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Chained Melodies
NoData writes: "Salon is running an elegant article that covers the current state of the copy protection and circumvention debate. The article touches on the DMCA and the SSSCA, with input from Touretzky, Lessig, and others. It offers a dystopic vision of a future where geeks battle increasingly complex copy protection schemes until ultimately, any consumer control over media is outlawed outright. Refreshingly, the article is not a "Salon Premium" feature."
...and all it takes is a bit of activism. Write up a letter to your local representative, find ten friends, and have them all write a letter as well as finding one or two friends each. Then, they will pay more note to the issue and quite possibly change their opinion. They are supposed to represent their constituents and often will even if they don't believe in the cause.
I _would_ also recommend writing senators, but that might be a bit more ambitious since they usually represent much larger numbers of people and thus would be harder to coerce.
Oh, and recommend they join Rep. Boucher's informed technological reps bandwagon.
When are we going to trust the government. The big business interests will push through more and more copyright enforcment laws and technologies that will effect everyone. Instead of fighting it outright, from the diametrically opposed viewpoint of "no copyright protection, ever!" we should take a more congenial viewpoint and encourage copyright protection while also making sure that our interests are protected. We can lobby for making sure that media marked as "public domain" can easily be copied on hardware with copy protection, and deem it illegal for a next generation audio or video device to blindly prevent copying of works, noting that there is a fair amount of free music and video out there. As well, we can cooperate with the industry and government in order to create these systems. Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer-- befriend the music industry only for the reasons of making sure that they stay in line.
Adam
A new Prohibition. The destruction of the PC industry. Is that really what The American People (not just certain bought-and-paid-for senators) want? I suspect that when you ask, you'll get the answer.
Of course the networks won't report on this, because they are owned by Disney et al. But it seems to be making its way into the print media.
sulli
RTFJ.
For anyone who has seen the Snipes/Stalone movie 'Demoliton Man', you have my sincere apology.
But, more importantly, this dystopian future that Salon highlights is paralleled in the movie. There's only one restaurant, Taco Bell, no salt (cause its bad for you), etc.
I recommend everyone watch it but not tell anyone that you did out of shame. Kinda like Mothman Prophecies, except that movie really, really, really sucked.
Can't you see the superbowl ads now?
"Today I went to the movies, went to the grocery store, downloaded an mp3, and helped evil hackers steal money from the hands of starving musicians."
stipe42
Quite simple really, and one both the music and movie industries appear to be implementing..
Just make all the content so dull that noone would ever bother copying any of it.
Quite why they bother protecting the latest Britney album is beyond me. Who the hell would want to duplicate that?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I mean... you'll get the answer you're looking for, which is opposition to this abomination.
By the way, why are Lessig, Felten, and the EFF crew not on every op-ed in the country? Do they not take this seriously?
sulli
RTFJ.
so.. let me get this straight... this kid can get arrested and thrown into prison under the DMCA because he clicked a checkbox in a (not even debatably) legitimate cd ripping program, to make a legal copy of his own legally purchased cd for his own legal mp3 player, because he "circumvented" the copy-control mechanisms?
There should be an idiot clause in the DMCA
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
Hollings, who has received $264,534 in campaign contributions from the TV, music and movie industries since 1997, has attempted to argue that standardized copy protection is the key to encouraging the continuing rollout of broadband Net connectivity. According to this theory, customers won't sign up for DSL or cable Internet access if they can't get top-notch entertainment via their computers. But Hollywood won't make that content available unless it is confident it won't be pirated.
So movies might not be available via the internet with out copy protection. So what? There's a lot more to the Internet than movies. Online gaming, information, and just not having to wait for a dialup or pages to load up are some of the main reasons why people have switched.
Hollings is grasping onto a straw man, paid for by over a quarter million dollars of Hollywood lobbying money.
Hopefully the consumer will win here.
Who's going to be hurt by these annoying new copy protections?
The people who rip the songs just to upload them? No... They're typically on the cutting edge, and will have the means to bypass whatever form of copy protection is in place.
The people who download songs off the net? No... If 99% of the user base is unable to rip a song, but 1% can, ripped copies will become available, and passing from machine to machine they will multiply.
The person who only listens, or only copies for himself? Yup! He's going to be greatly inconvenienced by these restrictive technologies.
The RIAA doesn't care, though. They only care about being able to ramp up the prices on music CDs. The MPAA doesn't care either.
In fact just about the time I gave up on new music is the same time I learned how to play the guitar and make my own music. I may not have the production values that Brittney has but on the otherhand I don't need 600 digital tracks of the same verse sung over and over to smooth out the mistakes. Playing my own music makes me happier than desperately searching for out of print Dead Milkmen albums. Playing my own music won't make me rich and famous but it turns on my wife when I bang on the bongo's like a chimpanzee.
If the record companies don't want my money anymore then Fcuk'em. I'll take my guitar and go home. That's why record sales aren't growing anymore. They have the nads to grossly underestimate the taste of the rest of us in the quest for the quick teenager buck.
It's all part of my rock and roll fantasy.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
It's the only thing outside of mass street protests that will grab both the entertainment industries' and Congress' attention, and this issue doesn't have enough social relevance yet for people to organize and fund protests.
Go ahead if you want and write your representatives, I hope you enjoy the form letter they send back to you in 4-6 weeks acknowledging that lobbyists' money means more than your letter. If you're serious about making yourself heard, call your Reps offices and make an in-office appointment with all of the ducks lined up for your issue. That way when the Rep votes against you, you're more likely to take it personally and vote their butt out of office.
Of course, bitching about this on Slashdot is absolutely the *BEST* way to fight this issue - so convenient, with karma points at stake to boot! Yea...
For more information on this terrible proposal, check out:
http://216.110.42.179/docs/hollings.090701.html
And if you want to fight it, check out:
http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010921_eff_sssca_al
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I've heard this argument before. "Buy American" to support the outdated, dinosaur auto industry. "Union made" to support the corrupt, criminally run union management in the hopes of having some benefit trickle down to the actual labourers. I will not buy an $18 CD to support numerous middle men and corrupt (yes, I mean criminally corrupt) recording companies when the artist is lucky to see $0.50 per CD. And don't give me that "means of production" and "advertising" BS. I can produce audio tracks in my basement with the same fidelity with less than $10k worth of equipment now; I can burn CDs and distribute myself; I can HIRE my own advertising agency and yet still retain the rights to my own music without the interference of these media conglomerates. Politicians are being bribed into creating laws that serve to protect outdated business models and work against the common good (see: original intent of copyright). If the system is fundamentally flawed, it is not wrong to oppose it; it may be criminal, but so was drinking, premarital sex, and loading software into your computer at one point in history. Finally, remember that Disney was built on repacking open-source fairytales -- Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I know we're going to get a lot of posts, as usual, from Geeks saying:
If it's ones and zeros, I can copy it.
Now let me offer the following well-thought out response: "stfu, troll."
I've responded to most of the last few articles Slashdot ran on this issue, but the trolls just seem to keep coming. Here is my definitive answer. I will merely link to it in the future.
Big, Definitive Answer
There has been a running assumption on Slashdot that because our current hardware/software is a combination that is open to external, or user-provided changes, hardware/software combinations by their nature necessarily are, and only outlawing these user-introduced changes can prevent them. ie there is no technology, only the law, to stop us.
This is a false assumption.
It is false in much the same way that it is false to say "Any lock that works with a key can be opened without it by a skilled enough lockpick using skilled enough tools. Therefore, it is only by hiding behind laws that we can expect to lock anything."
Now, I'm not well-versed in the history of locksmithing, so I'll provide a software analogy: RSA.
Now, this is a somewhat unsuitable analogy, because there is no mathematics, precisely none, that assures us there is any "one-way" discrete algorithm. But, for all intents and purposes, those who read slashdot know that by sending email run through GnuPG to a 1024 bit public key whose fingerprint has been privately verified with the receiving party, we can be assured that the party receives it and that no one else can look at the email, even if there is no law in the world preventing our ISP, and all mailhops along the way, from reading our information!
This applies directly to the hardware/software "rights management" issue. A content corporation can be assured, based solely on technology, without a law in the world protecting it, that when it sells a license to person x to listen to music y, z number of times under conditions foobar, x cannot share y with anyone else, x cannot listen to y more than z number of times, and x cannot listen to y under any conditions other than foobar, no matter how hard it tries.
In the past, trolls have said "if I can hear it, I can record it", and so today I will introduce you to a hardware/software combination that can never be overcome, and I will explain why not.
Meet Tim.
He is from the future, but don't let that bother you. Rather, be bothered by the fact that he is an eight foot tall hunk of gleaming metal looming
over you, three tons of pure android-molded badness. Let me tell you about Tim.
Tim is a Rights Management Solution. He is very smart. He recognizes people, situations, better than even you or I can, because he has more electrons whizzing around in his brain, and a greater experience database, than all human neurons that have ever existed combined. In fact he is, to the closest approximation, human. He gets paid. He has feelings. All that good stuff that comes from being based on a very human neural net. Now let me tell you about Tim's Job.
His Job is to loom over you and extend to you two fingers. If you put your head closer, he'll stick these fingers into your ear. But first he'll make sure that there isn't anything fishy on you. he'll run you through a metal detector and x-ray you. If you pass, you can now have the pleasure of having Tim's fingers rammed into your ears, and you can listen to whatever y music you've paid for, unless you've passed a z number of listenings already. Tim is very good at making sure you meet condition foobar.
Now let me tell you why Tim can't be disassembled, reverse engineered, or otherwise made a fool of. It's not because of laws protecting him. It's because he lives inside a Faraday cage (yep, that is, in part, what the eight feet of badass metal consists of), and he has been designed from the ground up to operate completely symmetrically. You cannot know what processing goes on by measuring any voltage within his body, and you cannot change the processing by changing any voltage. But you couldn't even if you tried: the moment the second layer of Tim's skin is penetrated, you will hear a screaming hiss and popping noise, which will be an indication of the chemical reaction that has just eaten all of Tim's internals. It doesn't matter, he doesn't mind: He'll get imaged onto a new body tonight from backup, and they'll just say: "Hi, it's 12 hours later than when you stepped into the imaging tube "just now", and it's because you died today. Sorry about that. The body you have now is new. Try to be more careful tomorrow."
Anyway, that's the short story.
I'll leave the readers to try to come up with a way of bypassing Tim's Rights Management Directive, but he's smarter than almost any of us, so it won't be easy. Easier is, I think, just paying for the goddamn music you want to listen to, and gettnig to a rent a Tim of your own for it.
The solution is simple. Lots of musicians make their work openly available. Vote with your ears and dollars.
Many people use Linux because they don't like the expense or anti-piracy policies of other options. Why not the same with music?
One of the basic benefits to the Internet is that single voices can communicate to the world. Why, if I can read about Joe Schomoe's problem with Little City, Arkansas Traffic Court, can't we break free of this "you must pay tithe to big publishing companies for entertainment" mentality.
Screw them. I can download more "non-major record label" music than I will ever be able to listen to.
And for that matter, an MP3 player in my car is cheaper than XM radio, doesn't have commercials, and doesn't require a subscription.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Ever wonder why you can get in allot more trouble for downloading a CD than if you were to walk into a store and steal it?
Hacker Media
I can see it now. The war on terroism as the FBI searches out the last remnant of the "GPL Conspirators"...[sigh]
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
10000% markup on crappy music: $20
Two hour movie for the familty: $50
Senator to protect an obsolete distribution channel: priceless? No, $264,534
They'll pass a similar stupid law up there in their Parliment and then you're back where you started. It's come time to attack this on as many fronts as we possibly can.
Yes, we are at the turning point, but how things go down is up to all of us.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I hope this gets modded up to a 5. It really pegs things down. I have little desire for most of the record label offered bands these days. I have a desire for the older bands (when they tried to cultivate something of a following...) and indie stuff. Now, if only there was a way to do movies and the lot in an independant manner that wasn't quite so expensive...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
As mentioned in the article, the computer industry dwarfs the content industries, and Hollywood's argument that their product will be the driving force behind adoption of new technology simply doesn't hold water. There is a great article called Content is Not King that responds to this mythology.
Most of us live in a capitalist society. Given that, the response to people trying to sell us this user-hostile technology should be not to buy it, and to make sure the manufacturers know we won't buy it so that they use their considerable clout to kill the SSSCA before it does any damage.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
According to a NYTimes editorial a couple of weeks ago, Napster had 90 million unique users at its peak. I don't know exactly how many of those were American, though I hear that the bulk of internet users in the world are American. I don't know how many of them are, or will be by this November, over 18, but considering that Napster was so popular on college campuses, I think we can assume that the bulk of them are or soon will be over 18.
So maybe 45 million Americans of voting age used Napster. Maybe more. That's a larger number of people than the entire populations of African-Americans and Asian-Americans combined. (Check it out at www.census.gov).
My point here being that this is an enormous block of potential voters who are saying, by means of their behavior, that they resist to some degree the current protections offered to copyright holders. (And I mean by this not just IP protection but also access to store shelves or radio play--try to get your music played on commercial radio without major label backing.) No politician would ignore the voices of a group of this size if it were an ethnic group, so why are they so damn inclined to side with the media companies here?
I guess the answer is: we don't present a unified political front. But perhaps we should. Media companies already have too much power in this country.
The entertainment industry gets copying of content banned.
This pisses off consumers, who paid for the content, and drives them to download cracked versions to actually use, while the paid-for version is just kept for the license.
Consumers realize that the paid-for copy doesn't really do anything physically.
Consumers start just downloading the cracked version.
I don't think that this is what the content owners want, but it's what would happen if they got their way.
-jeff
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
It's broken. The better option is to turn off JavaScript. There's a script near the beginning that, when combined with my ad-blocking proxy, produces a blank page. (Adding Salon to IE's list of "restricted sites" will block their scripts.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
This article simply grazed the important point in all this (IMHO), which is that the industry is attempting to make it illegal to own something which *could* be used for legal purposes. The law currently says that substantial noninfringing use is good enough not to be held liable for infringement, so they are changing the law, but lets see how the philosophy of this new law would work in the future.
Handguns are illegal because they could be used to kill
butter knives are illegal because they could be used to kill or at the very least commit battery
cars are illegal because they could be used to kill
alcohol is illegal because it could be given to a minor, which is illegal
rope is illegal because it could be used to hang someone with
The philosophy of this law points out the idea behind the statement "live free or die!" We might as well kill our selves because we are not living our own lives, we would be living the lives the media companies would want us to live, which is the lives that the major advertisers wants us to live. We would all be dudes owning Dells, drinking coke, wearing gap jeans, etc. This law should not be fought on technical grounds, but on philosophical grounds.
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Sorry, but you're taking a lot for granted. First, you need broadband access to effectively use filesharing like Gnutella/Kazaa to get music, and broadband has only hit 15% of U.S. households. The other 85% are effectively out of the loop.
Second, broadband will soon be getting more expensive *and* centralized once Congress passes that bill that will allow the Bells to effectively kill off their competition. That means it will be easier for the entertainment industry to track users by their bandwidth usage and prosecute accordingly.
So, yes, filesharers who are committed to sharing and grabbing files will still be able to do it, but for the other 95% of the public, huh?
They can certainly be used to commit buttery!
You didn't really expect me to leave that did you? ;)
In about the second paragraph it started to refer to people as consumers. I hate this, I am not a consumer, I am a person and I resent any attempt to turn me into capitalist robot who consumes what he's told.
Joe Average out there upgrades his Windows anytime he upgrades his PC, and isn't likely to put in the effort to reload his 2-generations-out-of-date copy of Windows (that doesn't support some of the spiffy new hardware he just bought)...
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
It seems the only way to get "heard" nowadays is with money.
American public = 300,000,000
* 50% on net = 150,000,000
* 75% used mp3 = 112,500,000
Assume that once in their lives each of these people will save $15 dollars, buy listening to an mp3 and realizing they don't want the album.
These people have saved almost 1.7 billion dollars. If we used only 5% of those savings to "donate" to campains, that would be 84 million dollars worth of "speach" that would be heard.
So in conclusion, send this money to me, and I'll get right to work.
-... ---
"For example, instead of sending analog signals to your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker," he says. "Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module built right into the monitor, so you can't bypass the encryption by tapping into the monitor cables..."
Right. I guess he hasn't heard of a soldering iron. If the endmost device in the chain takes an analog input, like a CRT or speaker driver, then someplace there has to be an analog signal. Who cares if you can't capture an unencrypted bitstream?
But before we get that far, I'm with the other folks who have said that when hardware comes out that enforces DRM, don't buy it.
Assume the following:
1. Regardless of any attempts by anyone to prevent it, reproduction of data will occur. No matter how good your copy protection, if I can play it, I can copy it. I can even reproduce it with an arbitrary fidelity approaching perfection by sampling it many times.
2. Once copied, the data will proliferate in the wild. No law is going to make everyone agree on the ethics of the issue or behave with restraint. There will always be some people who want and will copy and share.
If you assume these two items, the only way it seems artists will be able to gaurantee a certain amount of compensation for their efforts (something almost everyone unanimously agrees is necessary for w/out it we would see a great deal less effort invested in creating good art) is the ransom model.
This will require most artists to "pay their dues" by producing some amount of good quality free music so that they become known as good artists. At some point, they will be able to propose a ransom for their next work.
The ransom can be paid in any combination/way you like, 100 people willing to pay $10, 100,000 people willing to pay $1 and 200,000 people willing to pay a dime. Anyone can up their contribution anytime they like to speed release, but once the ransom is reached, the item is released into the wild.
This also provides a direct means of observing the compensation and will allow a sense of fair play to enter the equation of compensation, whereas now compensation is sort of open ended and indeterminable. Sometimes inordinately large, and other times non-existant. Also, a reputation for honesty becomes important. If an artist stiffs the public with a POS, they'll remember.
Chances are that if you can think of a problem with this system, with a little more thought you can think of a fix for that problem.
I can't tell if you are flamebaiting or just ignorant of the big picture. The problem is not as simple as some geeks stealing music. There were millions of non-geeks who downloaded music off of Napster not just because it was free but also because it was easy.
What you need to do is look at what the consumer wants and compare it to the current business model:
1) The ability to download any song recorded in the modern era (including live recordings, "b" sides, and radio-only versions) easily and quickly from the Internet.
2) To be able to take that song and play it in any type of device they desire (CD, Computer, MP3 Player, etc.)
3) To able to include that song on compilation CD's, mix tapes, etc.
4) To be able to ourchase/download only one song from an album without being penalized.
Now how does that stack up with the current model. First, even with online stores such as CDNow and Amazon, it is often difficult to find some titles. When you do you are usually forced to buy an entire CD even if you only want the one song. CD singles are usually only available for recent titles and may cost as much as half the price of the entire CD. The record industry is addressing this by allowing you to buy the music online but in some cases the music is in a different format that is incompatible with exsiting MP3 players. In other cases you are only allowed a certain amount of "burns" which means that you can't include one song you really like on all your mix cds. Add to that the fact that if you buy the CD you can't rip it yourself because of CD protection and must buy separately the digital copy.
The moral of the story is that the record industry dropped the ball. They underestimated the popularity of online distribution and failed to provided a working business model. Napster filled that gap by providing a system that was easy enough to use that even non-geeks used it. The industry is trying to catch up but instead of working together to build a system that would be fair to users and artists alike they are introducing multiple systems that don't meet the users' needs and, supposedly, rips off the artists.
I wonder if one could convincingly argue that current abuses of the DMCA amount to potentially illegal anti-competetive practices?
I was thinking about the concept of "fansubs" (typically Japanese Anime' that is not being made available in English, which is being translated and made available by volunteer amateurs)...
Realistically, the "amateur subtitles" ought, I think, to constitute "fair use" of the original copyright-protected work, so setting the potential "unauthorized derivative work" part of it aside, we come to the fact that someone who wants a "fansub" should really be legally buying an original from overseas, and adding the subtitles themselves. With DVD content, this shouldn't be difficult - just read the video stream from the disk and use e.g. "Transcode" to render the amateur English subtitles into the picture, and burn the result to either SVCD or DVD-R(?).
Here's the important part - in the US, as I understand things currently, you CAN'T do this. For one thing, the MPAA's special "Region Coding" on DVD's means that conceivably, if I tried to import a "Regionless" DVD player to watch the original on, I'd be breaking the law (Region coding DOES constitute an "access-control device", evidently). In addition, although the "transcoding" of the legally-paid-for video mentioned above is blatantly obvious fair use, even if you can smuggle in a DVD drive that can read that disk's region, even POSESSING software that can decode the video for re-coding is illegal under the DMCA...
The end result, as I see it, is harmful in two main ways - firstly, it of necessity deprives overseas filmmakers of US business for digital media, and at the same time it greatly limits US citizen's access to works from other countries...
Two sides of the same problem - non-US filmmakers lose money and Hollywood is "protected" from the small amount of competition they might otherwise get from them, and US Citizens lose access to international "perspectives" on issues (i.e. the way movies from other cultures portray various things) because they can no longer find a reasonable, legal way of observing them. Somehow, this doesn't seem like a good way to maintain a mentally healthy, informed populace...
(Conspiracy theorists may not reply with "they actively don't WANT a healthy, informed populace"...what's scares me is that I'm starting to agree...)
Well, there's MY rant for the day...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
You won't be able to record your own music on any equipment after the digital copyright management chip is put in place. Anything without the Copy OK switch on it won't record. Selling Copy OK switches will be against the law like selling cable TV descramblers or that cable that lets you program your own Playstation games. You won't be allowed, on a technological level, to make your own music to compete with the big record companies. That's where these laws are heading.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Apparently, the atricle originally said that Felton was the subject of a DMCA-inspired lawsuit. It was corrected to say that he was merely threatened with legal action, and not really "sued".
Does anyone else find it odd that the SDMI people (at least, I assume that's who it was) was able to get this correction put on Salon so quickly?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
From the article:
...
Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero, and then was able to encode the music without a glitch.
.... and later
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control.
Do Cianessi violated the DCMA by getting around the CD copy protection. And by mentioning how Cianessi got around the CD copy protection, Salon has violated the DCMA. And by me mentioning that Salon mentioned how he got by the CD copy protection, I've now violated the DCMA. And if you tell your friends..... I think you get the point.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So how about if a publisher impedes Fair Use in any way, they are prevented (estopped) from enforcing copyright against those that circumvent these measures?
The RIAA doesn't care, though. They only care about being able to ramp up the prices on music CDs.
That raises an interesting question. Presumably, the "cost" of all this "rampant piracy" has been built into the cost of legitimately purchased CDs. When the RIAA gets their way and laws are passed to protect their interests and business model, what are the odds that CD prices will go down?
Slim or none?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
the general opinion on here that it should be allowed shows that anyone will be a criminal if they feel they can get away with it.
Actually, we learned that little pearl of wisdom from the RIAA themselves!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Some kind of DRM has to happen -- say, that's 75% effective or so -- or else the powers that be are going to keep pushing (using rampant piracy as an excuse) until the distopian vision is accomplished.
"Good" (by which I mean, barely palatable) DRM might be:
* Only required on devices/software whose sole purpose is media display/playback. This leaves an OS, for example, or a hard drive out, but a playback application or portable MP3 player in. It won't catch all piracy -- there might still be non-DRM players out there -- but lots of people would probably still just use iTunes and Windows Media Player.
* Key distribution for DRM system(s) is ABSOLUTELY FREE. IE, we don't introduce any further artificial barriers to content distribution, and people can distribute their content freely, for free if they like.
Of course there's still holes, and of course there'd still be piracy, but I think by and large content producers -- from RIAA to your Indie Label -- could collect a fee a little more often and most importantly would have much less to complain about
I think the key problem here isn't piracy -- it's that RIAA and other content producers want absolute control over content and distribution. Piracy is an excellent ostensible excuse for draconian DRM measures like the SSSCA. Give the world reasonable DRM, and their case loses a lot of punch.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
You mean the way the guy who sweeps the floor of the car dealership gets a cut of the commissions due to the sales force? Or the way the maid at Stephen King's place gets a percentage of the gross of his latest book?
The guys running the mixing board and the guy sweeping the studio are getting paid by the record company. If they don't like what they make, maybe they should look somewhere else. It's not my job to keep them employed, you know.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
Ever see what happened to Alex in Clockwork Orange. Tim's gonna love it when an army of geeks clamp him into the Chair Of Torture. He'll kiss our butts to get all the wires out of his head and for that matter.....I'm at work here....the special one connected to his.....
They will be selling circumvention mechanisms. I love the bit about "sealed in the box" blah blah blah. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor locked doors a barrier". I split open the box that contains the speaker or TV, and look what I find! The signal going in to the CRT/LCD/speaker is an analog signal! I simply whip up an analog to digital converter (can be done in software or hardware, all I need is a high speed voltmeter [a.k.a. an oscilloscope or lab interface like Vernier makes]), and voila! I have digital content back! I didn't circumvent anything, I just made an analog signal that was in the clear in to a digital one. If nothing else, I can set a microphone near the speaker and a camcorder in front of the screen. The content industry literally can not win! To successfully pull off what they want to do, they would need to make the U.S. in to a version of 1984, and that isn't going to happen. Just look at how well prohibition worked. All they'll end up doing is strengthening organized crime, which will ultimately be a bad thing.
BlackGriffen
They are using money to convince congressmen that we the people are the enemy. It seems to be working. Hopefully this won't cause a revolution due to unhappiness as seen in my new .sig.
Congress is failing the people by not encouraging the maximum transations in commerce. Such transactions in any non-essential market create an rock solid economic base in that market. Instead they are sacrifcing a large market to maintain a small one through brute force. This could be bad, very bad.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
-- Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin'
(1963, and still under copyright by Special Rider Music, renewed 1991)
i am a soviet space shuttle
So the RIAA comes up with this foolproof DRM scheme and plugs it into every single computer and they successfully discourage the distribution of circumvention hardware, and their intellectual property (they stole it, fair and square) is safe, right?
Well, for a little while, perhaps.
See, there's a little property general purpose computing devices have, one a lot of you Mac users are already familiar with. Any state engine can emulate any other state engine, given enough resources and time. So your Macintosh can emulate a PC, albeit a bit more slowly than you might prefer.
So what does this mean?
It means that you can code your display and decryption algorithms in pseudocode, rather than have it run natively on the processor. Having a DRM system that's able to tell what the CPU is working on directly is difficult enough; a DRM system able to parse metalevels and see what an emulator is doing would require so much in the way of resources that it'd cripple the machine.
And remember, computers speed up by an order of magnitude every seven years, so you'd be able to emulate a 600 MHz P-III on your desktop PC in five. So much for the SSSCA.
I'm serious about this. Get everyone you know and convince them to not see Star Wars Episode II. Explain to them why you're doing this...then DON'T SEE THE MOVIE! Since geeks are such a huge percentage of the SW fanbase, this might work. If it flops, we can kindly tell them that we won't buy their crap if they want to take away our computers.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Yes, when I was searching for obscure things on Napster I never ran across any Wyndham Hills recordings. Perhaps contemporary adult easy listening is the way to foil piracy.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
the easier it is to crack it, the less likely people will go back to the store and demand a refund. If you make it troublesome but easily bypassed, people won't complain, just like our man in the salon article. After awhile, crappy copy protection will become the norm, we'll all be used to bypassing their weak protection schemes and never complaining, and all discs/media will have it.Then the industry will bring out the big guns and really copy protect their wares.
At which point you'll have a helluva time demanding your refund and starting a backlash against a technology that is a decade old.
The poor pitiful recording industry Yeah, I really feel sorry for all the musicians out there that have got big recording contracts and going platinum.
Ever watch MTV cribs?
Sit down some time and have a look.
I just watched one a week ago, where one band member was showing his winter mansion in Utah.
Not the band's winter home, just one band member's. Shortly after that came the sad story of lil-romeo. A 10 year old kid with a huge mansion and a decked out Benz he can't even drive yet, oh the humanity!
These are the poor recording artists who are losing all of their money because a bunch of geeks with PCs are fighting against the industry that charges $18 for a CD that costs them a penny? What happened to the promises that the price of CDs would come down after the original plant manufacturing costs were absorbed?
Hmm.. let's see, I'm still paying $18 how's about you?
Yeah sure, maybe the rock stars deserve to have mansions, boink lots of blond bimbos and eventuall OD on drugs or kill themselves. If not, we might not have cool phrases like "Party like a rock star"
How much more pitiful is it that the recording companies take a big chunk out of the artist's paycheck? They've obviously worked so hard and paid their dues working for peanuts in the clubs and eating Mac & Cheese (TM) for years, they deserve to have a few mansions in La Hoya, right?
How about not.
Some times the government forgets where it got it's roots.
Taxation without representation? Same concept.
The recording industry jacks up the price of CDs to sell to you, not because they have to in order to pay the janitor, but because they want to have 3 jaguars instead of just 2. Then along comes the Boston MP3 Party, and everybody tosses their CDs in the Potomac to show King RIAAchard they're a little torked off.
Just like in that case, had England actually been a little nicer about the whole thing we might be drinking tea with crumpets every day instead of coffee and donuts.
Wake up Lars, it was just a bad dream, nobody is trying to take away your gold plated Ferrari (--Camp Chaos) they're just sick of paying to get your ass hairs waxed out.
If the recording industry is really serious about combating the digital music trading problem, they should try actually lowering prices for the media they sell. If a CD costed 3 bucks, would anyone even have bothered to rip it?
Sheesh, huge companies like Ford GM & Chrysler all ran huge deals when we were in the recession, did the price of CDs drop a penny?
Didn't think so.
Poor babies.
Maybe we should send our $$ to them instead of the Red Cross.
Either that or just lock up all the h@x0r$ trading MP3s, so we can pay for their room & board in prison.
That's a much better solution.
Well, Opera 6.01 on Win2k doesn't.
Dyolf Knip
As these penalties increase, due to the concept of ripping producing millions of bootleg CDs over the internet for which you are of course held responsible, eventually the penalty for ripping your own CD will be worse than the penalty for stealing one from a store. So if you want a copy of your CD, steal a second one from the store :)
This law is not a danger to us. It will NEVER pass and even if it does, it's unconstitutional.
Here's why... The bill efectively eliminates the 'public domain'. Under this bill, all player would be required to not only have copy protection, but the media they are playing must BE protected. So unencrypted content is unplayable.
Now, congress could ONLY get around this by mandating a special 'public' encryption method, but that opens a door for hackers to strip a private CP method off and replace it with the public one and viola!... Publiclly playable (and tradeable) MP3's again.
If they don't do the public CP thing, then the 'public domain' dies. And the courts won't allow that, since the constitution is quite clear that un-copyrighted works must pass to the public domain. (In fact, the constitution specifically uses the words 'public domain')
We should be wondering why they would put forth a bill that most likely won't pass, and will CERTAINLY be struck down by the courts. I believe it is just a gimmic to pressure the computer industry into accepting/creating/using Copy Protection. But everyone, be creative here... think of alternatve reasons why they would put this forward. What ELSE do they have to gain by this? Because the obvious answer is NOT the correct one.
If no CDs are sold, then the record publishing companies will fail. The sound studios will then have to charge the artists directly, so they will get a cut of the $5 that was sent directly to the artist. This presupposes that home audio equipment will never be good enough to produce the music. If that assumption is wrong, then the studios will not be necessary, and they will join the buggy whip producers and blacksmiths in niche-markethood. And the operator of the home audio equipment will be part of the band, recieving a percentage of that $5.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
From my weblog
Jack, in your sneering Washington Post piece about copy protection, you refer to professors for whom '"innovation" is legalizing the breaking of protection codes'. Michael, in your testimony to congress you badgered an Intel exec until he told you that file copying can't be prevented, then told him he must prevent it anyway.
As you are evidently impervious to logical discussion, let me tell you a story.
This is the story of a rebel, a war hero, a persecuted homosexual, and a deep thinker. His life reads like the plot of a far-fetched movie, but if anyone fits your bogeyman image of professors who break code, it is Alan Turing.
In 1936 Turing published a paper on theoretical mathematics, in which he described the Universal Turing machine. It was a simple mechanism that could read symbols from a tape, and write back different symbols or change the tape's direction. He showed that with this general purpose machine, you could simulate any special purpose computing machine. He had invented the idea of the programmable computer.
Between 1938 and 1945, Turing worked in great secrecy on computing machines that broke codes. These were the first real computers ever made, and the codes they broke were those used by the German Wehrmacht. Without his work, it is very likely that Britain would have lost the War in Europe before Pearl Harbour.
After the war, in 1950 Turing published other famous papers that laid the foundation for modern computing, and hence all the digital gadgetry that you would like to outlaw for us (though presumably you'd keep the computers you use to edit and create effects for your movies). Turing died in 1954 by biting into an apple he had previously poisoned.
What does this story have to do with you?
Turing's Universal Machine means that you cannot have a software or hardware protection scheme that is secure. Whatever scheme you come up with can be simulated by another computer. The computer industry are not opposing your bill because they want to encourage copying, or because they are bloody-minded, they are not opposing you because of your self serving rhetoric about rewarding artists (remember Peggy Lee, Michael?), they are opposing you because what you want is provably impossible. You can only succeed by making all Turing machines illegal.
If Alan Turing had made an animated film involving a poisoned apple in 1936, it would still have copyright protection. He chose a different path, and gave the world the idea of the digital computer. I know whom I repect more.
Stephen King's experiment with "The Plant" did not stick to a straight-up ransom model. Rather what King did was to make an installment of "The Plant" available for download and allow downloaders to pay $1 for it for. If too many downloaders didn't pay, he wouldn't release the next installment.
If he had stuck to the ransom model, the payment would have occured before the download was available, and the question of freeloading downloaders would be irrelevant.
to all this corruption may lay in "campaign finance reform", a well written finance reform bill could really take a lot of power away from the corporate lobbyists (though a "well written" one would surely be hard to pass).
It's also non trivial to write a law which excludes professional lobbyists, whilst still allowing petitioning of government.
Until the corporations stop having the right to buy politicians, stick em in their back pocket, and tell em how to vote i am afraid it will be hard to fight them...but we do have to try!
US corporations have done a lot nastier things than pass dodgy laws. They have started more than a few wars. Something the vast majority of the real people in the US would support. Especially against democratic governments, which are ironically, those most likely to hinder US corporates' activities. e.g. if they want labour cheaper than in the US they are hardly likely to find it in a country with similar rules on health & safety or statutory minimum wage. Corrupt as it may be the US still has to look after the interests of its citizens to a standard where they won't actually revolt.