into xvid format, and have a better picture than the TV was capable of displaying during the live broadcast. I know. I've done this with two episodes of Max Headroom, with astonishing results. Even my old 8-mm college videos (not hi-8 mind you, just 8-mm video tape) looks better after it has been digitized, deinterlaced, and displayed on a computer monitor than it does fresh from the master source displayed on the same monitor (but still interlaced), much less the low res television.

Then there are all kinds of scaling issues involved when trying to use consumer DVD players with high quality monitors or plasma screens, so much so that many videophiles build HTPCs (Home Theatre PCs) in order to fix the scaling artifacts and achieve better quality output than is possible even if spending tens of thousands of dollars on specialized scan converters and scaler hardware designed to do the very same thing.

The general purpose computer is the best A/V display device available to normal people today, and will remain so for the forseeable future, unless congress decides normal folks shouldn't be allowed to possess the power of a home computer and passes the Hollings Bill or some variant thereof, in which case it is time to emigrate.

When Microsoft has billions going into research and a dominant desktop position, how can one expect an open AV standard to become prevelent, especailly when one considers the effort that goes into creating good codecs.

There are already good codecs out there, and more on the horizon. Nuppal or xvid come to mind as two excellent codecs (I'm encoding all of my Max Headroom episodes into xvid, and using this methodology under GNU/Linux I end up with quality video that exceeds the quality of the program on the television as I was watching the broadcast, easilly burnable onto a data DVD to boot.

Absolutely phenominal, and the xvid (a variant of opendivx if I'm not mistaken) can be scaled down as much as needed for web pages (at a cost in quality and/or resolution).

So, if you want a good, open audio/video codec write a Netscape/IE/Mozilla plugin that supports xvid video with oggvorbis encoded audio. The tools to make the video are already free and exist on virtually every platform ... if you want a web browser capable plugin, write it and free yourself from the Microsoft monopoly. Then you at least have a comfortable codec you can use until the Asbolutely Free with No Ifs, Ands, or Buts Ogg Tarkin codec is released.

I guarantee you many (perhaps most) web page authors who are doing this sort of thing as a hobby (most websites) and want video would take a free(dom) codec over a non-free one given the choice, similiar capabilities, and the opportunity, and there is no reason for us to be beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else with all the free tools and implimentations available on just about every platform at this point in the game.

Here's a great novel related to intellectual property and depicting a grim future where associations like the RIAA basically control everything: Autonomy

Shame it's not completed yet.

From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.

First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).

Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island ... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.

adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information ... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.

Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do ... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant ... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.

As for 'Open Source' television already existing ... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted ... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts ... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.

From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.

First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).

Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island ... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.

adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information ... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.

Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do ... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant ... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.

As for 'Open Source' television already existing ... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted ... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts ... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.