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Tech Industry To Hollywood: Slow Down, Camper
negativethirsty wrote to us with a story here at Wired, most of the tech industry heads sent a letter to the motion picture studios, with a nod towards the US Senate. Basically, the tech industry does not want SSSCA to be pased, and want to work out a "technically feasible, cost effective solution" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form.
The tech industry want the scca to be passed : it will instantaneously make most video-playing devices devices obsolete hence generating sales and profits.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is "ganging up on the consumers".
If these two factions ever come to an agreement, fair use as we know it is dead (even more than it is already!).
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Did two of the group's members (HP Carly Fiorina and NCR Lars Nyberg) not sign the letter? Do they have some ulterior motive in distancing themselves from a group that doesn't want the SSSCA passed (see, I read articles before I post)? Or is this just a coincidence and they were 'out of town' or something when the letter was drafted.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
The story basically states that the tech companies do NOT want the SSSCA passed. They want to work with Hollywood to find "technically feasible, cost effective solutions" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form (from the article).
IOW, the lesser of the two evils: still the possibility of all kinds of stupid draconian controls, but at least chosen by the industry, and not legally mandated.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Simple.
If storage manufacturers are actively heading in a direction I don't want then they will not get a penny of my money. I currently actively avoid SDMI limited hardware and encourage others to do the same. e.g. The secure multi media cards and MP3 players that support them.
*I'm* the customer, not the RIAA.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This will never work...
Because there will be numerous (Asian) Producers
offering copy-free-versions....players, disks, etc.....
It did not work for DVDs, it did not work for
game consoles, it will not work for CDs and other
devices.....
What we need (IMHO) is new laws that give people back fair use. Right now fair use is based solely on precedents.
Citizens of the US please start writing to your congressmen (M/F). We need to stand up for our rights immediately.
Pretty soon you won't be allowed to own cars, because they make it possible to kill people or escape from the scene of a crime.
The problem here is that not enough people believe/realise that they are adversly affected by this.
alt.binaries.erotica.hamster.ducktape
Hold on there before you throw the party. The wired article many the issue clear that the hardware manufacturers don't support government legislated control on content delivery. It however also made it clear that the hardware manufacturer would support the introduction of such control hardware as part of an industry based standard. To the user this is the same time.
We're still screwed...
600 word letter? I'd love to still the exact text of what they wrote. Anyone seen a copy?
D.
To hell with the consumer and to hell with What ,'we',the people who pay the bills want.What we want is a closed circle , one golden ring of friends where to play you have to pay us loads of money.No sorry we wont sell you the right to decode format ,x,mr small eastern company , we do not like you and you might offer features which would be of more benifit to the user than we offer and we would not want that, you might sell a superior product at a higher price and we definitly would not want that,what ? , competition you say? why the public has loads of choice they can buy off me or my 5 big friends who jointly own the format but not you or anyone else who we do not like.
,why well we can not have the public making illegal backups of our songs so we have to be carefull who we let use our encoders and our technology.
To hell with you mr small artist,to make it big these days you must sighn up with label x or label y
A closed system is a better system for all and provides a nice illusion of competition.Is it just me or is any one else getting realy realy tired of companies treating there custemers like criminals and trying to lock them into a system they do not want to have in place.What ever happened to the custemer is king.
What the music industry and the hardware industry want is a windows type senario where users are locked in to buying there products, there is off course severly limited competition and people do offcorse have the right Not to use there hardware but then they must sacrifice the right to listen to or view the music which these copyright horders own and that just happens to be a great big chunk
of whats being released and old songs who's copyright they have bought up.This whole senario
is a disgrace and goes against the whole idea of
competiton and does not in any way serv the consumer.
_________________________________________________
At the most stupid, this would mean that it would become illegal to produce a device capable of presenting a normal monitor-out signal to show a movie, on the grounds that this signal could conceivably be used to produce high quality digital copies.
In the US it's apparently already against the law to write a normal computer program to decode a recording that you own legally, but outlawing CPUs and video cards seems even more ambitious and even more foolish. There is no practical means of stopping a hobbyist consumer doing what he likes with his own property and sharing his knowledge with others, nor would it be in the public interest to do so.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
It made me want to stop buying music althogether.
I was never an avid music consumer before Napster/mp3s. I would buy one album a year if even that. Then when Napster came along, and I was able to listen to different music and figure out what *I* liked, I have bought dozens of albums. I don't know where the Recording Industry, Movie Industry, and Tech Industry think they're going these days. Why is it that they feel like they have to establish this higher moral stance (when actually it's based on profits, not morality) to preserve a copyright system that clearly doesn't work anymore, and needs to be redesigned?
This is what I see happening if this bill gets passed:
-A wide and growing division of artists from the mainstream, where the Net finally becomes a mainstream place to purchase music or a secondary "rogue" recording industry develops that is more sympathetic to consumers rights and wants.
Now, I know I don't have all the answers. But all I can say is that Recording Industry, MPAA, and Tech Companies had better wake up and decide whether they like making money off their "precious" consumers.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
Make no mistake: they are not. Technological protections infringe fair use rights, they prevent the material from falling into the public domain when copyright terms run out, and they greatly increase the cost of entry into publishing. Rather than debating whether technological restrictions should be backed up by criminal law, we should be debating whether works published with technological restrictions should enjoy copyright protections at all.
I think companies should be free to use technological protections for their creations, but they should then not also enjoy legal and copyright protections because they have precluded the uses that were traditionally envisioned for published materials. It's the same with patents: either you publish and get patent protection, or you keep it a secret and don't get patent protection.
I don't understand the ideas that I'm hearing.
I have seen standards (especially open/free ones) flourish and grow beyond any expectations.
These standards offer clear benifits and improvements to commonly used items.
I have also seen the makers of isolated products fall to bankruptcy due to incompatability and cost.
This is a pattern that has been in place as long as I can remember. If I can use a product easily and it benifits my life without breaking my wallet it will succeed and flourish.
If I cannot play a movie I purchased on my new DVD player because it has no copyprotection features on the DVD then I will be pissed off.
If I cannot play the movie because I have an old DVD player I will be pissed off.
It's the standard of DVD (such as it is) that is making it possible to survive. The extra footage and quality make it worth a bit more as far as investment, but to keep it going you need people that are not being irritated every other year having to re-purchase movies or replace an "old" DVD player.
That would kill any product line no matter what special bells and whistles it offers.
Standards are what make innovation work as a business model.
I could make a million improvements on an item but if they are not standardized in some way, to work with as many people as possible, without nulifying the benifits, they will fail to catch on and make money.
Even hollywood realizes this need for standards set up for success.
"Hollywood executives fret that without strong copy protection in widespread use, digital versions of movies will be pirated as readily as MP3 audio files once were with Napster."
They do not want hundreds of incompatable copy protection methods in place, they want a unified standard of protection that will be used by all.
"widespread use" requires widspread acceptance.
This applies to standards for both sides of the Copy Protection VS. Consumer Rights debate.
Change is good but random change is chaos.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
What would happen, I concede though, would be that it would be the end of getting *nix workstations for commodity PC prices, since the commodity PCs would be the crippled ones.
One ray of hope: I note that Apple does not appear to be part of this--which could mean that they don't buy into mandatory DRM in personal computers. Unfortunately, it could also mean that they back the SSSCA.
OK first things first: I'm an employee of IBM, but I do not represent IBM. This is my personal viewpoint. #include "std_disclaimer.h"
.edu labs and geeks with equivalent home labs, are probably the folks this law is aimed at to begin with)
I called our IP Law group about this law when it first surfaced on my radar, because a lot of the things we do when bringing up a new system would have to change. I was pleased to find out that the HQ people were already up to speed on this.
What would have to change? Like for instance on first power-on the BIOS isn't done and on-board devices aren't fully supported... Well if the SSSCA passes and our very first power-on doesn't have support for their DRM (since there's no exception in the draft SSSCA for systems development or debug) all of us engineers are now guilty of federal felonies. I'm sorry, but I'll change careers and/or countries before I take a job that requires me to break the law.
All of us engineers and programmers know also that hardware diagnostics frequently turn off all onboard devices except for one at a time to attempt to isolate bad devices... guess what? Won't be able to do that anymore. That means diagnostics are less effective, which means more customer downtime and higher customer support costs. Any computer company that cares about their customers will not look forward to that.
And of course, if Sen Hollings adds an exemption for systems development folks the question becomes "Who constitutes a legitimate developer?" The 14-year old down the street probably doesn't, but I know folks who have a home lab that rivals what some hardware OEMs have. And all those college students developing computers for their EE classes then become problematic too. (Since both of these groups, college students with access to
Who knows where this will end? (sigh)
--Rob
I think its a good law for the people,
:)
Take this merge it with the DCMA, and another bill or two the greedy politicians and RIAA and MPAA would like to see law. Start lokcking up EVERYONE that breaks this law on felony charges.
Hell youll have an entire generation of America in Jail within 5 years, The digital black market will erupt and I will become a VERY rich man, nice to live so close to Canada and be able to move stuff without customs worries
Seriouslly, the more these morons ind nazi wannabe's like Ashcroft crackdown the better, the pendulum swings both ways, it doesnt take a Revolution here for it to do just that, look at the 60's and the 70's after a decade and a half of morons like McCarthy.
I could see this as the single largest enfocment failure since prohibition. Bring it on
Digiatl Capone.......lol...
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
But there's an important distinction here...
If someone is brought up in front of a jury for driving a taxi without a bale of hay, or for selling film on a Sunday (still illegal in several southern states), a jury of lay people can understand the irrelevance of the charge and use their common sense instead of cheap pettifoggery of the prosecutor.
If however you are charged with "illegal circumvention of a SSSCA mandated DRM device in the course of vicarious copyright infringement", the jury is going to find themselves slammed with jargon and manipulated by the state to ignore their common sense.
Unfortunately "a jury of your peers" doesn't mean "a jury of professional software and hardware developers".
--Rob
Sharing music can take away my right to own firearms? It's a felony now and <sarcasm>felons are all dangerous criminals who shouldn't have guns</sarcasm>. In 15 states, a felony conviction removes your right to vote forever. LOSING THE VOTE:The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States
As for someone else's arguement that "I won't buy it"- great, me too. The two of us can spend some serious time trying to keep today's computers running for the rest of our lives because laws make us unwilling to buy new equipment. It will be easy as pie to market ourselves on resume's in a decade. "Still able to operate equipment from the 00's" Windows BlahX experience? nah, I don't have a machine that can run that. Apache 6.03 experience? No, but I've got 10 years experience with version 2.0
I'm trying to find a group that will tell politicans not to abuse me. EFF seems interested in doing that but they move at a snails pace. YourCongress.com seems to be interested in getting the people's voice to the politicans but the editors seem more interested in being funny then talking about issues. What groups do people use/belong to/know about that are active in fighting for geek rights?
This is both, but the bad news wins, I think.
The good news is that this sort of thing is very likely to derail the SSSCA. When large, politically respectable (i.e. campaign-contributing) companies tell Congress that they can handle the problem themselves, and that legislation will harm the industry, Congress will listen. A concerted effort from tech giants can stop SSSCA in its tracks.
The bad news is that what the tech corps are promising to do won't happen. Sure, they can design hardware with DRM built in, and they can establish standards and even bring some amount of pressure to bear on companies that build non-compliant hardware, but there will always be a market for non-compliant hardware because that's what consumers want, and they're the real masters of capitalism. As long as that market exists, companies will try to sell to it, and they'll succeed handsomely. By way of example, how many tiny, unknown asian companies made it in a big way in the DVD player market precisely because they were willing to defy the standards (and even break their legally-enforceable license agreements) to make region-free players? Low prices, cool features and suddenly the likes of Sampo and Apex are outselling JVC and Pioneer.
As long as there's no legal enforcement, it's actually in the interest of hardware manufacturers to cut corners and leave loopholes that allow the end user to work around the DRM.
So, the bad news is that after the tech companies succeed in stalling Congress for a few years, the likes of the RIAA and MPAA will come thundering back in, saying "See! They promised to stop this and they failed!" and Congress will nod sagely and pass the SSSCA.
The really bad news is that this action by the tech companies legitimizes the goal. IBM (my employer, BTW, although I don't speak for them, #include <disclaimer>) and the others are basically supporting the content distributors' point of view that this is a problem that should be fixed.
I guess what we can hope for is that by the time Congress realizes that industry self-regulation has failed, the rest of the world has realized that the correct solution is not to hamstring the technology and the technologists so that the old business model can continue to succeed, but instead to find new business models. Unfortunately, I doubt that the members of the RIAA, in particular, will ever realize this, because all of the obvious new business models make them unnecessary.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Like Germany, where macrovision is illegal.
Where does the basement musician or unsigned artist fit into all of this? If I want to spread my own music far and wide, I should be able to. It sounds like this right is being taken away from me. Will only the 'signed' artists be able to be distributed? As all ideas from the Industry, content and distribution control remains with them, and leaves the 'little' guy to 10 times the work, and nothing to show for it.
Microsoft fighting for something that makes sense? Maybe, here's a quote from a Nation article about defense spending: Even our own Bill Gates was alarmed at the United States' apparent hubris: "People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us."
But from the letter to the MPAA I didn't get any sense that MS, or Intel, or any other major computer manufacturer was actually going to work against anti-consumer DRM, just that they didn't want Congress involved. In fact, if DRM happens without Congress it might be much worse. Congress at least makes a pretense of getting public input and conducting halfway fair and open hearings and publishes their policies freely in many cases. You can bet that if industry (think oligopoly) does this on their own, the public will have no say, get stuck with a less secure (for users) security, and lose any chance for Fair Use and/or DRM-expiration when current media copyright expires (which we all suspect it may never actually do again).
When I hear the phrase "digital rights management" why do I get the feeling the only people who will have any digital rights left to manage are major corporations? Either way, unless consumers get informed and actually stand firm, we all stand to get fooked pretty badly on this one. I have friends who get downright vituperative about a woman's right to choose to kill her unborn baby, but bring up copyright-related freedom issues and even if they do comprehend the issue they couldn't care less. That's the real problem we're facing here: no one understands how this affects them, and even if they do they aren't willing to act differently to prevent it.
The reason Hollywood is so caught up in this is that they know that any technical solution they devise will fail without the law backing it up. But the industry won't stand for such a law, as we see with this letter.
sulli
RTFJ.
Did you make the same apologies for the DMCA, and were then surprised at Dmitri?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Congress is DESTROYING our free market by passing
draconian laws in support of corporate interests and giving out corporate wellfare. This type of thing will stifle innovation, and give big corporations an excuse NOT to find new business models. When the SSSCA fails to make the RIAA and MPAA as much money as they hoped, they'll just lobby for another stupid law even worse than that. Pretty soon you'll have congress passing laws that give them the power to force you to buy a new computer/dvd player/whatever whenever they arbitrarily feel like it, in order to "save the entertainment industry."
This will either lead to the following.
1. People comply, and eventually spend so much
of their money on new lisences, fees, etc. imposed
by congress to benefit megacorps that it forces
the average US family into poverty. No longer
able to afford any more, the entire US economy
will collapse, and the USA will become a
third world country with 99% of the population
so poor they can barely afford food and shelter
and 1% of the population extremely rich.
I'd hope that American people would have another
revoltion before that happens, though.
2. People are disobedient, and they start buying
Asian equipment on the black market, set up rogue
ISPs, etc. Money will get funelled out of the
US economy, and into the Southeast Asian economy.
American companies will start to lose a lot of
money, at a very fast rate. Throwing those in
jail who are caught will not help. Enforcement
will be bribed by some people to ignore the
fact they are circumventing the SSSCA and its kin.
Corruption will get worse. Eventually, The entire US tech industry and entertainment industry will collapse, and the US will be put into
a secondary status, a former shell of the superpower it once was.
If similar laws are forced upon all of our
our trading "allies" in the Western world,
the same effects might be seen there. Or if
they don't pass these laws, they just won't
trade with the US anymore, seeing as how
everything now has DRM that is not needed
or wanted there.
Either way, it will enable Southeast Asian companies to totally dominate the market.
China will quickly become the economic and military
powerhouse of the World, leaving the USA in its
dust if these types of laws are continued to
be allowed to pass. Why I say military as well,
is because if the US economy gets destroyed, we
probably won't be able to afford our military any
more.
The alternative is to let a pure, free market
dominate. If companies can't find new business
models, they will go out of business. Tough. However, people will have choices. Companies
will make money by working hard on making their
products worth paying for. This is how the
US Economy became the #1 economy in the world.
Now politicians who are corporate whores are
ruining this free market. It will ruin our
Economy in the long run.
But I guess that is to be expected. History
pretty much shows that once corruption is so
wide spread in a government like it is today,
that you know you're probably on the way down.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
In the whole argument here I see that Hollywood says that they need some kind of copy control or that otherwise everyone see/hear music/movie for free and therefore won't buy any CD/DVD any more.
The BIG question I have can Hollywood prove this claim? I read that at the hights of Napster the CD sales INCREASED! So this would prove that MP3 increase sales, so they sould encourige MP3 copy etc. But thats scary for big company's to think a la 'open source' (something for free can be worth something)
I also would like to see how the cost for creating a CD is. I would expect that the prices come down since the introduction, but they are stil as high! I think a very small % is for the original artist, the rest for a Hollywood company. Why not thing some kind of system that enables the consumer to download what he wants and that he pays what HE thinks what worth!
A number of people have claimed that the market won't accept crippled devices and that people will simply buy the uncrippled ones. I ask: given that the RIAA and MPAA are more than willing to pass Draconian laws to protect their oligopoly on entertainment media, what on God's green earth makes you think they won't go further and outlaw all devices *not* approved by them? It's silly to believe that 'the market' will take care of the problem when the folks vested in the old way of doing business are capable of buying legislators and laws to make any alternative a felony.
Furthermore, others have stated that different ways of doing things will put the RIAA/MPAA out of business, e.g., more and more bands selling their cds directly using the internet as cheap advertisement. Let's wise up a bit, shall we? If this becomes a popular way of doing business - cutting the RIAA out of the picture altogether - do you really think the powers that be will stand aside and let this model edge them out of the market? Hell no, they'll once again buy the laws needed to make the sale of music cds via the internet, or without RIAA approval, or both, a crime.
As ridiculous as this sounds the loons that run the music business (and now the movie business) have shown themselves to be quite capable of backing Orwellian laws and buying the support required to pass them. They'll do anything to retain their power even if that means imprisoning anyone who defies them, using the U.S. government as their tool.
What's more than a bit ironic here is that if a new technology comes along that eliminates my business and my job, I don't get to go crying to Congress to set up a protection racket for me. I have to learn new skills for a new job at a new business - that's called 'capitalism'. The RIAA, however, if presented with a market that makes their way of doing things obsolete, simply buys the legislation required to outlaw the technology that threatens their favored status. Now that's fair, American style!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
That's a cave-in to the entertainment industry. The reply could have read something like "The computer industry is a major engine of economic growth in the United States. Interfering with its freedom to innovate purely to help a small number of entertainment companies maintain their monopolies is harmful to the nation." But that's not what the computer ndustry representatives said.
That's what the promoters of the SSSCA really wanted. That legislation isn't going anywhere, but introducing it has intimidated the computer industry into doing what the RIAA and MPAA want - putting in hardware copy protection.
We will never have our freedom until the DMCA is overturned. Better sooner than later - when the economy collapses because innovation has been brought to a standstill by stupid laws.
The DMCA means any programmer who can write a trivial encryption routine to "protect" (restrict) content can act as a legislator by making certain actions regarding that content illegal.
When a programmer can outlaw exercise of fair use rights to a piece of content - fair use rights become meaningless.
Isn't that an illegal delegation of power from Congress to those that write content "protection" (restriction) code? I think so.
Of course we can avoid their content - but that puts Linux at a disadvantage (people will cry "It can't play movies - unless you go to a bunch of criminal hackers and use (un-American) illegal software").
It is better than the SSSCA, which would at best seriously mess with Linux and at worst make it difficult or even illegal to run at all.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I later found a link to the speach.
... has created a disturbing disconnect in our relationship, and trends say it promises to get worse" Hmmm, did he just say that the recording industry was killing "That very special connection between the fan and the artist"?
I have to say, I was thrilled when I finished reading it. In addition to pissing off viewers by interupting the Grammys, I can't imagine them accepting and sympathizing with over-the-top statements like "No question the most insidious virus in our midst is the illegal downloading of music on the Net". And how many people are going to be moved to tears by "That very special connection between the fan and the artist is an historically important partnership".
Then I love the next sentence - "In recent years, industry consolidation
But my favorite parts are where he actually promotes filesharing:
"file-sharing and ripping of music files is pervasive" and "millions of students and other computer users" - Everybody is doing it, don't be left out!
"from easily accessible Web sites" - It's so easy! Why aren't you doing it?!
"In just a couple of days they have downloaded nearly 6,000 songs. That's three kids, folks." Damn! You mean I can get 6,000 song for free in 2 days?! If a couple of kids can do it, so can I! "Honey! Start up AOL! I wanna get 6,000 songs in 2 days!"
Somehow I don't think that "our fans - that would be you - " are quite ready "to embrace this life and death issue". Whew, for a minute there I was worried that his speach might have been an effective piece of propaganda. It wasn't. They may believe their own crap, they may be able to buy politians, the consumers may have no clue, but they aren't about to win grass-roots support from the audience.
P.S.
I'd really like to know what kind of pipe they gave those three students backstage.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.