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Civil Disobedience and DeCSS
The EFF has put out a series of Updates covering the case day-by-day as it progresses. The most recent one or two aren't on the website yet, but should be soon.
2600 is keeping a complete archive of case-related documents, including transcripts. The transcripts are serious time-killers - it takes a long time to read 7 hours of testimony. But if you've got some time on your hands, they make good reading. Nothing beats first-generation source materials.
The New York Times has a nice summary in their Cyber Law section. Concentrates on the surprise testimony of Jon Johansen on Thursday, but touches on other issues as well.
The people at Harvard's Openlaw project have been scrutinizing the trial as it unfolds. They've collected a bunch of links to press coverage of the trial, and it's frankly pretty interesting to see the substantial differences between publications - almost as if they were watching different trials, one about the freedom to view DVD's as you choose, and a completely different trial about pirates, freebooters, and buccaneers. Their DVD-discuss mailing list often has insightful commentary.
So now that you've had a chance to read up on the trial, let's cut to the chase: the defendants are going to lose. (Note that the decision in the case may not come for a few weeks yet.) No doubt Monday-morning quarterbacks are already primed for action, and the MPAA's PR people have already prepared their after-action press releases calling 2600 a bunch of pirates, thieves, and baby-stealers. Some people will claim it was due to Judge Kaplan's evident bias (which has now degenerated into the lawyerly equivalent of a flame-war between the defense lead attorney Martin Garbus and the Judge); some will point out that any judge could have interpreted the statute as rigidly as Kaplan, with or without bias. Regardless of who wins, the case will be appealed, so this matter will be finally settled in the Court of Appeals or perhaps even the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, I'm going to take the liberty of reposting an email from John Perry Barlow. I don't think he'll mind.
Dave,
Thanks for the LA Times link. I like best the delicious irony of the following:
"This is a very profound moment historically," Time Warner President Richard Parsons says. "This isn't just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It's about an assault on everything that constitutes the cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: The country will end up in a sort of cultural Dark Ages."
A profound moment, indeed. Indeed, it is an assault on everything that has stifled the cultural expression of our society. It's an assault on the system that stole every dime The Chambers Brothers ever made while grotesquely enriching Brittany Spears.
There is certainly the potential for a cultural Dark Age here, by which I don't simply mean what would follow the death of Time-Warner. Rather, I refer to the very real possibility that Time-Warner and the rest of its loathsome kind will die with most of the expressive genius of the 20th Century buried with them, embedded in their corpses by their last success: using copyright to prevent the digitization and, hence, perpetuation of all that creation.
Only massive civil disobedience will prevent this ugly future. Speaking as someone who has created a lot of "intellectual property," I can assure you that my primary incentive was the possibility that what passed through my heart would be heard. I want it to be available to my great grandchildren. But they will never hear it unless it's stored in some other medium than the material objects the record industry manufactured, all of which will be as mute as stones by then.
Of course, I wanted to be paid for it, and I was. Just as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and countless others were paid, despite the absence of copyright protection.
The only people who are likely to lose the lesser incentive of wealth will be the likes of Richard Parsons. His loss will be our gain. Unless, of course, he wins.
Mad as hell,
Barlow
Yes, but the statement from Time-Warner could be compared to saying that if they stopped the PGA tour, people would stop playing golf, or if they stopped tennis tournaments people would stop playing tennis. Some would stop playing these sports if they could no longer make a living off of it, but they won't die, we won't go into a recreational dark ages.
But even more than that, at least in my opinion the desire to create is what makes someone an artist - not their past creations, not their marketability or their worth in dollars. If someone loses the desire to create because they aren't getting paid, maybe they were never true artists in the first place.
I have to agree with you on this. Copyrights are a good thing. But as the saying goes, all good things in moderation. Since copyright was first instituted in this country in 1790, the production of just about everything has increased and change has happened at a more and more rapid pace. These changes are not the result of copyright. They are the result of many people building on the ideas of others. The areas where change was greatest and fastest were the areas where patents and copyrights held the least sway.
We need to repeal the last couple of copyright extensions and go back to a much shorter term. 28 years is still a long time to profit from a creation. Patents get less than that today, and should probably get less still in some cases (and the patent system is a whole other argument). I don't think we'd see any shortage of new works if copyright terms were shortened. No, the studios and publishers would scream bloody murder about it, but in the end, they've been the one's trying to screw the rest of us over in the name of "the poor authors." Copyright is a deal between the public and the authors. The public has been getting the shaft for years though. That needs to change.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Rebels in Afghanistan were taking out Russian helicopters without modern weapons. Had they been better armed, they could have put up a much better fight still. I would assume that the guns come out after the government pulls its guns out. By doing that, it has declared war on at least a group of its citizens. They should have the ability to fight back. There will always be those who don't want to be involved, and will go along with any outcome, but the rest should not have to suffer under a tyrannical government. History seems to show that virtually all governments that last for any good length of time eventually get to such a point. I think that's one of the reasons that the founders of this country wanted us to have the right to keep and bear arms. Of course they probably didn't forsee such advances as nuclear weapons, Cobra gunships, F-117 Stealth Fighters, etc. But those weapons will probably not be suited to the sort of conflict that would result. It would mostly be a war of information, with guerillas that only fight when forced to. They would probably much rather run and continue to wage an information war to unseat the government.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It doesn't have to be tolerated, and in most instances, CD is not tolerated. Witness the events in Seattle recently. But the demonstrations do get attention and that is what those people want. They may get arrested, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, or in some cases shot with real bullets or severely beaten. This is the risk they take to get attention for their views.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The truth is, copyright was limited in effectiveness to the time in our history between the invention of mass publishing and the time that mass publishing became so cheap anybody could do it.
He's right, you know. Copyright was created in response to the invention of the printing press. The English government (a monarchy at the time) needed a way to control what was printed. Censorship was the original intent of copyright. Later, in 1710 with the Statute of Anne it was changed to reflect new goals, namely that of ensuring that the publishing industry could prosper while not giving them complete or perpetual control.
The statute was challenged later, several times in fact, by the publishers. They hoped to regain the perpetual ownership rights that they had before the Statute of Anne came along. They failed in every attempt. The US used the Statute of Anne as a guideline for our own copyright as it's described in the Constitution and as it was originally made into law in 1790. It granted a 14 year term, renewable for 14 more years, just as the Statute of Anne granted English publishers and authors.
Since copyright originally came about because mass copying became much easier, so should a new method be created now. The problem, as always, is still the publishers. They are still pursuing the goal of complete and perpetual control. This is not in the artist's interest, and it is certainly not in the interests of the vast majority of the citizens of this country. There is supposed to be a balance struck between providing the incentive for creators to create and paying back the people of this country for their granting of a limited monopoly to the creator by adding the work to the public domain once its term has expired. I believe that that balance was completely destroyed about 24 years ago with the Copyright Act of 1976 which extended the copyright term to life+50. That meant that copyrighted materials would probably not fall into the public domain until at least a few generations after they were created. A minimum of 50 years, but conceivably much longer. This throws the whole arrangement out of whack and (through the publishing industry's whining of "It's for the poor authors.") has created a sense in the American public that authors weren't being rewarded for their work, when, in fact, prior to the extension, author's were protected for up to 56 years. That's a very long time to have a monopoly on the publishing of a creative work. The term has since been extended to life+70 years, or 95 years for "works for hire," (i.e. anything created by a corporation). I suppose the 95 years would apply to most music now since the record industry got music created while under contract to a record company declared a "work for hire."
Read the background material in the Eldred v. Reno case to get a better explanation than I could provide here.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
In a way, that's an understandable tactic. All you have to do is prove possible bias, demonstrate the trial was swayed by something other than evidence, and you can walk out on appeal. It's the same stunt Microsoft tried in the Anti-Trust suit.
However, that isn't "justice". That's trying to win by default. And trials are not supposed to be about "winning" or "losing", they're supposed to be an impartial examination of a situation, to ensure fairness and accountability.
Far from using the actual DATA that the defendents possess to show the reality of things, the defendents are being sold up the river by their own lawyers, who seem more interested in a pyrric victory that can generate lots of publicity for themselves than a fair decision that reflects the reality of DeCSS.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If one of the Slash hackers could add a special over-ride switch for postings of exceptional value to the readers, PLEASE do. There aren't many posts that deserve to flout the +5/-2 range, but this is definitely one of them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, sometimes the majority is wrong. If the majority was always right we'd all be married to Harrison Ford or Jennifer Aniston.
The evolution of an idea from a minority opinion to a majority opinion can start with small protests. It's the best way.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
You mean M- M-w C-y, don't you?
Wait a minute now, what does "removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority" mean?
It means that, while still inexcusable, racism was at least comprehensible; it's hard to avoid a "tyranny of the majority" in a democracy, except by making sure that the majority of people respect each other's individual rights, and that's not an easy process. The ability for corporations to exert excessive control over consumers and workers, on the other hand, is a tyranny exerted by a small minority; when that becomes possible it's a good sign that the distribution of wealth and power are seriously fubarred.
Wow. I think of myself as a libertarian, mostly, but you'd never know it to read the above paragraph...
You had just claimed that Banning DeCSS wasn't about "the right to watch a movie", and then equated it "the right to get a drink of water".
In the sense that both are gross underestimations of the rights involved, yes. Want some more similarities?
"Movies" aren't something that the government owns. They don't throw you in jail for watching a DVD on Linux because the government mandated that Linux users can't watch DVDs.
Um.. the judge here is presiding over a trial, not a philosophical debate. The MPAA wants it to be illegal for you to view movies in ways they don't allow, whether you paid for the movie and are exercising fair use rights or not, and they have a law (a government mandate) on the books now which will make it possible for you to go to jail if you resist.
Sure, I could buy properly licensed players for each region I wanted to view DVDs from; and blacks could go to colored schools. Just because there's an alternative available doesn't mean that unfair restrictions are suddenly OK.
If I didn't make this clear enough before, I don't think the DeCSS case in particular, or even the IP rights war in general, are as worrysome as segregation was. But they are both about rights, not trivialities like what operating system you can play DVDs with or what restaurant you can eat at.
I'm skipping your weird analogy; I'm still trying to figure out exactly who "Ford" is analogous to, and where the "volunteers who implemented improved Super Tires, gave the design away, and then got their asses sued off" are.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
"And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create."
Artist don't only create to get paid that create to express themselves to see if they can capture the public's eye this has nothing to with the artist but the corporations.
Yep. And you're the one assaulting it. You are the one who shoves crap like the Backstreet Boys on us. You are the uncivilized cretin, Mr. Parsons. The sooner your kind die, the sooner real culture can thrive. I won't miss you at all.
If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create.
Mr. Parsons, consider yourself to have met an artist with the incentive to create no matter what monetary rewards (or lack thereof) are present. Perhaps your world, where so-called "artists" are in it for the money, would perish; but this would definitely be a boon to civilization. We can do without Britany Spears.
Worst-case scenario: The country will end up in a sort of cultural Dark Ages."
It already is and you are to blame. I've seen the sort of garbage that Warner produces and I can tell you that it is responsible for all the cultural decay you see around you now. You are a fool, Mr. Parsons.
For those of us in the United States, at least.
This seems to me to be exactly the kind of "laying down the basic framework" type thing that would be best served by an amendment to the constitution. Maybe stick some reasonable privacy stuff in there as well.
Passing a law would only lead to years and years of lawsuits until the law is confirmed or shot down by the Supreme Court.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
There are too many goddamn awful bands anyway; the world would not miss the majority of them. And I'd much rather listen to music made by people that do it because they enjoy it, than to people who are doing it just because they think it might make them rich.
Do you really think music would disappear if that lure of fabulous rock-star wealth disappeared? I don't. There has always been music. There haven't always been copyright laws, record companies and multit-million dollar recording contracts. But people made music anyway because they wanted to.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
As another noted, my dislike and prior experience with Declan colored my interpretation of the photograph and the message it was sending. mae culpa.
2. Posting a link to a photo of Declan's in a comment means that he "enjoys a rapport with slashdot"?!
I should have been more specific. I was not referring to you personally, or the photo in particular. Rather the photo (and my misinterpretatino of it) were the catalyst to expound on Declan's lack of journalistic ethics and the seemingly high (perhaps now cooled to medium based on the "olde tyme hacker" article) he appears to be held in by at least some editors at slashdot. I refer to previous slashdot articles, particularly those posted during the time when livid was under attack and developers were being forced through legal thuggary to withdraw from the project, largely because of Declan's irresponsible journalism. At that same time this was happening numerous articles of his were posted, with slashdot intros of the sort saying (paraphrased) "Declan has another interesting look at X" or "Declan McCullagh of Wired covered Y." Most other stories are not introduced with the author's name, but rather "an article at [publication]." In fact, the only author I'm aware of that enjoys such regular billing on slashdot, by name, is Jon Katz (apologies to Mr. Katz for mentioning his name in the same breath as Mr. McCullagh).
This implies rather strongly some kind of rapport or relationship between Declan and slashdot, which, if true, reflects poorly on slashdot.
I point that out as criticism because
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Its not treating Art as a Commodity to want to get paid. While I work with professional artists on a regular basis, this is not my main job. Hell, most of the time I am working with these folks, it is because I am getting to work with the people I consider heros in my life...I took my last vacation to work two weeks unpaid on a friends album, so obviously it ain't about getting paid for me either.
/.ers know what kinda expense it take to make an album (or a movie or software or anything that can be put in a downloadable form thus must be free). If ya wanna be purely idealistic, quit yer corporate jobs, move to country and start up a geek community. If ya wanna try to live idealisticly but know that ya have to throw in a little realism, keep yer day jobs and know that Art doesn't have to be a commodity, but it sure helps at times (and doesn't necessaritly mean giving away yer soul).
Now on the otherhand, I have a pretty well stocked home studio. A lot of this comes from doing beta testing for various instrument companies but another part comes from just plain hard work. I've done several jobs where I've worked simply to get another piece of equipment where I wouldn't have been able to do so if I wasn't look at art as pseudo-commodity stock. Its great for the amatures to say they ain't in it for the money, but what do ya say when ya want to buy that nice $20k console and yer day job ain't cutting it. Theres no way in hell I could justify something like this if I wasn't a professional (which I'm not...just a partially compensated amature as well).
To be honest, I really don't think most
clif
You can produce all you want and not give away your creations for free. You have a perfect right to not show anybody anything you've created unless you get money. You do not have a right to tell them what to do with it.
Copyright is not about preventing stuff from being taken from you. It's about telling other people what they can do with what they own in the hopes that you can make more money. At one point in time, this restriction was not unreasonable. Now it is. Deal with it.
Stop trying to claim that copyright is some holy thing handed down by God itself. The truth is, copyright was limited in effectiveness to the time in our history between the invention of mass publishing and the time that mass publishing became so cheap anybody could do it.
Copyright is no longer effective. It no longer works. Figure out something that does work and stop whining about a situation that has irrevocably changed. If people listen to your whining enough, and try to make copyright work against all odds, our society will be plunged into a dark age of tyranny.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
There is a:
When they took the first amendment, you didn't care because you had nothing unpopular to say.
When they took the second amandment, you didn't care because you didn't own a gun.
When they took the fourth amendment, you didn't care because you had nothing to hide.
When they took the fifth amendment, you didn't care because you weren't guilty.
When they took the sixth amendment, you didn't care because you weren't waiting for a trial.
When they took the eighth amendment, you didn't care because you'd never been arrested nor convicted of anything.
When they took the ninth amendment, you didn't care because as long as you had your job and a place to live you didn't need any other "rights".
When they took the tenth amendment, you didn't care because you're not concerned with national politics or state's rights.
But you actually get up and arms when the corporate suits come after your SOFTWARE? Give me a break.
We must fight the good fight, we must do everything that we can to win. However, we must also be prepared to lose. We must have plans in effect just in case things don't go our way.
Stuff like this is going to make the boys at havenco VERY rich some day.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Determining whether their actions were "legal" or not is the whole point of the lawsuit. I don't read the law the way the MPAA suggests and neither do a lot of other people. Furthermore, there is the question of what lawmakers actually intended, and what we as citizens want to happen, something that needs to be resolved legislatively. Legal challenges are an intrinsic part of the US system of law and government; this case had to be brought.
What kind of government do you think operates in the US? Your kinds of arguments might be applicable in fascist or autocratic societies, but in a democratic society that is governed by the rule of law, court challenges and political participation are essential. That may annoy some lobbyists and legislators with vested financial interests, but it still needs to be done.
I find your arguments both dangerous and naive. Similar arguments have been made throughout history, and I suggest you read up on the consequences. Issues of corporate control of the media are of fundamental importance to our society, and this is not only a good cause, it's an essential cause.
Implicit in your argument is that a technology should be outlawed if it allows pirating. That's nonsense and it was never the stated intent of lawmakers. The stated intent was to outlaw technology whose exclusive purpose was to allow pirating. If some otherwise useful technology also enables pirating, then the industry should have to figure out how to deal with the consequences, not society as a whole.
Besides, if the industry wanted to make cryptographically secure DVDs, they could. DeCSS is a consequence of either technical incompetence or a deliberate attempt to test the laws on the part of its developers.
This case will undoubtedly be appealed. It might well go all the way to the Supreme Court, as it is one of the first in what seems to be a whole series of new intellectual property disputes, and the Supremes might deem it a good idea to lay down a precedent. And appeals are where Garbus really shines; bear in mind that the man has never lost a case before the Supreme Court.
It might take a while, but I think we have a good chance of winning in the end.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The whole piracy-is-infeasible argument was extremely weak from the very beginning. Spending any effort on that argument is just setting up a strawman for the plaintiffs to trivially knock down. Even if it weren't for good encoding like DiVX, it is a sure thing that storage and bandwidth technology will make 5 Gig movies pretty easy to pass around in a few years.
I was kinda saddened when I read Garbus splitting hairs about whether that guy or his assistant when to IRC to get a pirated movie or not. I mean, I guess Garbus has to fight and contest every inch of ground, but that whole issue is so pointless.
I'm a few days behind in my reading. I damn well better see some good arguments by Garbus about Fair Use and the purpose of DeCSS. If the court is still treating the potential-for-piracy angle as being relevant, then Garbus is screwing up.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And from my own experience (I am a programmer@mandrakesoft), the most it takes is time. The hardware is pretty cheap. I program whetever or not I get paid to do it. But I likes to get paid for doing it. I think that is a pretty common view of the things.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
I love this -
ZDnet News:
(snip)
The attorney for the movie industry called it a clash of cultures: the freewheeling hipsters of the Internet vs. the hard-working creative talents in the movie companies. "The plaintiffs have a right to protect their content," said Leon Gold, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP and the lead attorney for the studios, in his opening remarks. "The hacker zealots are wrong."
(/snip)
Oh, yeah, hard-working creative talents. Eisner and Valenti?
Neither of these guys has broken a sweat in 20 years. They live extremely well off the proceeds of their serfs.
Go, Go, Goldstein!
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
My point was that organizations like the AP, UPI, Knight-Ridder do the real low-level reporting; what we see on the networks is nothing but repackaging. The repackaging process removes alot of content, leaving the public with a shell of what you would find in a good newspaper article.
Even if corporate giants disappeared, there is already more than enough media out there to go around. Newsweek and US News would take over Time's share. The newspaper and internet news market isn't really an issue. The radio news market could go to Bloomberg, which is already a good radio news source. Television news wouldn't really exist, but that's okay because the quality sucks and market share is dropping anyway (except for local news market share).
What really drives your point home are the bios on the user pages you linked to. That's just too much to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm not ready to believe that Signal11 is forming a "Karma Mafia", but I think it's becoming pretty clear that he's abusing the system. As you will almost certainly be moderated down I'm posting this with my +1 Bonus in the hope that it will cause people to notice your post and read it in its entirety. Moderators should take note of this and it will hopefully be a factor in their future moderating decisions.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
We've all heard it before, but I'll say it again. DeCSS is not required to copy, its only required to play. Thank you. (The only piracy is stops is the ability to spread it across encoding regions, and piracy over the net)
They affect you in one country in the world. Fortunately, there are still N-1 other countries.
The Web being what it is, no matter how hard the MPAA tries, there will always be places from which you can download DeCSS. And many legal mirrors of DeCSS, too (though your dowloading it may not be).
You know, strong crypto used to be illegal where I am (France). That didn't stop me from using it: I just downloaded the software from a place (e.g. Finland) where it was. I see the same happening with DeCSS.
Have you even LOOKED at his user info?
Have you seen all the trolling, racist, anti-gay and what not comments? I don't think I'm the one that's poisoning something.
I am merely stating that this kind of person does not deserve some sort of extra attention,- the moderators will sort out how relevant his message is.
Breace
I'm posting this with my +1 Bonus in the hope that it will cause people to notice your post
Sjeez, you could have looked at his user info first (fortunately this is possible, because he did not post AC, even though he stated that), and look at his posting history. Hardly the kind of person worth listening too, right?!
I guess this will make me a karma whore, but there's no need for you to override the moderators. Now you are abusing the system to draw attention to the post of a person who's proven to be a troller, racist and so on.
Breace
Another issue is that sometimes the Supreme Court decides not to hear an appeal, letting the lower court decision stand.
cssmyass.com/org/net - up for grabs...
Incidentally, if anyone is interested in buying a 125+ karma account, I'm more than willing to sell...
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
To authors and inventors. Not to their heirs, employers, or assignees.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I would also note that folk music is now disseminated partly by recording; I've learned many songs by listening to recordings of Peter, Paul, and Mary, or the Grateful Dead, or Fairport Convention.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This is my post. I half way expected to get a flamebait rating or two. There are more reasons than just money why an obviously guilty man beat the system, but his millions were the biggest factor. It really was to spark a discussion on how the MPAA is throwing huge amounts of money directly and indirectly into winning this case. It is a precedent setter, and they can't afford to lose.
:-)
/.]
Let the moderation system do its job. For every person throwing around a few bad mods, there are at least five others doing a good job. I've got the karma to spare
[hey, cmdrTaco! There needs to be more moderation points given out just to combat all the pr0n posts and juvenile offtopics rants which are cluttering
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I was visiting my ex last week in the US, she works for a large advertising firm. They just got the largest ad contract in the company's history from a Political Action Committee representing the drug and health companies who have a stranglehold on the US market. She earned twice her yearly salary from the bonus for this one contract, and they didn't even try hard for it.
:-)
The surprising news is that dozens of other PR and ad firms also got similar contracts at the same time. The total amount to be spent will be more than all the presidential campaigns together estimated to be between US$90 million and US$220 million. Just to convince the US citizens to vote one way or another on some health reform law. Billions are at stake. The are so desperate, they are giving the ad agencies money to refund to other clients and buy out their ad spaces on tele and in print.
I prefer the old fashioned way, where someone outside the polling station hands you $5 and tells you which candidate to vote for.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The only proven way of getting something to survive the ages is to write it down lots of times.
We can see the art of cavemen, the writing of the ancient egyptians. But can we hear their music? We hear Mozart on the radio, on CD's, in concert because his music was written down in sheet music and then many people copied it down again.
The (copy-righted) music of today is not allowed to be written out in sheet music for all to enjoy. It is only available to us on CDs which aren't going to last as long as most people seem to think. Sometime after the decay of the music industry the CDs will slowly lose their memory, the few tapes that exist will be practically worthless, and who ever uses a LP anymore? How will we listen to our favorite musicians then? The music can't be reproduced there is no sheet music to reproduce it from.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
40 or so years down the track, no-one consides the draft dodgers to have committed a 'crime'
What people consider to be or crime is irrelevant. If people don't consider it a crime to pirate software or go on murderous rampages, that doesn't make it any less of a crime. Dodging the draft was a crime. People who fled to Canada broke the law. The difference is President Ford pardoned all the draft dodgers. This shows 1) why people don't consider it a crime anymore and 2) that it was a crime, as Ford had to issue a pardon.
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
Q. When was the first time you heard of the existence of a
9 utility that defeated CSS and decrypted the content of one of
10 the studio's DVDs?
11 A. Early to mid-October of 1999.
12 Q. What was that utility?
13 A. DeCSS.
14 Q. What was the source of the original information you
15 received in the existence of DeCSS?
16 A. I found it on a news posting on Slashdot.
EEEK!! They are watching. That is scary.
(ps. I hope the above quote is not copyrighted or something)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yes, why people create things like music, OSS, science, art, mathematics, and novels is VERY complex. I just laugh at these people like ESR who claim to have it all figured out for OSS.
Online art and music need a lot of people to strat tring a variety of things including:
1) I'm writing one song per month, If people donate money I'll work at my day job less and make more songs.
2) Uploading versions of the song containing advertising to all the pirate mp3 sites, but distributing clean versions for free from the artists web site (which uses banner ads).
3) uploading mp3s to all the pirate sites which ask people to buy a CD of the same thing.
etc.
Anywho, It's a time for people to do what they enjoy and explore the finantial options surrounding their activities.. the operative words here being enjoy and explore.. not financial.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The legal system you argue should always be obeyed wouldn't exist
except for law breakers. Laws shouldn't be broken lightly, but injust
laws shouldn't be followed blindly either.
I wonder if the guy who said that actually believes it. Somehow, young garage musicians will say "Fuck it mates, let's go into chartered accountancy, there's more money there."
Wah!
I definately can see fair use considerations, but I wonder why people are fighting so hard for the closed format of a media conglomerate. I never maintained that what the lawsuit is doing is a vioaltion of fair use, which is serious business. I meerly think that comparing it to the civil rights struggly is inflationary language. The term Nazi gets bandied about already for perpetrators of relatively minor violations (I would be surprised if there wasn't at least one reference to "SS-like corporate thugs" or something of the sort somewhere on this page), and I see this as a related issue. People infringing on fair use and intellectual property is a serious issue, but nowhere near as serious as the systematic deprivation of the fundamental rights of millions of Americans (or anyone else, for that matter).
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
But not all unjust laws are equally unjust. I doubt that Dr. King saw every possible legal issue as a battle of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. And if he did, I must respectfully disagree with him. There are shades of injustice, and some are worse than others. All tha I am maintaining is that the injustice perpetrated by restricting the fair use of DVD's is less than the injustice perpetrated by systematically depriving a large portion of the population of rights to equal employment, equal access to all public services, and equal rights to be free from persecution.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
intellectual property (a legal fiction to begin
with) influences how people make their livings, or
how well they will be educated?
I think that it definately will have an effect. I think that the effect will, however, be less than the effect of segregation and the systems that existed before the Civil Rights movement. If I seemed to diminish the impact of the Fair Use issue, it is only because I think that it's moral implications pale beside generations of officially enshrined injustice. Fair Use has very important implications, but the struggle to defend Fair Use remains, in my mind, less significant than the struggle for Civil Rights
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
In Fair Use, it is the same issue. The content is 'expressed' not by the end user, but by the company producing it. If there are no restrictions on what does and does not constitute Fair Use, than all control is lost. You're own words can be used against you, or used without any compensation, reducing the incentive for creation. The public as a whole then loses the benefits of that expression.
Fair Use is not about the government telling you what you can or cannot say, or what of your own information can be made available- it determines what you can do with information that is belong to someone else.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
This is about the continuation of music. Most of my MP's are from bands long since split, and the record company hasn't any CD's. Many of the bands I like were pre-CD so none exist, and all thats there is from other fans that have digitized thier cassettes and LP's to ensure that people can still listen to the work.
Ultimately, this is part of the war over Intellectual Property.
There are two futures. In one, almost every piece of information (music, books, film, software) is owned by somebody. Powerful organisations use standards to make sure that "free" information is not a threat (eg "extend and embrace", or encrypting standard AV content so that only those with cryptographic keys can create it).
In the other, almost every piece of information is unrestricted, and the people who created it are rewarded in other ways.
This is every bit as big as the fight against racism (although obviously quite different too).
Fixing copyright
Guess: The defense will lose and have no grounds for appeal which will be denied.
The grounds for appeal have never been that "the purpose of the decss project was to play dvd's in linux without paying anything". Regardless of the fact that it violates our fair use rights to have to buy keys to watch stuff we already own, you've sidestepped the basis of the appeal. The basis of the appeal, to the Supreme Court, is an appeal over the consitutionality of the DMCA.
Specifically, whether it is constitutional to ban all speech which describes how a mechanism works, that could be used to circumvent a mechanism in a way contrary to the intention of the inventor of the mechanism. This is what the DMCA does.
The defendants ARE guilty of violating the DMCA, and should be found guilty.
The DMCA IS guilty of violating the Constitution, and should be found guilty.
I understand that it's very hard for moderators not to mod people like you as flamebait - and I applaud them for moderating you up for the public ridicule you so richly deserve.
P.S. the commercial linux DVD player project initiatives were commenced only AFTER the decss project broke, because the MPAA didn't want to appear that they were denying a community a legal way to play movies. Of course, that still leaves Amiga, Atari, Solaris, BeOS, HP-UX, BSD, etc., etc., and their user communities, without a DVD player. Maybe if some more Jon Johansens get their homes raided we'll see some bogus development for a HP-UX DVD player (:
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Admittedly, there are many alternatives to DVD technology, but they will take some time to get going.
The Video CD was an interesting technology, and is still currently a cheap alternative to somebody who wants to put video content together for a "set-top" box, but not pay the huge fees to author DVD titles.
There are also other nacient technologies which will eventually replace DVD, but it will be the better part of a decade before they become as solid as DVD.
What really makes me upset is that the DVD Fourm had (and to a small extent still has, although the clock is ticking) the opportunity to establish a universal video data format, and create a "consumer" multi-media computer platform that could be operated by your grandmother. Instead, the DVD format will disappear in a few years when the next generation of high data density devices appear. Efforts on projects like MPEG-4 will also obsolete DVD-Video as a format, which can be only described as a specification comittee gone mad at best. This is too bad, because it held so much promise.
No, the principle of first sale is explicitly endorsed by Congress in 17 U.S.C. 109, and a whole line of caselaw. Most recently, the Supreme Court used it in Quality King v L'Anze (1998) to allow importing of copyrighted works over the objection of the copyright holder.
Specifically section 109 includes 109(c): "Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(5), the owner of a particular copy lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to display that copy publicly, either directly or by the projection of no more than one image at a time, to viewers present at the place where the copy is located."
Note that this is an affirmative grant and that only the exclusive rights of 106(5) are notwithstanding. Congress did not add the right of access control to 106, and there is nothing you can point to that states they intended to.
Therefore, my interpretation is the proper one given the accepted jurisprudence for resolving conflict of laws.
2) [Reverse Engineering] You admit that DeCSS qualifies for RE and then basically say "but it's still copyright infringement". 1201(f)(2) Allows the creaton of and (f)(3) allows the distribution of descramblers as long as they are not "infringing", so you allude to correct law. However the copying done by DeCSS is performed on a copy that was purchased. Fair use is very easy to prove under these circumstaces. See the Betamax case and its progeny.
3) Too bad copying entire movies is not even remotely "fair use" The HOLDING in Sony v. Universal refutes your position.
You must learn how to read law.
I note that you quote neither law nor cases to support any of your positions. Silly you.
4) There is NOTHING in free speech which gives license to violate copyrights.
In Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985) the Supreme Court refered to "the First Amendment protections already embodied in the Copyright Act's distinction between copyrightable expression and uncopyrightable facts and ideas, and the latitude for scholarship and comment traditionally afforded by fair use".
So indeed, there are two such principles. You can see also the decisions in Feist, Acuff-Rose, & Betamax for a better grounding in these affirmative defenses. Particularly, read footnote 13 in the Betamax case.
5) This case has nothing to do with antitrust or misuse of copyright and you'll find that neither of those lame defenses was even attempted, even by this lame defense team.
Garbus is one of the leading Consitutional Lawyers of our time. Perhaps you've heard of the Pentagon Papers? Perhaps not.
In an interview in Feed in May, Martin Garbus answered the following question:
He's refering to the case US v. Paramount where the studios attempted to justify block-licencing of copyrights, but lost.
Antitrust consideratons occur in no less than three ways in this case to lead to misuse of copyright:
(1) Collusion - the studios collectively use the DVD-CCA licence to strengthen their negotiating position and control the player market
(2) Tying - the right of access is sold separately from the copy itself. The studios use their collective "market power" to "force" "unwanted" licenced players on people.
(3) Restraint of Competition - The DVD-CCA licence has restrictive terms that force anticompetitive terms on would-be player manufacturers.
If you care to continue the discussion, please subscribe to the dvd-discuss list at Openlaw.
people are downloading X-Men today (no DVDs exist, as I recall), in pretty good quality
If you or anybody can actually prove this, it would be very helpful to the defense.
If you know of a DivX that is being "traded" out there that is definitely not available on DVD, then please email me and I will get that information to the defense.
The judge has pointed out that the defense cannot ask the plaintiffs to prove DeCSS caused DivX piracy if they cannot prove it did not. This would help prove it did not.
"If the artists want to sell their music in your little paradise, then great.
Otherwise what you are promoting is Marxism, pure and simple... whereby we take away the property of the people and redistribute it per state doctrine. "
It's actually a little more complicated than that. This issue is heavily dependant on your definition of property. I would argue that there is a 'natural' definition of property which deals with things that are physical - if I 'own' a house then I decide who may live there - if it were given to someone else then I would no longer be able to use it.
'Intellectual Property' on the other hand is a legal construct. An example of a society without the concept of intellectual property was ancient Greece. Storytellers in that culture told variations on the same stories - no one owned these stories - anyone could retell them, either in exactly the same way, or variations on a theme.
This took place long before Karl Marx was born, and I think that you would find few people who would call it a Marxist society. The concept of ownership of idea's can, and in my opinion should, be debated separately from the concept of ownership of physical things.
Bradley
I doubt the Norwegian Parliament would give him an award for publishing it if it were illegal!!
.sig: Now legally binding!
"We project hundreds of tiny sea-creatures will be harmed by this, most notably the krill crushed beyond recognition by the impact of these devices. Additionally, there are no long term studies on the psycological impact of consumer electronics on marine life. They could be upsetting the entire ecosystem!!"
-Ima Treehugger, The National Trust for Preservation of Useless Organisms at Gunpoint.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Ok, I have now backed up and restored South Park's original Spirit of Christmas to DLT about 80 times. So far not a single bit has flipped. This will continue in a loop, but I think that if a 50MB movie can be copied that many time and nothing happens, we are safe.
:)
The storage medium is getting better. Hell that it one of the reasons I was holding my breath waiting for DVDs. I wanrted a better, longer lasting, digital medium. There are even disks now that will last over 10,000 years. I re-call that there was a story about this on Slashdot some time ago.
So, seeing as right now the there are disks that could out live recorded history, I think my scanned in photo will be fine. In fact they'll out live you and me.
Ye, of little faith. You'd have more if you'd read more Slashdot.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I'm as much of a free speech advocate as anyone, but this is simply BS. There's a reason yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is illegal. You can't incite people to riot, and you can't say things which can reasonably be expected to result in the immediate harm of others. Slander and libel are also restricted forms of speech, and rightly so. Also, just try saying the word "bomb" next time you are waiting in line for the metal detectors at an airport. The constitutional freedom of speech does not mean you can say any old thing you want. With that right comes great responsibility.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Fact: DeCSS circumvents CSS
Fact: That is, currently (like it or not), illegal.
Fact: The judge has no choice but to do easy math: 1+1=Defendents lose.
Fact: The defense has provided the most worthless witnesses, (one "Internet Expert" had no knowledge of OC48 or great capacity in use today, Corley claims he knows of no one today with a hard drive large enough to store a DVD movie (4 gigs). Another expert tried to testify (goaded by defense attorneys) that the internet simply cannot handle the burden of thousands of 650 meg DIVX encoded DeCSS ripped DVDs being exchanged (despite hard proof on usenet daily/hourly).
Fact: The prosecution has only to make the most minimal argument, doesn't have to prove piracy, and has had more help from defense screw ups than it's own experts (which step by step show exactly how DeCSS is used bypass CSS (case proved) and then show how easy it is to make a DIVX movie and go into IRC and exchange it for another bootleg).
Fact: The Livid "expert" probably did more damage to the entire case than did corely himself. He was even busted twice of lying in his deposition (was he lying then or lying now?)
Fact: Corley is either lying or the most ignorant computer newbie on the block. He doesn't understand the most basic fundamentals of what he writes and claims he has no idea who almost anything he's involved in works.
Fact: Corley claims their website crashes daily when it's log file gets too big (must be a common problem for unix based systems I guess) and so they simply removed the log file. Then when popularity increased, their hit counter caused their site to crash when it was being called too often so they removed that too. This way he can claim, "gee you honor, I have no idea if my for-profit website has received more traffic than ever in it's existance before"
Fact: A perfectly legal, authorized DVD player for Linux will be produced by someone who took the time to apply and pay for the license and ANY possible defense based on "We linux users deserve to play DVDs for free" will evaporate.
Guess: The defense will lose and have no grounds for appeal which will be denied.
so, i mean, sure, i fully support the idea that artists should get paid for their work. i like the idea that people are making enough to make more music. but i think that there are a zillion counterexamples to any assertion that if bands can't get rich, there won't be any bands or any decent recordings. ( i don't think that you made this statement, btw, but i do think that it's part and parcel to the *AA's argument -- they don't care about teeny tiny little bands, thy care about their cash cows -- spears, sisqo, and limp bisquik).
The other thing to consider though is how many of these "small" bands would be doing ti if there wasn't a chance they could one day make a lot of money? Would the spend their lives on the road, making very little if any money, if they didn't think that one day they may "make it big"? Sure, some would, but I would guess that most of them wouldn't.
Most people who are in a band full-time are there because they believe they are good enough to eventually make a good living off of it. They love music and everything else, but they think they can make moeny, and that's why they do it. If you love making model airplanes, and just feel compelled to do it in your soul, are you going to quit your job and start making model airplanes every day? No way, because you realize you can't ever make enough money to support yourself doing that. If you take away the hope that people will get rich from making music, most people won't put as much effort into it, because they HAVE to have a backup plan, because they don't have the faith and hope that they have now that they can one day make it huge. In the end, it's always a matter of economics.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
The whole IP system is in need of a fairly massive rennovation, though. Anything they could do to the current one would just be legal patchwork.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seems like the brewing war could be averted by the simple act of Congress laying out exactly what is and isn't fair use. That seems to be the big question mark currently. Maybe they should take a look at the legal precidents, think about it for a bit, and explicitly enumerate, in tiny paragraphs, exactly what you can and can not do under fair use.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
11 THE COURT: I don't know what the point of all this
12 is. Obviously the case isn't over, and if there is more
13 evidence that sheds light on the subject, I will certainly
14 consider it, but it seems to me that there is a reasonably
15 strong case to be made for the proposition that the barn is
16 unlocked and this horse is out.
17 Now, it seems to me also that what the MPAA wants is
18 a legal determination that unlocking this barn was illegal,
19 and so the next guy who considers unlocking another barn is
20 going to have something serious to think about. I suspect you
21 are also asking me to issue an injunction against the guy who
22 unlocked this barn not to unlock it again even though there is
23 no horse in it. So, you know, I don't know that this witness
24 has any light to shed on that subject.
i read court documents so you dont have to ^_^
From Thursday's testimony:/ 0720.html
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/NY/trial
6 Q. How did you know to go to the LiViD website, download the
7 material you downloaded in October and November?
8 A. I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
9 Q. Tell me what the trail was.
10 A. I read about it on Slashdot.
hilarious! slashdot in league with the MPAA.
news at 11...
I will check out your charges.
I have known Declan McCullagh since 1994, and helping him was one of the greatest regrets of my free-speech work. I can attest from personal experience that he will backstab people and increase their risk of being sued, if he sees any advantage to it. I've posted about this a while back on the dvd-discuss list, so I'm not trolling.
HOWEVER ... I know of no "rapport" of his with slashdot (but, umm, actually that would explain a few things ... hmm ...). What is this rapport of which you speak?
I think the original writer read too much into Jamie's posting the link. But, frankly, I understand the reaction.
There's something here to keep in mind. These issues, these legal battles, they aren't just flame-wars. We can't killfile the MPAA. We can't bitbucket a court order. We can't give a judge negative karma. Too many people have bought into the idea that we exist in a world that is unaffected by the powerful forces which shape society. Governments, large corporations, big-money. They are real. They affect you. If the actions of programmers are inimical to these interests, they can fight back with a vengeance. This lesson MUST always be remembered.
Horseshit. No guarantee of intellectual property rights is made by the Constitution. Congress is empowered - but not required - to create such rights for the original author or inventor and for a limited time
which bears almost no resemblance to today's copyright and patent system.
Sure it does. In fact, it is precisely what the current copyright and patent system is, where both only hold for a very short time. What's the problem?
First, corporations have no rights
Of course they do. If you really believe corporations shouldn't have rights, you need to move away from the US, to a communist country. Do you really think you have the right to go down to the GM plant, blow up the building, and drive a few cars from there away? Of course not because corporations have rights. They have property rights. Intellectual property rights, which are granted by the US Constitution, are a corollary of that.
second, property rights - especially intellectual property rights - are second to freedom of speech and expression
First of all, freedom of speech (and capitalism, and ...) is predicated on property rights; if you do not have the right to any medium of expression, you have no freedom of speech. Note that property rights are so fundamental that are not even a Constitutional amendment, but freedom of speech is.
Second, trade secrets, which is what is under issue here, are widely understood to not be freedom of speech. There are many cases of people going to jail and/or being sued in a civil matter for illegally using trade secerets to make money. Which part of this don't you understand?
Copying DVDs is not the answer. There's noone out there that disagrees that copying and distributing DVDs is illegal, and if you do, you need a morality check. The issue is what I can do with my legally purchased DVD. Why do I have to sit through 10 minutes of commercials to watch Tarzan? Why am I limited to viewing DVDs only on authorized players?
The real answer is to use DeCSS and unauthorized players to watch your DVDs. The instant you start distributing DVDs, you give the final bit of ammunition that the MPAA has been hoping for: piracy. So far, there has been no proof that piracy has occured as a result of DeCSS. And until there is, that's a big check against the MPAA. Once piracy starts, the MPAA can quantify the loss in $, and then have it all shut down.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
You must sit at the white's only lunch counter, none o those dang negroes sitting at your table, who cares if its wrong, its the LAW.
But my decision not to vote goes deeper than a refusal to support one of two presidential candidates. Were that my only problem with the "democratic" society we have, I'd do some research on issues and candidates, then happily go to the polls and leave the "president" box untouched while selecting my "representatives" and voicing my opinion on whether or not Proposition 10928346671829243746, the Downtown Parking Space Revitalization Tax, should be passed into law. What I am doing by not voting in November is not giving my stamp of approval to the system which oppresses us. People say that if you don't like the way things are, you should "get active", register to vote, become informed about issues, write letters, and run for office. "Don't like the fact that taxes can take over 50% of your hard earned money? *You* have the power to change it! Start a 'I pay to much Tax' campaign, your representatives will listen!" Bullshit. For the last few decades Presidential and Congressional Candidates have campaigned on the platform of making thigs better. I'm still waiting. Four years ago, Republicans said they'd get cut back on pork barrel projects if they controlled congress. Last night the national news said that $$$ spent on pork barrel projects has actually increased. I have better things to do with my time than to decide whether I should vote for the candidate who promises to cut personal income taxes by 3% over the candidate who says that we should instead spend "our tax dollars" on programs to level the playing field for all americans (I have a real problem with that "our" - the money spoken of is either mine or yours, but does not belong to both of us, and the hand of "Government" does not belong in my pocket). I have better things to do with my time than to beg other people to let me keep my money. I decide how to spend my money. I decide what percentage of my money is for charitable causes. I decide to have personal responsibility. I decide not to turn my personal responsibility, my Liberty, over to someone else
The real problem (one which most people are unable to recognize) is that "Government" is largely a fiction that exists in people's minds. What is the difference between the geographic areas of southern Arizona and northern Mexico? If there wasn't a wall, how would you know that you'd just passed from Arizona into Mexico? Sure, there are people with Guns who will say that I'm incorrect, that Government is very real and does exist, and that I'd better pay their "income take" or they'll pay for my vacation at the concrete inn, but how do their threats support their beliefs and make them legitimate?
If there are any moderators left on this thread, they'll probably be inclined to mark this as a "troll" or "flamebait" (especially those with anxious clicker fingers). Revolutionary ideas are always scorned when they first appeared. There are a lot of people who are quite a bit more adept at expressing these sorts of ideas than I, and are skilled at responding to the "but if we didn't have government [insert Bad Thing here] would happen!" replys. The earth used to be considered the center of the universe, and all who said otherwise were suppressed. Women were forced to take an inferior position in society because of their gender. Slaves were once considered inferior to their white "owners". With the passage of time, these three ideas changed from being "facts" to archaic opinions, just as current views on democratic government will pass from progressive to foolish. Contact me if you're interested in some links that further expand on these ideas...
some things to think about:
"Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -- P. J. O'Rourke
"Violence is the final refuge of the incompetent." -- Isaac Asimov
"Freedom is still the most radical idea of all." -- Nathaniel Branden
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I am not worried about lack of availability of MP3s and DivX movies. As broadband becomes more and more common, these will be quite everyday. How many college kids do they think they'll be able to fine / throw in jail? Even in easy-to-police public forums (ie IRC), piracy flourishes.
(Personally, I only look for MP3s to fill in rarity holes in my 350+ CD collection. Most of the MP3s available on the internet are commercial blech or uninteresting (to me) techno.)
I can still make music on my own, and expect to be able to regardless of what Time-Warner does.
I am worried, though, that certain software or hardware devices could be declared illegal. I recently bought a GameBoy "GameLink" device from some shady guys in Hong Kong (see http://www.cd64.com/) -- this thing lets you copy ROMs that you download from the internet onto cartridges and play them on your gameboy, or copy catridges to your PC. Definitely a grey area of copyright law.... but I'm not using it for that. I'm using it to develop entirely new software for the gameboy, something which I think is and should remain 1000% legal.
It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to think that these things would be covered under the DMCA (maybe if some trivial encryption were added that the device needed to "circumvent"). NOW my artistic expression is endangered! Now I can't make gameboy games for my friends (and grandchildren) to play. And this situation is what I find extremely frightening.
Those guys are obviously not selling the pirated VHS, otherwise they'd be standing on the street side.
Furthermore, there are no pirate DVDs there, just VHS and CDs. Manufacturing DVDs is rather expensive, even if you didn't have to pay for the source copy.
Finally, who gives a fuck? The trial is about the right to distribute a piece of software, not about the right to copy movies. There's no claim by the prosecution that they are using the software, or even wrote it.
"You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. "
Actually, I'd say the most effective means of protesting it is to go to court and get the law thrown out as unconstitutional (or set precedent for a positive interpretation of it).
From a practical standpoint, Civil Disobediance works. (It also helps to make it difficult for those who would make laws like this. Who do you think has bigger headaches, the MPAA/RIAA or the college dorm collector)?
There's a film about him called, creatively enough, *Leadbelly*. I highly recommend it if you're interested in one of the most unique stories behind the music. But I'll briefly give you some highlights:
Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbedder(sp?) was a travelling musician in the 20s and 30s in the mostly-rural South. Like most musicians of the day he made his money by playing in bars and saloons, at village festivals and the like. But he was unusually good, and played a 12-string guitar so fiercely that he sounded like a whole band all by himself. He also composed some of his own great lyrics, despite complete lack of education, in addition to playing the old stand-bys that everyone back then knew (House of the Rising Sun, Midnight Special, and a bunch of other now-famous tunes). He was in prison twice, if memory serves once for assaulting a white man who assaulted him first, and once for murdering one who also probably deserved it. One time he was in jail in Texas, and he was allowed to have his guitar in prison--the governor's summer house happened to be right across from the prison, so Leadbelly was brought over to play all the governor's parties. He impressed everyone there, and even played a song once whose lyrics were a plea to the governor to pardon him; Governor Pat Neff was so impressed, that he said the last thing he'd do before leaving office was to sign Leadbelly's pardon. True to his word, the day the governor left office Leadbelly was pardoned. He went back to his old life as a travelling musician, before landing in prison again after he went back to his hometown and some white men picked a fight with him. That's when some people from the Smithsonian Institution, who were on a project to preserve folk music through recordings, heard about him and interviewed and recorded him in prison. When he was released, he'd become a minor folk celebrity and was able to do recording sessions with a bunch of the small studios that existed back then, as well as make money from playing in public. By this time he was older and the fire in his belly wasn't so uncontrollable, and he became the kind of middle-aged gentleman who, even though he may live in a fleabag motel, dresses immaculately and wears $50 shoes--in the 1950s, $50 shoes were beyond merely expensive.
His recordings got passed down over the years in ever-degrading forms, copies of copies of copies of the original acetate and glass recordings, and if you get older recordings of him they'll often sound terrible. A few years ago though the Smithsonian started restoring and remastering its collection of folk recordings, and then publishing them. So, Smithsonian Folkways has put out the CDs of the best of Leadbelly's recordings, and they sound nice and crisp. The one caveat is that Leadbelly sang in the old tradition, and his stuff sounds far more original, far more rough and surprising than today's music. It takes some getting used to him, since we've been raised on sameness and often blandness in our music, but he's the best damned guitar player this side of Robert Johnson (the 20s bluesman who, the story goes, made a deal with the devil at a crossroads, in order to become the best guitar player ever--cf. the movie *Crossroads* with Ralph Macchio for a Hollywood version of his story).
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
The DeCSS case isn't the issue at all. DeCSS is ultimately unimportant *in and of itself*. But the principle that's really being fought over here is the most important, most fundamental principle there is. It's about personal rights versus corporate rights, and this will be the big fight of the 21st century. The Civil Rights movement, one of the greatest advances in this country--which should never have had to happen in the first place--ensured that ~20% of the country's population finally got rights equal to those of the other ~80%. But this battle will determine if each and every American will be giving up many of those important, fundamental rights, or if he gets to be as free as his forefathers. Here's why it's so important.
Corporations are legal fictions which have evolved over the last 2 centuries to have all the rights that real people have, but with fewer responsibilities and far, far, far greater resources. Wal-Mart, for example, can ruin a local economy just by building a store in a small town, because no other stores in town can sell as low as Wal-Mart thanks to the volume discounts Wal-Mart gets on the wholesale end; therefore, low-income people will *have* through economic imperative to shop there, forcing other stores (esp. ones owned by actual people) to go out of business, which causes more and more people to work for Wal-Mart which pays a wage which is entirely unlivable unless you buy everything from the cheapest source in town--your new employer, Wal-Mart. Results: almost all other retail stores in small towns go out of business, so that most of their old employees now work for Wal-Mart, and can only afford to buy from "the company store." It's a 21st-century version of a practice outlawed after abuses in the 19th century, but it's legal since there's no company policy to force people to buy there--it just becomes an economic necessity when Wal-Mart moves in to a small town. And of course Wal-Mart loses a ton of cash initially when moving into small towns, but as a megacorp they can afford to let their profitable stores subsidize taking over small towns until those towns are entirely under Wal-Mart's economic control (at least regarding the retail sales and low-income workers). Also, Wal-Mart often drives all other supermarkets and grocers in small towns out of business, because Wal-Marts with supermarkets in them sell the food at or below cost in most areas, since the retail sales section of the store is immensely profitable. If you disagree with this analysis, then you haven't lived in a small town both before and after a Wal-Mart moves in. My nice little college town was destroyed by a Wal-Mart; we used to have a wonderful, colorful Main Street, and now it's an abandoned bunch of boarded-up buildings.
But what does that have to do with tech, or with DeCSS and the rights I mentioned in the first paragraph? Wal-Mart, as a huge corporation, can do things no individual could ever afford to do, and can drive all the smaller guys out of business, and put lots of people under its economic control. The same thing is true of most other sectors of big business these days.
Take the recording industry, for example. Over the years the top few companies gobbled up the entire market, so that now they have a complete lock on the market. They just made a deal with the U.S. to stop a price-fixing scheme for CDs which they'd been using for years--MAP, Minimum Advertised Price, set minimum prices at which CDs could be advertised by retailers, ensuring that retail prices for CDs would remain artificially high. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The big record companies own almost all the recording studios, almost all the advertising agencies they use, almost all of the wholesalers they sell to, and a fair percentage of the retailers which the wholesalers sell to. The result is that it's almost impossible to get CDs produced outside of the big corporate structure into the pipeline at all, at any stage; at concerts and at specialty stores in big cities, those are the only places that albums produced outside the system can be found. Otherwise, the rcording studios find lots of raw young talent every year, record with a huge percentage of them, pick out a bunch of those to go to the next level and be sponsored by the company to put out an album that will be advertised a little and promoted while the band busts its ass touring--and oh, did I mention that the band goes in debt to the studio for recording with them? Yup, they get in debt for the cost of the studio time, production costs, and advertising, and the amount of an advance to live off of while touring. If they make it big they can pay it back and move up in the food chain, but if they don't make it big they still have to pay all that money back or go bankrupt. Most bands break up or at least end up owing their souls to Sony or whoever at this point. Studios often argue that CDs are so expensive to offset the costs of all the bands who fail, but bullshit: those costs are inflated since the recording companies own all the studios and postproduction and CD press facilities and advertising agencies they use, and since bands go into debt to the recording company to get that album out. Then, if at this point a band hits it big, they become a name band that might actually make money. For every band that does become hugely successful and makes a living from album sales (small percentage of income) and big tours (large percentage of income), dozens of bands went broke and got to start paying the big corporations back, file for bankruptcy, break up, etc. So, in effect big music stifles art, stifles the advancement of art which copyright law is supposed to protect. Who the fuck cares if Lars Ulrich and Garth Brooks are making money out of the current system, when thousands of other bands got anally raped by the system? And the argument that mp3 piracy and new music services don't promote giving anyone payment for their work is crap, because when the old system is gone people will have money to support bands by buying merchandise or attending concerts, but as long as they're required to pay $15-$20 for every piece of music they want to buy, very little of which goes to any band, consumers won't have the disposable income left over to support artists directly. Lots of people have faith that this model, voluntarily supporting artists who disseminate digitally downloadable work, will work for all parties concerned: Stephen King, for example, fresh from the success of his pay-for-download book, is releasing a new book online; it'll be released in three segments, and as a test of the system he'll only release the last section if people give him enough money to account for $1 per download. One thing's for sure, the music companies' stranglehold on the whole music pipeline stifles advancement and bankrupts many more artists than ever get supported by it, and the advancement of the art is being stymied and interfered with: witness the "band factories" that have popped up, creating artificial bands with canned personalities and canned songs, people like N*SYNC who don't deserve to exist and are created by the industry to cater to the lowest-common-denominator of uneducated teenybopper taste. That is NOT what copyright law was created to do; it was created to promote the advancement of arts and sciences, not to have all-powerful corporations destroy the art of music by unnaturally promoting their own artificial creations which set the art back.
The movie industry, represented by the MPAA and the DVDCCA, are doing the same thing with films. The scariest thing for them is for there to be a "Blair Witch Phenomenon," with low-budget, creative, *new* films cutting into their market for over-budget canned studio plots recycled since the 40s, actors and actresses who look absolutely nothing like real Americans in the public at large, movie theaters who not only charge $8 for a ticket but have the audacity to in addition charge $2.50 for a small watery coke and $3.50 for small popcorn with watered-down fake butter. Why else would they decree that no film released on the Net before being shown in theaters can ever receive an award nomination? No, getting movies for free isn't my right. But it is the right of filmmakers to release their films in new media without being discriminated against by organizations controlled by the top few mega-corporations. It's not my right to make illegal copies of DVDs and upload them to the Net, but it is my right to take a DVD I buy and play it on anything I want to without having to pay extra for software licensed by the DVDCCA; it is my right to take clips from that DVD and splice them together for a presentation, or to use clips from a DVD in a collage/montage fashion in a new work, or to write new software to play it and skip over those fucking 10-minute commercials Disney puts before its movies and sets the copyright notice bit on so that DVD players won't let you skip the track, or to do any number of other things which the people in Hollywood say I can't do, but which Fair Use law says I can.
And I haven't even touched upon the copyright issues the studios have saddled us with, yet. Copyright originally lasted 14 years, now it lasts the life of the artist plus 100 years. Big corporations, Disney in particular, got those laws changed to keep their characters and works from ever passing into the public domain. Ironic, since Disney built itself using characters in its motion pictures who were derived from characters in the public domain, characters invented by the Brothers Grimm and other writers and storytellers. We need the public domain. We need IP to pass into the control of all of us after a reasonable period for the creators to derive a profit. 14 years, for example, is more than enough time for the big studios to derive major profits from their films: big films usually make a small profit on initial release, then a huge profit at rental within the first couple years; smaller, relatively unsuccessful films usually make their profit at renatl within 5 years. 100 years after the death of the artist is utterly insane, and a complete violation of our rights. We have a right to have IP pass into the public domain, so that after its creators derive profit we can all benefit from it and build upon it. Take the hugely popular TV show (in its day, it was #1 up until Tom Selleck quit the series and it folded), Magnum P.I. There has never been a film, although Tom Selleck said just the other day on Larry King that he'd love to do a film version, but he can't because Universal owns the rights and Universal is in tumult and has been for a while. Guess what? It's been 20 years since that show was on, and if Universal isn't going to use the film rights it shouldn't have them--under old copyright law, the character would have passed into public domain by now and a more competent studio could do the film with Selleck, but instead Universal and current IP law are preventing the furtherence of the arts rather than furthering them as IP law was supposed to do (not that Magnum is all that artful, but you get my point). Companies today never want their characters or music or other IP to pass into public domain; they want to carve up the markets entirely for themselves, keeping forever whatever IP they buy the rights to or create in-house. That's not how it was supposed to work. IP law is backfiring, and taking away rights from the common man. Shekespeare made money from his plays even though some publishers were pirating them without paying him. Writers made enough money to support themselves even before copyright gave them huge periods of time in which they had exclusive IP rights. Beethoven, Haydn, and Leadbelly managed to support themselves without a Big (Brother) Studio protecting their IP "for them."
That's what this is about. It's about the rights of individuals and the rights of whole cultures. It's about whether we will become a corporate culture, controlled by a few powerful companies with vast IP warehouses, or whether we will be individuals free to invent and build upon the IP of the past, or simply to enjoy the IP of the past. Much of it is disappearing. We now live in a culture in which television shows and other short-term outlets are important factors, and these cultural artifects are being lost to us all the time. Why shouldn't I be able to freely distribute a television show which hasn't aired in 20 years? Those TV shows made their profit at the initial airing, there's no need to keep the IP under lock and key. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have vast IP storehouses online, where for a few dollars to pay for bandwidth and server upkeep we could download episodes of our favorite dead TV shows? Less than 1% of them ever make it to retail tape. But that will never happen under the current system. It reaches beyond that, into film, literature, music, and the rights of the people to engage in Fair Use of all of it. What we have is a cultural crisis, and a set of industry monopolies in every realm, and it needs to be dealt with. It's bigger than DeCSS, DVDs, or Linux. It's about our way of life, and our freedoms.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I will be the first one to believe that corporations' greedy insidious actions and the DMCA are wrong, unconstitutional, immoral, and potentially life threatening when it comes to their environmental irresponsisbility. (obviously last point not about DMCA.) BUT!!! You simply CANNOT say this is as fundamentally evil as what people fought against in the battle for TRUE recognized equality and civil rights! Not if you want anybody else but a bunch of geek zealots or possibly bigots to listen to you - because:
In the fight for civil rights, people were fighting for true equality. In that society they were very much seen as second class citizens, if even citizens at all. They were trying to enlighten people against the bigoted notion that one race of people was inherently better than the other - a moral issue.
In our (as in the majority of upper-middle -or-middle-lower class citizens) fight against corporations we are fighting their power, which is based on their wealth - an economic issue. The notion that the rich and powerful are "better" individuals than the rest of us is nourished by the very system of capitalism, which I'm sure very few of us is actually completely against. The rich and powerful WILL get better tables in better restaurants, better schools, better living conditions, better legal protection, better political representation. It is noble to fight these things but when you think about it, since anyone could potentially become rich, and NO ONE could potentially become a white male if they are not already, the injustice is not as deep, and is at least PARTIALLY merit/incentive -based.
It is certainly up to us masses to band together to be more powerful than that top 1% of assholes who are "keepin' us down" like the MPAA. And no easy task, that. But please remember that the loss of certain aspects of free speech is NOT as awful as never having it to begin with, or any chance at all, much less a fair one, which is what MLK and other civil rights leaders were fighting against. And you will NEVER get a majority of the population to believe that it is (as awful) no matter how hard you try along this line of reasoning - only alienate them.
ooky
"I...hate...you...Walt...freakin'...Whitman!!!! LEAVES OF GRASS MY ASS!!!!"
I'm not an American either, and will happily confuse all aspects of the mess they call a democratic legal system :-)
What I was really implying was that using the UCITA click-through validation we could protect the licensce which prevents them from replying or discussing the mail and have the return to address encypted so that any reply shows they broke both UCITA and DMCA (because they unencrypted the data!). IANAL and therefore I didn't suggest an exact scheme for the annoyance initially because I feel a lawyer with a good grasp of the legal situations and implications could specify this best, perhaps they can even come up with a suitable solution to attack only the DMCA. The aim should be simple, to annoy the hell out of them and get attention while providing them with only one route to escape, the destruction of these stupid laws.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children.
You assert that the actions involved in the creation of DeCSS are illegal, but you do not explain why. I would disagree that the reverse engineering of that CSS encoding scheme is illegal - rather I would assert that if the action of reverse engineering is to be declared illegal, it should be done so explicitly, in a public declaration, so those of us who don't like can move country to somewhere where it is allowed and encouraged. Like Norway for example, where reverse engineering is, I believe, protected by the constitution.
Anyway, I'll let you continue.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
Again, you assume that the act of reverse engineering the CSS scheme is illegal and base your following arguments on this premise. The whole thrust of this issue has been that long established guidelines set out in law do NOT map well to the latest technologies, and that access control systems are not currently well legally described and that the actions of the companies who are writing these access agreements may not be in the best interests of the general public or of society. Because this issue is demanding from both a legal and a technical standpoint, the number of people who really grasp these issues in full (and I'm not certain I count myself as one of them - more interested and concerned viewer than legal and technical expert) is very small, but the effect of these licenses certainly does have an impact.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
1> In the case there was no proof that DeCSS was actually used. And in all probality one of the faster rippers was used. However, those rippers are based on the same concepts as DeCSS. It may not be apparent to the court that there is a difference. The expert witness for the plantif ripped you've got mail from a DVD and turned it into a DiVX under 640 Megs. They traded it on IRC for The Matrix. It was not taped on the camcorder in a movie theater. It was the real McCoy. This creates a guilt by functionality issue for DeCSS.
Problem on point 2 is that the judge isn't a geek looking for artifacts on the TV screen. On a 13" LCD DiVX looks fairly compelling.
What it comes down to is how the DMCA is written. Since the Judge has pretty much said this case is about DMCA and not fair use. He has constantly ruled that any testimony that may indicate CSS as a content controll system rather than a copy protections system is not relivent. Thus any testimony that reflects that is stricken from the record.
This is a "Bad Thing" (tm)
In opening Statements Martin Garbus made it clear that this case was not going to be decided here. Instead it is a case for appeals, and probally a case headed for the supreme court.
Reading the court transcripts makes it very clear that the team is concentrating on getting key defence evidence gets in the record. They are also trying very hard to ensure that key items are struck from the record. They are trying very hard to have evidence that's considered here say removed. This is an importent step in the appeals proccess.
As far as the appeal, don't count on much from the U.S. Circuit Court. Posner is a well respected. His views align well with the views of the others on the circuit.
This is going to come down to a supremem court case.
NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE. DeCSS (Reverse Engineering of CSS) is LEGAL in Norway. Just because the US had a lousy law passed (DMCA, bought and paid for) does NOT mean that it applies globally. If you US voters have a problem with your law, complain to your government. DO NOT, however, assume that US law is global law.
- Paul
I think of CD as a good thing, because I define it somewhat more narrowly than many people on this thread. CD, to me is intrinsicly non-violent, non-destructive and based mostly on getting attention and demonstrating the extent of your dedication to a cause. True CD (IMHO) does not "exert its views" over anyone - but it does put your views right out front where people have to deal with them, and they have to deal with the fact that the person expressing those views holds them so strongly that they will keep coming back, keep being arrested, keep being harrassed, because it means that much. The Boston Tea Party was not civil disobedience IMHO, because it involved destroying other people's property.
Mirroring your program everywhere so they "can't get rid of it" is not civil disobedience. Sitting in front of the courthouse until they arrest you and telling everyone that you are going through it for free software rights is. One tries to inspire other people with the depth of your commitment, the other just flaunts the law for its own sake. Its trying to bring the government to its senses instead of to its knees.
I have yet to see an act of civil disobedience out of this crowd.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
No; they'd be Free, like these.
<O
( \
X Adopt a bird today!
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is more likely that it will atrophy from it's failure to recognize when times "are a'changing"
Although I don't idolize the speaker, I couldn't help but think of this quote:
"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly..." --Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince as translated by W. K. Marriott
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that when (and if) big corporations die, art (and culture) will die, too.
All this has nothing to with the artist. It's all about corporations getting as much money as they can.
Art will triumph. Corporations won't. Corporations fear Napster (or DeCSS or whatever) because it means the corporations are at peril. Art will never be at peril.
True, artists will have to find a way to be subsidized. But Mozart did okay. Haydn, too. Chaucer? Yep, Chaucer, too.
If anything erodes, it'll be the phoniness that corporations have substitued for 'art'.
Brittney Spears? N'Sync? Backstreet Boys?
Buh-bye.
There's something else happening here, and it's a combination of the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and the current patent frenzy. These things all favor big, established players, primarily US and Japan.
Take reverse engineering, for instance. There is a much more enlightened policy on this in Europe. Perhaps if European industries were as worldwide-entrenched as US and Japan, that policy wouldn't be there. But it is, and it's part of the groundwork.
So the US just isn't too friendly in the IP business, be it arts or science, unless you work for one of the big players.
So go somewhere else.
Go to Europe.
Go to Latin America.
Go to India.
The Rest-of-the-World is getting to be a big enough market to just ignore silly US protectionism.
Since I'm a US citizen, born and raised here, I have to say that we take these actions at our peril. We may well be building a cozy little box for ourselves, and we'll get passed by.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Anyone else ever wonder why they just dont take cases like this directly to the highest court possible? I just think that big cases like this would get over with so much faster. You know who ever looses is gonna appeal the case, might as well just cut out the middle man.
I strongly disagree with this.
1.) I believe that there is no imperative to follow unjust laws.
2.) Some of the most visable reversals of unjust laws we the immediate effect of their being broken. (eg Rosa Parks)
3.) For laws such as the DMCA, which are probably unconstitutional, the courts make an excelent venue to chalenge them.
3a.) By breaking the law, 2600 has caused the whole situation to come to head. Because of this it may be possible for the Supreme Court to be hearing the case in another year or so.
3b.) I belive that all parties in this case have an extreeme interest in seeing this case settled as quickly as possible. 2600 would like to be able to speak freely as soon as possible, while the MPAA would like ruling in their favor as soon as possible so that they can better suppress DeCSS
4) On the other hand, if this was being fought through a strict constitutional chalenge, the MPAA would have no motivation to see this case though quickly, as they obviously prefer the status que.
5) Overall, however 2600's actions are irrelivent. If 2600 had not posted DeCSS, the MPAA would have sued the next juiciest target. 2600 simply has an "evil hacker" image which makes them the best target.
They are also paying out billions of dollars in a settlement.
I would also say that the $145,000,000,000 damages assessed by a jury is a loss. Though that probably in appeal for a long time.
One potential disadvantage to a large company with lots of litigation is that if someone is ruled against them in one case, they can't fight the same thing in other cases.
Fight Spammers!
Fight Spammers!
Archive three copies of anything you want to preserve. Periodically (depending on the particular system you're using), check the three copies against each other. If an error is found in one copy, use either of the others to produce three new copies and dispose of the one with an error. Now you have five good copies. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
Storage -- physical or electronic -- might force you not to augment the number of copies. Keep the three latest.
Sure, you might get the same bit errors on two copies, thereby "outvoting" the clean copy. Since bit errors are essentially random and uncorrelated, the odds of this are, I believe, truly negligible. You might also get some errors in one copy and different errors in another. That's OK -- as long as two copies agree on a bit, use them to reconstruct a "clean" copy.
I've thought about this off and on, and other than costs of storage, I don't see how this would fail. (If technology leaves behind your format, you're hosed, but that's really a different issue.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I believe that when Dr. King wrote in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that people should do what it takes to combat "unjust laws," he didn't give a rat's ass whether it was about segregation or watching movies. An unjust law is an unjust law:
"You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail" 16 April 1963
Assuming the dire predictions of a court loss are true, here's one strategy for resolving the situation: do everything possible to make the new DivX (or even some other format; anything but the locked version the industry is pushing) used ubiquitously in the same way that MP3 has become. Then make existing content available in this format. This would include piracy, personal rippers, etc. The whole idea is to get the public-domain format to become the defacto 'standard'. Pretty soon, commercial manufacturers will come forth with players, recorders, editors, etc. for this format. Even DVD players will have to be able to handle this format on top of DVD. At some point, the industry will have to capitulate and offer content in DivX if it hopes to maintain its profits. Until they do, people will rip and pirate their material to the more convenient DivX (or whatever). MP3 is well along this path already, and I predict industry resistance to distribution in MP3 form will ultimately crumble. Now, it's just necessary to do the same for other content.
As I said in my post, I would love to make a living from it. I am one of those folks who want to create for a living. There is nothing bad about it, nor did I say there was.
What I said was this: money is not the incentive to create. Whether I get paid or not, I will always create. I would just prefer to get paid for it.
The purpose of my original post was to refute the statement that "art will dry up without monetary incentive."
That is not true.
Now, paying artists for making art certainly allows them the freedom to spend more time creating art. I would not refute the claim that money allows for more art to be created because the artist does not have to worry about another source of income.
But I would bet that most artists, who are passionate about their art, will create whether they are paid or not. As I said before, in my case, I create because I am compelled to - not because I think I can make a buck. However, if you want to buy my art, allowing me the luxury of making a living from it, I would love that opportunity because it would allow me more time to create.
think about posts as you read them - it helps sometimes.
wish
---
I didn't say I am against DeCSS copying. I have both of the Copyleft T-shirts in my laundry basket at home. I'm just responding to the short-sighted comment about all restrictions to speech being evil. Some restrictions are a good idea, and do not neccesarilly conflict with the First Amendment, which was mainly written to protect journalists, critics of the government, and churches.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In fact, several watchdog groups are preparing a class action suit against both the "big five" tobbacco companies and the lawyers who wrote the settlements to reverse the settlements under anti-trust law.
The settlement made the lawyers involved (like Minnesota's Mike Cericci) extremely rich, will result in almost no money whatsoever going to insurance members and tax payers (on who's behalf they were supposedly suing), and here's the real gem:
The companies which settled were being sued for deceptive advertising and hiding the results of some studies. The punative damages are high, so they made the argument that if they tried to pass the cost on to their customers, smaller competitors would push them out of the market. That would put them out of business, which means no more payolla for the lawyers. Therefore, a provision was written saying that any new tobbacco company that comes along will be required to pay into the same settlement fund, even though they had no history of wrongdoing.
The upshot of this is that it does not hurt the tobbacco companies... not one little bit. All they need to do is raise the price of cigarettes a little, knowing full well that anybody that wants to enter the market will have to do the same (and will lack the resources... therefore not enter the market.)
So, in exchange for the possibility of losing a few customers to higher prices, they have guaranteed a monopoly trust position over a multi-billion-dollar market for the next couple decades.
On top of that, they are required to fund PSA's... some of which paint them in pretty good light, and those that don't are still free publicity. Previously, it was illegal for them to even do TV product placements.
So, tell me, how have they lost?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ah, but this is another way that they win.
If you live in a state that was covered by one of these settlements (which are pretty much boilerplate now), then you personally can't sue them for anything, because it has alrealy been litigated for you by the state (or the feds, depending on where you live). The lawyers got most of the money, the government took their slice and allocated it to pork-barrel "health awareness promotions", and you get nothing. (Or, as big tobbbacco companies would put it if you caught their eeeevil overlords off-camera, "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Bwahahahaha!!!!!!")
Aren't you glad that your government loves you so much?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
For the last damn time DeCSS is not needed for copying DVDs, in fact it's a stupid way of copying DVDs. The MPAA is a CARTEL which is trying to force people to only buy their goods. Last time I looked Cartels were illegal (at least in the UK and I assume in the US).
Imagine GM were able to prevent you buying tyres for your car unless they were made by one of their subsiduary companies. Insane, right? But obviously you'd say that anyone else making types were some sort of 'tyre cracker' hell bent on driving cars without paying GM their well deserved cash. Why should we have to only have "approved" players any more than only approved tyres? It makes no sense unless you are on the side of the criminals (the MPAA).
This is not an "entire DVD crack thing" except in your head.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Fortunately, we are not in any situation remotely close to that yet. I personally don't care whether I can watch Happy Gilmore and The Matrix on DVD as opposed to VCR. I don't care that the RIAA only wants me to use their CD's and not make any additional recordings for my own use. Yes, I think they are wrong in their thinking, but at the same time I don't think it is bad enough that we need to be overdramatic. *BUT* keep in mind, with the thinking behind these large corporations being similar to that of the Catholic church during the Dark Ages, we have to stop the progress of this now. It is much easier to boycott the 1st season "Saved By The Bell" episodes on DVD now than it could be if we allow our society to fall back into a dark period with a small group of people in power of every aspect of our lives.
To make this sound Jon Katzish..."HELP! I'M BEING OPPRESSED! I'M A GEEK!"
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
People have said that "if it's not legal, it'll just go underground." They've posted a picture of people selling pirated videotapes a block from the courthouse, to prove their point. I think that this photo proves an entirely different point.
My family lives near where that photo was taken. A huge percentage of those pirated videotapes are copies of videos made from tapes made by people sitting in a theatre with a camcorder. The rest of them are copies so distorted it's fairly impossible to discern a picture. Either way, I'd much rather pay $4 at a blockbuster to rent (and then copy) the tape myself than $8 to buy a copy on the street when I have to sit 6" from my screen to make out what's going on in the movie, while listening to the person sitting next to the guy with the camcorder crunch his popcorn louder than the actual soundtrack of the movie.
Legalizing stuff like DeCSS will make a huge difference. You won't have to go underground, and that makes it acceptable, unpunishable, and mainstream... it means that dvd rippers with DeCSS and the like will be sold in stores for the average joe, and consumer reports will help him comparison shop. It means everyone has access, not just those people who look to the underground.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
That the point about civil disobedience is that it's disobedience. That is, don't indulge in it unless and until you're prepared to take a few whacks in the cause of Right.
I say this not to discourage anyone, nor to suggest that the MPAA doesn't have its head shoved where the sun doesn't shine on this issue (on which matter I Express No Opinion) but to simply try and ensure that folk have thought about what they intend doing.
The big question is: what will it achieve, overall? I mean, sure, lots of people can bypass copy-protection and so on, but 99 per cent of the population won't bother. I feel sure that the corporate interests are fully aware that breaches of copyright by small-time hobbyists, by and large, don't cost them sales in that these people are taking copies of material they probably wouldn't have bought: the people who do buy legitimate copies aren't going to start searching for counterfeit stuff - the whole point of enforcement is to keep the commercial counterfeiters underground where they're too much trouble for the regular punter to find.
So you can download and use DeCSS if you want, but you aren't going to hurt the market any: all you'll do is provide them with more targets to sue in order to keep the commercial counterfeit operations out of the light.
I'd suggest that the real remedy against this sort of commercial exploitation is to stay away from their part of the market. Stick with live music, don't buy CDs, see films in the theatres only (far better than watching at home, and the more you go the more the price comes down) and generally steer clear of artists who've taken the corporate shilling.
Having set that out, I think it's abundantly clear why the epitaph for the corporate music and video industry need not be carved just yet.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Hear hear!
Can I ask the next person passing this way with moderation points about their person to give the above a boost? Thank you.
It's a message that frequently gets lost in the noise, but: it might be a poor excuse for a democracy more or less everywhere in the english-speaking world, but it's still a democracy. The reason the tabloids have so much power is that they can persuade voters. Cut out the middleman, lobby voters direct!
A small offer: anyone thinking of writing their local elected slime on any subject but not confident of their written communication skills should feel free to send me a draft in advance. I'm happy to do the odd 5 minutes pro bono adding my own skills of persuasion and deathless prose to your efforts to exercise some political muscle.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
In that post I said that based on my analysis of the legal system that I believed that if it were tested with innocent defendants that I expected the legal system to have a false guilty error rate of about 90%.
I am sure that there are a number of people who would like to know why I say that. My analysis is based on the results of simulations of the legal system which are performed in Law school. The simulations are so called 'moot courts' - where students are chosen to take on the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, defendant, witnesses and jury. The moot courts are used to train the students in actual court room behavior and are made as realistic as possible. Often the law professor serves as judge in the simulation, although sometimes an actual visiting judge will sit in.
Although everyone involved knows for a fact that the defendant is innocent the conviction rate in moot court is about the same as it is in real courts, the prosecution wins about 90% of the cases. So great is the illusion of justice created by the rituals of the legal system that it never troubles any of the participants that their simulation arrives at the wrong decision 90% of the time. If the legal system actually worked the defense would win 100% of the cases in moot court. All that the simulations are actually showing is that fabricated cases work just as well as real ones.
In my opinion much of the legal system is carefully designed to keep people who might question it from ever thinking about what is going on inside of it.
Artists create because it is a part of them. They create because to them, it is like breathing. They can only go so long without doing it, and the longer they go without creating, the harder it burns inside of them
yes i am a musician
luckman
luckman
I don't involve myself with flames, much less know how to bait one.
A letter-writing campaign does sound good, as does a few petitions. But civil disobediance in the traditional Thoreau sense doesn't seem appropriate somehow...
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Not being able to play Star Wars on my Linux box is not on the same plane as Martin Luther King fighting for the right to drink from the same water fountain as a white person.
While I have great respect for Dr. King and the civil rights movement, I think that we are currently in the midst of something that is of equal, if not GREATER importance.
It's not about pirating DVDs. It's about free speach, free thought, and freedom from corporate repression. Whenever a Big Company with billions of dollars says "You can't do this", our freedom is being eroded. The MPAA thought police are telling you what to say, what to think, and how to act. Most people are simply *controlled* by the entertainment industry, although most freedom-loving Linux geeks probably don't fall into that category. In a world full of media-controlled conformists, it is the duty of the non-conformists, the geeks, to rebel.
While Dr. King may have given black people the right to drink out of a water fountain, we are giving people the right to *think* without the MPAA's gun to their head. Money can be as damaging as bullets, my friend, and Hollywood has no shortage of cash.
This is the new rights movement. The Free Though movement. And it is the Geeks' Movement.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
I'm not trolling, I truly believe this is a legitimate question.
I keep hearing about how people buy lots of DVD players and movies to watch instead of VHS, which is obviously true since VHS is declining. And the biggest market that is probably attracted to this technology is us. If we don't like what the MPAA is doing, why are we buying DVD stuff?
Analogy: I don't like the fact that NT crashes all the time and I don't like the license agreement for it. What do I do? I don't buy it! It may have better support for this and that, but I still don't buy it. If the MPAA doesn't want to release specs on what it does, fine, boycott and let their technology suffer until they clean up their act. You won't shrivel before the sound quality on the video tapes (which isn't that bad), I assure you.
A better analogy: I hate softmodems. They don't work as quickly and they don't work in Linux, and the companies refuse to disclose specs. I don't make a little device to put on the PCI bus that records all traffic, then make a backend to minicom and pppd to make the modem understand AT commands. Instead I buy a real modem! If I made one of these little backends I would probably get sued, albeit unjustly, then the big company would win because they have a tiny point that it's licensed material (very tiny, and not even true) and they have all the money.
The way democracy works in the US is the public filters out bad products. If the toaster you bought a week ago ate your pet rock, you tell your neighbor (or with email, a few thousand people) and no one buys it. But by buying the products you're endorsing the licensing on the product. You don't like it? Use VHS, I see nothing wrong with it. Don't expect to run to the government every time and sue when you don't get your way. The government upholds the law, which says anyone can be as stupid as anyone wants. So the MPAA wants to do something dumb? Fine, don't support them, which includes not buying their offending products and giving them profit.
Someone's definately going to call this a troll, but like the guy who risks his 'net connection to relay his message, I will do the same.
# debian/rules
The author of the quoted diatribe first writes, "...I want [my music] it to be available to my great grandchildren. But they will never hear it unless it's stored in some other medium than the material objects the record industry manufactured, all of which will be as mute as stones by then."
He then brings up some of the greats, "Of course, I wanted to be paid for it, and I was. Just as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and countless others were paid, despite the absence of copyright protection."
I enjoy the irony that the music of Mozart, et. al., despite not having their work "stored in some other medium", rather only having the "material objects the record industry manufactured, all of which will be as mute as stones by then" (that is, sheet music) is still enjoyed today, centuries after their deaths.
The point being, ultimately it's not the technology, it's the music, that ultimately determines whether your grandchildren listen to your music. They'll be still listening to Beethoven in 100 years, but not Britney.
ShoutingMan.com
Okay, so maybe the cases aren't exactly the same, but I've found that semi-high to high-profile cases always end up the way everyone expects them to.
I mean, Microsoft is going to be broken up, the Supreme Court isn't going to decide it any other way. Regardless of your opinion, it is going to happen, and the reason why is that "we just can't have it any other way."
Same thing with the DeCSS case, the judge is going to look at it, probably not know a single danged thing about the Internet, other than the fact it is full of pornography and his kid uses it a lot, and figure that this DeCSS must be another one of those "bad" things the Internet does.
The program is highly illegal by current standards of law, and the only way to change those standards is to adapt new law. Public opinion in this case is: "yeah, sure would be great to have DeCCS, but it ain't gonna happen."
So the likelyhood of anything favorable happening is kinda slim. I think Slashdot should start focusing on laws that affect these topics that show up on the site more and more as events take place that put the Internet in the hands of our Governments.
It will be an amazing event to be able to sit and watch them nip away at it here and there and then eventually start to consume it whole. I'm guessing the nipping is just about over and it is time for the meal.
Hey, I want to see the Internet remain free like the rest of us, but it just "ain't gonna happen."
Yes, it's time for civil disobedience to undergo a revival. I say go for it. Break the rules. Break the law. Pick your side and fight. Civil disobedience is about choosing to violate the law because sometimes being criminal is the right thing to do. Are you worried about a record, a news story, your picture in the paper, what your in-laws will think? Don't. We're all criminals waiting to be caught. Being arrested isn't a sin. It's not an automatic black mark. Being arrested can be more powerful than voting. The law is the law until it isn't the law any more. Don't sigh and submit. You don't have to. Don't accept what you've been handed. Fight it. Rebel. Then write letters about it, post fliers, mail pamphlets. Hammer on the doors with battering rams, with your fists, with your head. Prove them wrong. Upset the apple cart, overturn the outhouse, barricade the bridges. Get some guts, some spine, some gumption, some chutzpah. You are privileged to burn the flag on the courthouse steps, to march without a permit, to chain yourself to the trees, to stand in front of the tank, to haul salt from the beaches to the people. You are entitled to tell everyone exactly what you're thinking. Civil disobedience means small battles standing proxy for large wars. By God, don't just stand there.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
One of the things we can do to fight off this law suit it too slashdot Congress to pass a bill assuring Fair Use. The MPAA is on a media blitz and confussing people about the basics of information, culture and copyright. What we need is to get Congress to pass a NEW LAW which guarantees Fair Use over the provisions of any other Copyright Law. We can wait for the Supreme Court to uphold Fair Use, but we can also demand from Congross these protections as well, and then undermine the Court Case entirely.
Orin Hatch is already upset with the degree the DMCA underminded Fair Use. We can HELP him fix his mistake. www.NYFAIRUSE.org is one organization which is trying to do just this.
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Declan McCullagh (the site which hosts the photo implying ill-behavior on Goldstein's part) has never been a friend of DeCSS or open source DVD. That he enjoys a rapport with slashdot is IMHO one reason to seriously question the ethics of those who run this forum.
While this doesn't necessarilly exhonorate Golstein, I would suggest we all consider the source and be appropriately wary of assuming the truth is being told (or shown) here.
I suggest anyone who is interested check out the archives of the LiViD mailing list. I found Declan's behavior to be shockingly reprehensible, unprofessional and downright destructive, and truly regretted that I had previously defended him on the very same list.
Declan is in my opinion responsible in no small part for what has happened with DeCSS (and is directly responsible for the original author of css-auth quitting the project as an act of self-defense). He is the main reason I don't read wired, and a contributing cause to my reading slashdot less and less.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
> And Rosa Parks was arrested fo breaking the law.
... were the legal ones (bus boycotts, sit-ins, etc).
Which is still remembered today and is used as the canonical example of an American fighting for her rights.
> The only actions which worked
The bus boycott would not have happened if Rosa had not been arrested. She brought attention and focus to the struggle.
Incidentally, sit-ins are illegal. Something about trespassing.
Also remember that there are two ways to change a law: get the legislature to change it or have a judge overturn it. In the case of DeCSS, the legislature was already bought and paid for and isn't about to change its mind.
The only alternative is for judicial review, but courts don't hear theoritical cases. The only way to get a law like the DMCA heard by a court is to break it.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
IIRC, under EU law reverse engineering is indeed legal, for the purposes of interoperability.
"Then it comes to be,
that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel,
is just a frieght train coming your way..... "
"Fortune, Fame, Mirror Vain, Gone Insane..... But The Memory Remains...
The next round of this debate? Digital Television! While the FCC is telling us that we'll be enjoying this wonderful new technology by 2006 - don't count on it. The MPAA and others are fighting like mad to control the delivery, and playback of digital content that will become HDTV (or DTV). You think they are going to transmit a digital signal and let you receive and record a perfect copy on to box or hard disk? Ha! Not likely...
The Digital Transmission Content Protection Method (DTCP) currently being debated will morph into some new standard controlled by the MPAA and others to control what you can see, and how you can see it. Check out some of these links:
Fourth digital-TV interface spec tossed into fray
US digital TV strategy "in disarray"
Digital interface debate resurfaces at Western show
FCC sets deadline on DTV interface issues
I'm completely thrown back that president of Time Warner, an AOL sellout, a completely capiltalist media company would make the following comment:
"This isn't just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It's about an assault on everything that constitutes the cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system , the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: The country will end up in a sort of cultural Dark Ages."
First he assumes that capitalism is required for cultural development. Second he states and boldly so that we must protect our "intellectual property system" when most people know full well that in it's current state it is flawed at best. The IP laws on the books currently reflect a society where products were largely tangable. In todays society these products are not so. Music, Software, etc. Lastly I'm shocked that he would seem to make the statement that "we control your culture" - we meaning all media companies. The truth of the matter is that popular music, news, etc. are hardly a basis to grow our culture on. They are capitalist sell out rip offs of something that is truly creative.
Now my rant to these companies; For those who purchase music regardless of the medium we should have the right to do with it as we *damn* well please. I sure as hell know what happens to a CD, or an LP if I play it over and over -- it fucking gets scratched, warped, or otherwise. That is why I transfer files to mp3 format - guess what I use napster also! And I buy more music than anyone I know. As for movies the media companies must think that they control every possible media solution avaliable because if I happen to run Linux or BSD, or QNX -- anything BUT MacOS or Windows and I want to use a DVD disk you come down hard. To me this seems completely retroactive of what the consumer needs.
My end statement would be that you, the media companies out there & the "artist organizations such as MPAA and RIAA - you disgust me with your arrogant misunderstanding of the very people who you market to. I would love to see all of you replaced.
I think Stephen King has maybe figured the right formula for "free" (as in speech) content. Release a part of the work for free, no strings attached, but promise further installments if readers pay voluntarily. The work becomes free for all after the payments are met, and the artist still gets paid. Tying payment directly to the promise of more from the artist is a lot more direct than the nebulous claims of "if we can't make money then the artists can't work and our culture will die" claims that the movie studios and recording companies make. In a way its like the patronage system, where someone contracts a work form an artist for a significant sum, but the work is made for all to enjoy (and the patron gets some recognition for their name getting attached to the credits). The trick will be to get it so it's relatively painless for many people to pay small amounts, and the incentive is made obvious, but not naggingly repetitive to the point of PBS beg-a-thons. I really hope King's effort succeeds, and becomes a model for more ventures like this.
I'm sick of hearing this "argument." Money didn't buy justice in the OJ trial. The LA DA spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to convict somebody, and then they made the bonehead move of putting a cop on the stand who had a record of being questionable and he happened to get caught in a lie. It was gross incompetence that got OJ off and nothing more. If you want to start a serious discussion about money and the courts then the real question to ask about OJ is how much more money did they spend trying to convict him than most people and why was that? For me personally, it would have been much more acceptable to let the bastard skate had LA county not spent $19million trying to convict him.
Don't believe me, then how come the tobacco companies got busted for $150billion?! They are the one group that has unlimited money and they lost their case.
Big money and big companies don't always win. They will in this case in part because 2600 tried to disobey the court when they were asked to take the DeCSS code down. They removed the code and then published a list of mirrors in an attempt to circumvent the court order. They lost a lot of credibility with the court by doing that. Goldstein is somewhat lucky to have not done jail time for contempt.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
You might want to read Civil Disobedience by a Mr. Thoreau as to why there are many many people who disagree with you.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Your imagery is spot on for 30 years ago but I think completely irrelevant for today. The connected citizen who disagrees strongly enough with his elected (or not) government has enough power to shake himself free without physical protest. The Internet makes it possible to work anywhere in the world, untaxed and undetected by a government or legal system. And I think civil disobedience in this day and age will be characterised more by code and data flowing through networks than bodies lying on University lawns.
Sure there will be casualties and I agree that the huge machine that is the Federal Goverment and legal system is not going to go down without a fight, but I think the very example you give of a Cobra gunship shows just how the rules have changed. Will the Government deploy Cobras and the National Guard against sysadmins mirroring DeCSS or Linux-using DVD software programmers? They can't.
What can they do? There are countries other than the U.S who think the DMCA is a crock of shit. If you're an information worker or a programmer or an artist, hell you can go and work there. You could even have your money in yet another jurisdiction - preferably one which laughs at any IRS attempts to come calling. Remember I'm not talking about a faceless mass of blue-collar workers here: this is a highly skilled bunch of people who don't like what their Governments are doing in the name of big companies.
I look forward to the next 20 years or so when the elephants realise they've been outsmarted...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The original from Thoreau.
--sugarman--
A "War on Copying" is a very real, very frightening possibility. A waiting period, background check, and registration of CD burners - or photocopiers. (Or pens). We must, after all, Protect the Children, so we'll have programs in the schools: CARE (Copy Abuse Resistance Education) would encourage kids to report their parents to the friendly neighborhood police officer if they found CD-Rs in the house. And we can mandate the death penalty for pirating kingpins.
I can see the PSA now...a father discovers the bootleg MP3s on his son's computer and demands to know who got him into such an obscene practice. Finally Junior yells "You, all right? I learned it by watching you!". And as Dad's face crumbles as he thinks about that Van Halen CD he burned to have a copy for the car, the voiceover comes up: "Parents who make copies, have kids who make copies."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Didn't americans learn anything from the OJ Simpson case?
If you have enough money, you can buy any court decision you want. Right and Wrong haven't applied in decades. The MPAA has tons of money to spend to defend their monopoly, and the lack of morals and scruples to do so.
This case will be lost because the judge is well in the pockets of MPAA. The only hope is to bring this obvious fact out in the appeals court, and get the ruling overturned.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
I totally disagree. If the law is wrong, you have an obligation to break it. You must be prepared to accept the consequences, but you don't need an excuse. The government is the one that needs an excuse, for passing this kind of crap, and they will have to look very hard to find one that doesn't say "we were paid to".
--
Communication is only possible between equals
How would one test the constitutionality of a law without breaking it? Rosa Parks is a pertinant example of why we should break wrong laws. It's called civil disobediance.
"The whole world is watching! The whole world is...(THUD)" -Uncle Duke in Iranian Prison
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
How's about we design a standard form letter for the coporate world we want to disobey. Not a piece of text, but a lovely piece of html, javascript and vbscript. Preferably that protects itself with the DMCA via a click through licensce. Something simple that downloads it's contents on reception (i.e. the document is simply links) and whose content is perhaps all the news items from "favourable" sources of the DMCA related litigations. Simply put it tells them that we object to their use of the DMCA's protections for the reasons discussed below. :-)
I presume that the document should be authored in the US to ensure that the legal situation is an appropriate quagmire, and really we should get a nice lawyer to write the click through licensce to ensure that if they try to prosectute ANYONE (ISPs etc.) that they must therefore break the DMCA.
Any American Lawyers there to tell us what we should and shouldn't do, and to write the "licensce", I'm sure we wont have a problem designing the mail itself
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
This case is going to lose for one reason. DiVX. DeCSS is no longer the huge issue. It's the use of DiVX in conjunction. The MPAA and TW have already provided proof that movies are being traded on IRC in DiVX format.
One of the original defences was no one had the bandwidth for trading 5 gig files. Getting that down to 640 Megs over a college internet connection gives huge ammounts of ammunition to the MPAA.
Remember Stack v. MS? Stack won $130m Microsoft won $30m. But MS bought Stack.
You may not agree with the McDonalds' coffee cup case, but they are a big guy too.
Big tobbacco lost! It took years and years, but they lost. It took hundreds of plaintiff lawyers to coordinate via the internet.
I have been using sharing information on my case with others via the net to help them (and myself) to win against Mattel.
Fight Spammers!
Certainly the last I checked under european law we are perfectly within our rights to reverse engineer any software which we own ourselves. Assuming [insert-norwegian-bloke] actually owned the piece of software he disassembled then he's done nothing wrong.
This stinks a lot to me since it's the whole 'America is soo big that it must be right' thing, and afaik no license agreement can withdraw your fundamental rights.
By installing M$ Office you agree to spend several hours a week banging your head off the screen and wondering where autobackup went
- no one would agree to that!!
As I see it, in disassembly he did nothing wrong. In redistributing that knowledge there may be some problems since it was derived from a work which he didn't own the rights to duplicate. However if the actuall CSS block makes up a sufficiently small amount of the total code then he might get away with that. I'm pretty sure in the UK you are allowed to legally photocopy up to a certain %age of a book.
And the Whilst I appreciate the good intention of DeCSS I think the people involved in this case acted foolishly and wrongly, and should face the consequences, no matter how much we might wish things had turned out otherwise.
f**k that - they stood up for what they believed in despite the fact that a foreign government was screaming nooo. If they had conceeded quietly we might never know that decss worked.
I think there's a good example of what the world would be like in the absense of big media. It's the internet porn industry. Because, up to now, the biggies were too squeamish to be associated with it (AT&T is now dipping its big toe in the water, however) and financiers are likewise loath to have their names associated with backing them, the industry is fragmented into thousands of mom-and-pop size operations. There's content for every fetish and taste, each struggling to gather an audience thru ads, spam, and word-of-mouth. I draw no conclusions as to what this 'means', just offering a glimpse of what a big-medialess world might look like. I have to say that, even if all big media vanished tomorrow, the forces of consolidation are inexorable, and we'd have it back again within a very short time.
When laws are evidently bogus, whatever is made illegal does not disappear, it merely becomes underground. Yes, the system is broken. Maybe it can be fixed; if not it can be bypassed instead. Vainly hoping for the right outcome still though. I will 'vote with my wallet' on this issue, boycotting is my middle name. FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
One thing is for sure, I don't recommend reading the above links or posts on this topic while listening to all three (3) Rage Against The Machine albums. I am in a frenzy and about ready to return the power to the have-nots right here from my corporate cubicle.
"Just victims of the in-house drive-by. They say jump; you say how high?"
As much as I'm not a fan of organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, not with the crap they promote and the decent stuff they stifle, I still can't help thinking that the DeCSS defendents should lose this case, for two reasons.
Firstly the fact is that whether or not their actions were moral, their actions were most definitely not legal and refusing to comply with the law is still a crime whether it is keeping DeCSS on your website or murdering small children. Whilst there are important moral differences between the two, we live under a code of laws which attempts to follow morality but in order to be effective must sometimes be harder than is perhaps necessary.
You may not agree with the law or its interpretation, but that's no excuse for breaking it! If you disagree that badly then there are perfectly legal means to protest which are a lot more effective in the long run. This case certainly proves that point.
The other point is that by rushing out and making such a big point of keeping DeCSS available they make the more reasonable pro-freedom groups look tainted by association. Now it looks like the same thing is going to happen as soon as legal action is started, making it harder for organisations like the EFF and ACLU to fight for good causes.
And you can bet that this episode will be used as the basis for more punitive legislation by a US government already dedicated to eliminating all vestiges of freedom on the net as it is.
Whilst I appreciate the good intention of DeCSS I think the people involved in this case acted foolishly and wrongly, and should face the consequences, no matter how much we might wish things had turned out otherwise.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Seeing as how people are downloading X-Men today (no DVDs exist, as I recall), in pretty good quality (barring compression/audio defects), I'd say that the MPAA has far more to worry about than people distributing DeCSS.
Lately I've seen DivXes made from tapes done with camcorders snuck into theaters, and from screeners (tapes sent to movie reviewers/oscar type people), so I doubt that DeCSS is responsible at all for most of the increase in pirated movies (DivX, on the other hand, probaby IS)
From the NTY article:
After his son left the witness chair, Per Johansen told a reporter in the courtroom hallway that his son had done "very well." He noted that Jon's grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II. He said that he himself fought communism in Europe in the 1980s by working as a secret courier for Solidarity leaders in Poland, carrying money into the country and smuggling out documents.
"Jon is in an historical line," Per Johansen said proudly. "He is fighting for freedom."
Them's fightin' words. IT's good that his family stands behind him in this battle.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
You can find my copy of DeCSS at http://WWW.Apocrypha.NET/DeCSS/.
I have has that there for a while. I too see that the DMCA is the last nail for many who only want to make small productions. If the DVD format is a licensed format, lecensed by the studios what chance does the little guy have.
This is an era where we can record our own music, edit our own video, digitize voice and pictures for future generations. Digital formats will last. The medium will change, but things can be copied from disk to disk. The quality will never go down.
We see this imortality of data as a boon, but studios don't. Studios see it as a loss. With analog formats there was lifespan to a movie, and copies lost quality.
Our boon is, by their definition, is the studio's loss. I don't think they will lose anything if the DVD format is open. I think that there will still be people small time productions, if it's open, and some control will be lost, but it's control they should never have had.
It's time we hacked the law, and exposed laws that protect corperate "freedom" by tossing the freedom of the people in the trash. If keeping the DVD format and platform closed is the only thing keeping American culture alive, then I for one think it should die. A more interesting culture will rise up. The one that exisited before large studios killed American culture.
Let's find out who voted away our freedom when they voted for laws to protect these closed formats. Let's publish the original notes and ideas of the people who pen the original copyright laws. Let's dumb things down forthe press. Let's PR our cause.
People who want to maintain the freedom that their parents fought for, have to keep up the fight. That is a war that never ends. Someone is always attacking freedom, just not always with a gun.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
If the people taking that information feel like it.
What are you going to do, send them a box of cookies? Warm and supportive Hallmark cards? I'd like everyone who has a bunch of mp3s to apply the following filter:
- Remove all mp3s in your list that you actually own the media to, CDs, cassettes, vinyl, or, God help us, minidisc.
- Remove all remaining mp3s by bands you can actually swear you'll buy CDs from in the next three months. Be honest.
- Remove all remaining mp3s for songs you've only had on your hard drive for two months (let's give you a chance to throw out the chaff).
- If you really feel like you are someone who has the exclusive right to determine how much someone else makes (and, for those of you who are high-paid geeks, or don't think you're that highly paid, guess how much someone working at McDonald's thinks you should make), take off all bands that are incredibly famous millionaires, your Britney Spears, Metallica, and NIN kind of bands.
Armed with that list of remaining tracks, go over to your wardrobe and count how many band T-shirts you own by that band.What? No T-shirts? Well, where are your concert ticket stubs? Okay, none of those...umm, bumper stickers? (A stretch, who knows if they get anything from that at all.)
Let's get this "rewarded in other ways" thing nailed down before we start the revolution, shall we? And, heck, before we're in such a rush to help out all of the poor, unfortunate natives (the musicians, the artists, the writers), let's actually ask them before bringing (forcing) the benefits of our wonderful civilization on them. "Geek culture knows best for you" is not the approach we want to take.
Young people quite naturally expect - based on their experience with authority figures in their childhood years - reasonable behavior from people in positions of authority. THIS DOES NOT OCCUR when dealing with government entities.
The legal system is a giant unemotional machine, and if you get caught up in its gears it will grind you into very small pieces. The legal system does not care if you are right, or if your cause is just; the gears will turn no matter what.
The 'Due process' that the Constitution promises you does exist, but processing is what is done to a piece of meat when it is put into a grinder, and the results of the legal system are just as inexorable. Because of its great size and power the legal system is an extremely dangerous machine to get caught up in; roughly 90% of the people who are indicted in the Federal Court system are convicted; the 10% who are not are like the spillage from a meat grinder.
I suggested trying to fight an elephant, because the analogy is pretty good. If the elephant notices you, and you are engaged, your chances of escaping are very small. The one thing which we do know is that nothing bad is going to happen to the elephant.
You have read about cases where civil disobedience has changed things about government. What you do not understand is that the reason that you read about them is because they are so rare that they become news stories. Dog bites man is not news, Man bites dog is.
Back in the 1960-70's we had Kent State. I guess this generation will get a repeat: while the Seattle WTO disorders caught the law off guard, eventually that sort of behavior results in a massacre.
Are there other ways of doing things? Yes - well thought out words and ideas will do far more toward changing things than street protests ever will. Government is not going to lose a street fight - that is the one thing it is designed to win.
Have you ever seen a Cobra gun ship in action? I have. Trust me, civil disobedience won't last 10 seconds against a single Cobra gunship, and the National Guard has thousands of them. All that you will wind up with is lots of dead people, and no one to tell their side of things. History is written by the survivors - not by the people lying dead in the streets.
I find it kind of frightening that people's comprehension of the pre-segregation world is so confused that they can equate violating fundamental rights of movement and association with the right to watch a movie.
Banning DeCSS isn't about "the right to watch a movie", any more than segregated water fountains are about "the right to get a drink of water".
The latter is about discrimination, restricting freedom of association, and the removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority. The former is about maintaining a stranglehold on intellectual property, restricting freedom of speech (If I can't tell someone, in English or in C, how to bypass a broken encryption scheme, yes, it's restricting freedom of speech), and the removal of rights from a majority of society (the hundreds of millions of consumers who *used* to have "fair use rights" guaranteed by the supreme court) by a minority (the IP providers who can make more money off of restricting content distribution channels, controlling content player manufacturers, and moving even digital data to read-only and pay-per-use systems).
Granted, segregation was grossly worse, but with centuries of evil tradition to back it up and a subtle (and often too unsubtle) population-wide bigotry, that wasn't surprising. And racial relations improved, and are still gradually (too gradually for some) improving.
On the other hand, intellectual property controls are getting worse, and fast. The court cases that made VCRs, dubbing between media formats, personal MP3 players, etc. illegal are all pretty much moot now, since we've got this shiny new DMCA law that wasn't around back then. Even EULAs (you know, those "contracts" you "agreed to" without signing or reading anything) may become binding, and all the ridiculous restrictions therein take effect. The idea being fought here is the idea that you can purchase a data disc, "own" that disc, entertain yourself or run your company using the data on that disc, but have no control whatsoever over it except what the previous owner gives you, revokable at any time you try to move that data to a new medium, play it with an unauthorized system, publish incriminating benchmarks, or do anything else the previous owner doesn't like. Does that not worry you a little bit?
I'm sorry that people can't play their DVD's on Linux. I really am. But comparing your ability to watch a movie to someone's ability to make a living for themselves, to attend a decent school- that is a confusion of scale that I just don't understand.
And yes, I do appreciate the intellectual property cosiderations. I think that the DMCA is junk, and I would love it if more manufacturers would embrace open standards. But if you don't like it, why not abandon it? You buy a media format knowing what platforms it works on. No one buys Betamax expecting it was their god given right to have it work in a VHS machine. So DVD doesn't work on your machine? Screw 'em. Don't buy DVD's. Watch regular videotapes. It might inconvenience you, but not nearly as much as minorities were "inconvenienced" by generations of segregation, prejudice, and violence. If enough people drop it, the manufacturers will relent, or the format will die.
But there is no need to demean someone else's struggles by comparing the life and death of a good percentage of the American population to the tribulations of a group of movie buffs.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
what if time-warner and the rest of the media conglomerates died? what would happen? how would we get our daily dose of standardized, nutritious, 100% USDRA of important information (all in a conveniently wrapped up package with a bow)? Wow, that was a horrible sentence, I'll try to be more coherent from here on out.
Anyways, what would happen if the massive media machines that puss Britney Spears and N'Sync on us went the way of the dinosaurs? Let's think about this for a moment. There wouldn't be any huge parent companies anymore (at least temporarily). We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets. That in and of itself is a scary thought, we would have to make an important decision with information that we would have to go out and gather ourselves. We wouldn't get everything served to us all nicely tied together on a silver platter with a certificate of authenticity from whatever conglomerate we went to for that information.
What effect would this have on the music industry specifically? Well, if we lost the conglomerates we would lose the massive marketing machines. And since there is no longer a massive conglomerate we could assume that we would no longer be bombarded with identical images of how everyone is supposed to be (from tv, movies and music). So, it's feasible that the massive appeal of teeny-bopper music and celebrities may decrease simply because there wouldn't be a concerted effort on the part of the media to inundate us with images of how we should want to look and act.
Of course, there is a frightening "other side" of that coin. What if, in the absence of any media conglomerates, in a world of thousands of independent media and news stations, companies and outlets, we were still bombarded with tv's and movies that basically amounted to watching people more attractive than us make out with other people more attractive that us, and complain about the difficulties of being attractive and popular? If that type of entertainment (and I use the term entertainment loosely) persisted with a myriad of independent stations...well I'd give up all hope on the human race right then and there and go live in a cave.
a cave with a generator and a computer to play games on of course. I'm only human.
Moller
EFF DVD Update: July 20, 2000
0 720_ny_trial_transcript.html
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/ cyberlaw/21law.html
, 7070_7,00.html
Universal City Studios v. 2600 Magazine
EFF Fights Movie Studios' Attempt to Monopolize DVD Players
Johansen Shines on Witness Stand in Defense of his Software
Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teen-ager who created DeCSS, the software at the heart of this case, took the witness stand Thursday morning to testify for the defense. Johansen explained that he was attempting to build a DVD player for Linux when he and two other members of the group MoRE developed the code. He also explained that DeCSS was written as a Windows executable file because the project had to be tested first on Windows since Linux could not read a DVDs UDF files. This testimony blew a huge hole in both the movie studios' and the judge's reasoning who assumed that because the code was written for Windows it had nothing to do with developing a Linux DVD player, as EFF's defense team has claimed for months.
The courageous teen also revealed that the MPAA filed charges against Jon and his father Per, instigating the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit to ask Jon to answer questions at the police station in January 2000. His testimony revealed a flaw in the judge's thinking, who has previously stated in several opinions that the teen was arrested and has inferred guilt therefrom. Not only was Johansen never arrested for developing the software, the Norwegian government awarded Jon a prestigious award for his excellent grades in high school and his contribution to society for creating DeCSS. Although it did not come out in court today, the Norwegian parliament has also issued the young teen a formal apology for the treatment he has undergone as a result of publishing the code.
In stark contrast to the veracity and integrity Johansen displayed on the witness stand in the face of a powerful industry trying to crush him, the head of the MPAA's world-wide anti-piracy effort Mikhail Reider testified next. The MPAA investigator who was previously an intelligence officer for the DEA and FBI gave testimony replete with "I can't recall", "I don't know", and "I can't remember" to the most basic questions involving the MPAA's investigative efforts in this case, reminiscent of the Jack Valenti deposition. The credibility and truthfulness of this witness was called into further doubt when shown and asked about internal MPAA reports sent to her that contradicted her testimony and were obtained by EFF's defense team through discovery battles. At the conclusion of Reider's testimony, the Plaintiff's rested their case.
EFF's defense team called Edward Felton to the witness stand who is an expert on technology and testified for the Department of Justice in its case against Microsoft. Felton, who likened "hacking" to "tinkering" explained that the public is ultimately served by the disclosure of information learned from publishing the results of encryption research and security testing. He also testified to the expressive nature of object code and that he can read it and encourages his students to read and write it as part of their education. "In addition to executing it, you can learn a lot from it," stated one of the world's most highly respected computer experts.
Journalist and publisher of 2600 Magazine Eric Corley, who is more commonly known by his pen name, Emmanuel Goldstein took the stand in his own defense at the late afternoon and will return first thing Thursday morning at 9:00. Goldstein explained many of the important contributions to computer security, technology innovation, and the protection of privacy that his magazine was responsible for since its creation in 1984. He also described his extensive journalistic background which includes having been published in the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal among countless others and testifying before Congress on technology issues.
Judge Kaplan provided some sense of his thinking saying that Web publisher 2600.com had a reasonably strong case that the issuance a permanent injunction against it was a futile act due to the mass proliferation of the software. Fond of analogies, the judge stated the defense had a reasonably strong case for the proposition that the barn is unlocked and this horse is out. (See pulled quote from transcript below).
In response to questions regarding the movie studios' right to control who can make DVD players, the judge gave some indication that he believed the DMCA may over-rule antitrust law in the U.S., something to be found no where in the legislative history of the statute.
Thursday morning, Emmanuel Goldstein will complete his testimony with the cross examination of him by Proskaur lawyer Leon Gold. EFF's defense team also expects to call Matt Pavlovich, a developer of open source DVD player tools and Professor Peterson of Princeton University's Computer Science department to the stand.
>From trial transcript of July 20, 2000, Pages 670-1
17 Now, it seems to me also that what the MPAA wants is
18 a legal determination that unlocking this barn was illegal,
19 and so the next guy who considers unlocking another barn is
20 going to have something serious to think about. I suspect you
21 are also asking me to issue an injunction against the guy who
22 unlocked this barn not to unlock it again even though there is
23 no horse in it. So, you know, I don't know that this witness
24 has any light to shed on that subject.
Page 674:
6 courts have said for 300 years, at least that courts of
7 equity ought not to use the equitable power of injunction to
8 try to accomplish the impossible or to perform something which
9 is entirely futile, and therefore, in the exercise of
10 discretion, given the broad prevalence of this particular
11 utility, this time the court declines to issue the injunction
12 because it would do no practical good.
Transcript of today's hearing:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/2000
An index of the DVD updates can be found at:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/dvd_updates_archive
You can subscribe to EFF's mailing list to receive the regular
DVD updates. To subscribe, email
and put this in the body: subscribe cafe-news
EFF's archive of MPAA v 2600 litigation:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/
RELATED COVERAGE:
Norwegian Teenager Appears at Hacker Trial He Sparked
By Carl Kaplan, NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/cyber
(This is one of the best articles yet written about this case).
DVD-Hacker Trial Judge Says Horsefeathers to Movie Studios' Injunction Demands
By Greg Lindsay, Inside.com
http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
I have to speak personally here, as a musician - moreso as one that does not get paid. I do not create my art (music) for the hopes of getting paid for it. Money is not my "incentive" to create. I create because I am compelled to. I cannot not create. It is something metaphysical, something bigger than myself that drives my need to express myself. I don't do it for money.
That said, if I was getting paid for it, I could quit my day job and do a whole lot more of it. I would love to get paid for it. But that is not WHY I do it.
wish
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Baloney!!! The reason that our culture goes anywhere is because future developments are built off of ideas that come before. This is like saying that "Just because you learned how to read doesn't mean that you should be able to write." Sadly, I don't know what the lowly unwashed masses can do to prevent this.