Slashdot Mirror
Tech Industry Versus Content Industry
gambit3 writes "Business 2.0's Cover Story this month asks whether Andy Grove is a Pirate. Interesting read on the mainstream media about the battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Read about in Business 2.0"
Has anyone thought about asking the artists, like the anti-fair-use poster-diva Celine Dion, themselves what they think about the DCMA and its abuse by media corporations?
In my youth artists tended to campaign for good causes so where has the idealism vanished? In this case the artists are in the front line for defending fair civic liberties. Are they with us, or will they rather stay quiet hoping for a fatter paycheck?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
To wit: "pirates" use some technological device to "steal" copyrighted material, which leads to an intrusive technological "solution" to the problem (i.e., CD's that break your computer and damage your speakers), which leads to some ingenious workaround, which in turn leads to an even more cumbersome technological countermeasure...
What the Content folks need to realize is that eventually, this fedback mechanism will hit a point of diminishing returns, and the anti-"piracy" measures will make the media more trouble than it's worth to purchase and use, and consumers will simply stop buying, and seek out some other form of entertainment, like going outside and playing softball...
You know, maybe the Tech v. Content struggle isn't so bad after all... :D Seriously, though, it would probably behoove the Content industry to try rethinking the idea of intellectual property as it is presently understood, before their frantic efforts to protect their "property" end up wiping out their source of profit.
Effective today, I'm not buying from them any more.
It would be awfully tempting for a low-paid movie theatre projectionist to accept a few bucks from some quick-thinking pirate, and sneak a high-quality digital video camera into the projection booth for some quick-n-dirty pirated videos of first-run movies!
How long before DMCA-types start mandating surveillance of projection booths in all theaters, and a national licensing/registration system for projectionsts? Laugh now if you will, but check back in 6 months...
Disney's Michael Eisner and others say Hollywood will defend its intellectual property at all costs
It's obvious that he will do whatever it takes: he is already going as far as bribing our politicians, giving free speech rights only to the wealthiest, and destroying our democracy.
And what for? Disney rarely if ever produces anything other than useless fluff. The company is optimizing the same thing the drug industry is optimizing: a quick, addictive product that gets our children hooked early and lacks intellectual content or social merit. Disney shouldn't be censored, but we certainly don't need to make any special effort to protect their trashy content beyond the minimum.
The article mentions two things about copyright a lot of people seem unaware of. Firstly that the actual INTENT of copyright is to get more content into the public domain. It exists only as an incentive for creative works. Secondly it notes that copyright expirations have been extended retroactively faster than things can expire!
In my opinion, we should go back to 2-5 year copyrights depending on the material.
~Blake
I almost cried tears of joy when I read the transcript of W. Brian Arthur (economist), Andy Grove (Intel chairman), and Lawrence Lessig's (law professor) discussion about these issues. A lot of the same points are made that you see daily here on /., and a lot of comparisons to the nineteenth century railroad industry and various information revolutions of the past 200 years.
A very interesting read that helps put current events in an historical context...
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
... then this could hurt the US tech industry in more ways than one. Groves is right when he says in the article "Suppose I use my personal computer now to create a playlist and burn music onto a CD. Suppose in three years, the only PCs on the market won't allow me to do that? What is my incentive to buy a new computer?" And what's the incentive then for companies to invest in R+D for new consumer devices, if they can't be used because of zealous copyright laws?
Someone should point out an example to Sen. Hollings: the eurobond market. In the 60s and 70s some too-stringent US regulations meant that it was difficult for foreigners to use the US capital markets to sell bonds in US dollars. So the market grew up in Europe instead, where the trade remains enormous today. Overbearing copyright legislation could do the same thing: the innovation in creative industries could easily move abroad to a more relaxed regulatory environment.
(BTW, this was a very good article - although the number of cookies the site tried to place on my machine was ridiculous - about 20, just for reading one article, sheesh. How about some legislation against that?)
Let the tech producers that enable such products as Toy Story, or whatever else CGI driven film, or even, say, a CD that exploits a sonic effect, or a book that utilises a typesetting tool charge these media bozos a per-frame, or per-second, or per-page royalty.. enforceable via the very hardware protections that they are clamoring for.
Even better.. how about a CGI actor's union that charges a per-actor fee for all of the 'extras' in the background of scenes in films like The Mummy, or Star wars?
If we choose to strike back along these lines, the Eisners of the world will be begging for mercy by the time we're done with them. Just go crazy with licensing terms, and let 'em bend over.
Fire with fire, I say.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
"Piracy is the killer app."
This is interesting; the other two killer apps, pr0n and games, were NOT so terrified about piracy - or they didn't have so much power.
Come to think of, we're talking about the *entertainment* industry here. Stop reading for a second and think "entertainment"... ok, now how does this fit with all the big words/phrases like "intellectual property", "innovation", "loses of billions of dollars"...? If Disney goes bankrupt tomorrow, how will the life of the average American change? Will millions of people starve, or freeze to death? Extend to African, Asian etc.
I think all this has gone way out of proportions.
if you use a good enough junk-filter, slashdot.org will display a single, *blank*, page
Was anyone else affected by the earthquake that seems to have hit the northeast USA about ten minutes ago?
My favorite part:
And it won't have to be pirate-proof. Copyright, after all, has always been a leaky vessel. Publishers have managed to tolerate the sharing, swapping, reselling, and lending of books. The software industry figures it loses $12 billion a year to piracy, but it hasn't called for anything like the sweeping controls Hollywood seeks. The recording industry, on the other hand, tried to develop an elaborate technological security regime; it proved unenforceable. "We lost two years," says Eric Alben, chief lobbyist for RealNetworks, which supplies streaming software to the recording industry. "And in the interim, pirated music proliferated." When the major record labels finally launched their own online services, MusicNet and Pressplay, they imposed so many restrictions that few customers have signed up.
I agree with the media industry in some areas: Yes, I believe in purchasing the CDs that I listen to (although I promptly rip them and then never use the CDs again). Yes, even the middle-man between the artist and the consumer deserves to make a buck or two. But just because some people are stealing doesn't mean they have the right to invade everyone's life. Every other industry seems to be able to come up with adequate (not perfect, but good enough) methods of reducing the impact of theft. But the recording industry goes crying to Congress when they start seeing a bit of piracy.
There are changes coming, and I really hope the recording industry figures out a good way to take advantage of it without screwing up everyone else.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
*bows* +5 Informative, thank yoo, dankyooverymurch!
The US entertainment industry treats the average criminal as a consumer.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
On several occasions I've witnessed people blatantly downloading songs into local storage. They claimed the copy was of poor quality, but they clearly were humming the melody and remebered the words. Sometimes other people would hear and start humming too, thus proliferating the illegal copies to other pirates.
This must be stamped out. The recording industry is working with goverment to mandate mind control devices to eliminate people enjoying music without fair and equitable payments to the rightful copyright holders. Maybe then we can stop the tradgedy of the children of record company executives going hungry.
We must always be vigilant and stop commiting these henious crimes against the companies who created music and merriment.
That's some good shit you got there. Let me be the first to welcome your new account to the troll/crapflooder community with a toast to the posting artz.
A TIP Of ThE HEINEY TO the POSTING ARTZ! TO THE POSTING ARTZ, THEN!
So sez Donny Most, TV's beloved Ralph Malph Fizzucken Alpha of Happy Days fame. Happy Dayz Krew represent, yo. Yeah ou like that huh liven large an SHIT.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30839&cid=3
_________________
EBAY SAFETY TIPZ!
...who's mensa card is it?
One of the earlier posts mentioned that Time needs to cover a story like this - and then it dawned on me how very true that is. The mainstream media have covered very little of the consumers' side of issues such as Fair Use, DCMA, or any other "us vs. them" issues, especially those involving their advertisers ... We will never see our side of the story covered by Time or on CNN because their paychecks are by the media/recording industry/producing industry. Unless we (the users/consumers) start making all kinds of noise about our rights and how we want to use music and digital media, nobody will hear a damn word except for the blather from politicians like Hollings or whats-her-name from the RIAA... mainstream media only reports what is important to their parent companies...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
This part of the article I found rather interesting, as far as the possible potential of using the new wording in the 95 year copyright act. This could really cost Disney a lot of money if we could find the right people (descendants of the original authors) to sue them.
What am I talking about? Notice the words I bolded in the bottom section - "and applied retroactively". If this 95 year extension is applied retroactively, then aren't quite a few Disney movies now based on works that had fallen into the public domain, but now possibly (due to the retroactive wording) would be considered to now actually be under retroactive copyright at the time they were 'pirated' by Disney? Thus making Disney's claims to things like The Jungle Book, Pinocchio and others, completely void, as they were stolen from people who are now protected by this retroactive copyright? How far back does this retroactive thing go?
"Since 1960 the term of copyright -- originally 28 years -- has been extended 11 times, most recently from 75 to 95 years, and applied retroactively. It is ironic -- and deeply pertinent -- that when motion pictures themselves were fairly new, Hollywood dipped liberally into the public treasury it has since done so much to reduce. Many of Disney's classic children's movies were based on stories, like Pinocchio , on which any copyright claims had lapsed. Had the current law been in effect in 1939, David O. Selznick would have required permission from Emily Bronte's heirs to make his film of Wuthering Heights, a book written in 1847."
While reading this article, I stopped at one point and thought:
If I go and buy a washing machine- pay all of the cost up front and it is 100% mine, once I've left the store (assuming the vendor isn't going to install it for me) they don't care what I do with it. I could never use it to wash clothes, just as a big drinking fountain, and nobody (except maybe those who saw me do so) would care.
If I walk into a car dealership and buy a brand new Porche (or whatever)- again pay all of the cost upfront- the dealer doesn't care what I do with it. If I drive it home and disassemble it for parts, there's no issue someone else will take up with me (except the police when I try to drive said car on the roads after its' no longer street legal, ofcourse).
So what does Hollywood really want? They can do the "we care" controls: as the article stated, streamed content alone could handle that. As of today, the technology exists to prevent consumers from working their will on Big Media's content even after it has arrived in the home. So why did the have the CBDPTA introduced? What has them so scared of even their own shadow they want DRM in every device, including handhelds too small for media and camcorders? What is the real point of the restrictive legislation?
The only answer I can think of is very, very frightening. They realize that their billion-dolar studio lots could very easily be turned into housing subdivisions right now, because computer technology has advanced so far that anyone with a decent new machine and some rather easily obtained software & hardware can make movies to the same quality as they do, but at a far lesser cost. And no doubt, this keeps Eisner (& co) awake at night: I'm sure he knows the difference between Disney's Peter Pan and his Peter Pan 2 leave poor Walt doing 1 million RPMs in his cryogenic chamber.
What the big Hollywood studios fear the most from technology isn't piracy (or at least, that isn't their main concern right now); I am rather certain they wake up each morning, wondering what they're going to do to keep their trust alive when everyone with a camera and a PC can be a movie studio. I think they believe they've gone this far by buying up all of the big talent in both producers and actors, and I don't see why they're so worried that some amatuers might up stage them (after all, Blair Witch didn't do all that well, did it? Only grossed a few millions, not the hundred millions of the blockbusters.)
Do you like Japanese imports?
Now I'm hard pressed to find anything worth my time to watch or hear. All the big Networks seem to rush to make copies of the crap that the one of their competitors made. The recoding industry keeps pushing crap out onto the market. The Movie industry keeps pushing out crap.
For the past five or six years I've just about completely stopped watching TV or buying CD's. I rarely even go to see a movie in theaters now.
As far as I'm concerned the only thing that will hurt me is the crippling of technology that will come from the Disney bill.
I can live with out the media companies. Can they live with out the consumer?
They sold me a hammer, I hit someone on the head. Hammers are bad. Ban hammers regardless of the effects to builders.
Not to mention gun mfrs...
AOL bought Time Warner, and it shows in the corporate strategy. Business 2.0 is owned by Warner Bros., part of AOL Time Warner. This article could appear in Time, ALSO owned by AOL Time Warner.
Realize that AOL is a content and bandwidth player. They sell things online. They acquired Time Warner since their problem FOR YEARS had been a lack of content. Even Compuserve and Prodigy had internal content. Time Warner provides a wealth of content that AOL can sell through to their members.
AOL wants to drive people onto their network and have them buy Time Warner content. MPAA/RIAA garbage that causes people to lose interest in doing so is not in their interest.
Remember, AOL Time Warner has a great Internet distribution mechanism in place, AOL.
AOL's unique position as a tech/content company puts them in the position of OFTEN being on our side. Nevermind that their network isn't for users like us, they are putting money into Linux servers (with likely Redhat support contracts), Mozilla (and AOL's use of Mozilla is going to force everyone into standards compliance), etc.
We have a strange friend here...
Alex
Look, the content industry is doing some disasterous things to copyright, granted, but it really isn't something that should be front and center right now.
In case you forget, we're fighting a war in Afghanistan because we believe that the coordinators of some Kamikazi attacks on us happened there.
The White House is terrified that Iraq is close to weapons of mass destruction, and the "enlightened" Europeans are throwing a tempertantrum that Israel is defending itself. Europe is joining the fray by attacking Jews in their own country.
The Saudi regime is scared of an Islamist rebellion (which would cut off our oil access), and other problems that are forcing the Bush administration to back off Iraq, possible too long.
And you want them to DROP coverage of THIS to discuss attempts to make duplication of digital audio/video harder?
Ya know, I bet you lots of bullshit like this would have gone ignored during the last World War as well. Sometimes you need to get our of your Slashdot bubble.
Alex
Looking for a political alternative ? Maybe we, the "knowledgeable few" should start acting responsibly, and above all in a united manner against the corporate enemies of progress. By progress I'm talking about the free exchange of cultural "goods" worldwide so that even the poorest can - enjoy/learn from - all these massive resources that come from those of us who have access to permanent links to the Net. It doesn't mean that new content will disappear, it means that those who can afford it, share it! The middleman has to go and that is why he is fighting tooth and nail to keep his privileges through legislation that he is trying to get passed thanks to money-based lobbying. I am no commie retard but it is about time that we, the tech heads, took over some of the power whose abuses we are always complaining about! Of course they wield big bucks and, as they say, money talks. The only way around this is to encourage (inform!) artists to refuse any arrangement with the middleman, and make sure they are appropriately rewarded. Rewards nearly always come in the form of royalties on sales. What are we waiting for to create an independant paypal-like micro-payment system based on what people actually "consume" ? You can bet the major pigs are busy trying to make sure they set it up first and then lock us into it. Nothing can change if you don't start by BOYCOTTING these companies. For me, this doesn't mean punishing yourself and your friends by not going to see the latest movie in a theatre, but getting more out of what is already spreading through alternative networks (and which is what you really want, not what some marketing asshole has decided to let us see). Not starving the creators of content, but pushing them to realise their own responsibility in the current situation. Digital Rights Management ! HAH ! How many times do I have to pay for something before I have the right to download a copy of it in a different format because the medium has changed ?
The movie execs aren't scared 'cause they think that users can make movies as good as them. That is babble to them. Remember, these are the people that think "Tom Cruise's Face in any movie"=="money in the bank" To them the height of their art is when Independence Day made over 300 mil in US box office, and over 150 mil in rentals. Not the fact that Clerks was a good movie (though it was). To them Clerks wasn't even a almost-movie.
Sorry for the Kevin Smith movie reference, for those who don't know what Clerks is(it was his first movie made on a 20k budget, and quite a good one at that).
Hollywood, unfortunatly for us(the consumers), got a rude awakening at napster. They saw a brief glance at the future for the brief moment of time napster was around. Consumers actually empowered to do whatever they wanted to with property they bought. The napster for the movie industry will now, unfortunatly, never happen. We won't be able to point our fingers at how a low budget picture got a huge box office gross 3 weeks in because people previewed on the "movie version" of napster.
Before most movie execs prolly thought of computers as word processors that could play solitare. Now they know what they are really capable of, and we should be afraid. Even if this bill doesn't get passed, Hollywood will likey follow it up with something very much like it, only perhaps they might give M$ more money next time, to get them on their side. A lobbying force such as M$ and Hollywood together should be feared, as tech industry people will be much more hesitiant to speak up to them. And remember M$ also likes to employ good lawyers to do nothing, just so M$ won't have to fight them in court. I can think of very little that they wouldn't do, if they were to cut the right deal with Hollywood.
Everyday Hollywood wakes up and asks itself if the Napster for Movies has started, and everyday it doesn't happen, and they have more time to plan how to take our rights away.
Guess what? Business 2.0, where the article appears, is owned by AOL/TW.
The Business 2.0 article is the best I have seen about this subject.
Business people are the greatest friends of business. However, they are also often the greatest enemies of business.
:)
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
the article actually mentions that point but presumably Disney would refuse to comment, even though most of their success seems to of been as a result of other peoples work and "IP".
Many of Disney's classic children's movies were based on stories, like Pinocchio, on which any copyright claims had lapsed. Had the current law been in effect in 1939, David O. Selznick would have required permission from Emily Bronte's heirs to make his film of Wuthering Heights, a book written in 1847.
funny how times change
A counterpoint, no more to the very 'over-simplified' statements above:
Life is so much easier when everything is either Black or White, but I prefer a world of many colors - even if it is a bit harder to focus.
sigh
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
cLive ;-)
serves me right for rushing...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Very well said, both of you. To the rest of the audience, please go read this book:
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Gore Vidal
(ISBN 156025405X for those of you boycotting Amazon)
What may be interesting to the /. crowd is the stance of John's first record label,
Aware records. I bought a CD from them a
while ago and when I got it I had a little trouble ripping it to MP3 for my Rio portable player (turned out the problem was with my CD reader, not the disc). Anyway, I called
Aware to ask if the disc was copy-protected, and to tell them that if I ever found out that they were copy-protecting their releases I would return everything
I had ever bought from them and never do business with them again. They said that they had never issued any copy-protected discs and never planned to, since their whole scene is to publicize little-known or unknown artists... and they understood that doing that sort of thing would be totally counter-productive. I've bought
a whole bunch more stuff from them since and as far as I can tell they do indeed "get it" when it comes to questions like this.
The only caveat is that they seem to be affiliated with (maybe even owned by) a large label (Columbia), so their parent company may not be nearly as hip on this point.
I love the way the article doesn't quite come right out and say that these laws won't do a damn thing...
"""
... A Beautiful Mind, Black Hawk Down, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring were just a few of the current commercial films available for free download.
Where do the pirates get recent mainstream releases? Some may have been ripped from DVDs... Others are made from master prints... [or] aiming a digital camcorder at a cinema screen
"""
Except that none of those films are out on DVD. So they all had to be ripped from a source external to the computer. (Like a camcorder.)
Of course, the ironic thing about Eisner being annoyed with digital copying is Neal Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" which states quite simply that if Disney understood exactly what an OS was used for, they'd instantly produce one that would obliterate Microsoft in the consumer market...
What Eisner & Co. understand very well and what their opponents haven't been able to capitalize on is that you have to define the language of the debate in order to win it. That's why we're all talking about pirates and thieves, and not about a balancing of rights.
Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that this is so, since what we now call the "content industry" has always been a major source of propaganda for the state. Those of us who want to effectively oppose the continuous extension of copyright need to start using the tools of the content industry. Calling Sen Hollings the Senator from Disney sounds like a good start.
Here's a proposal. I think we should start describing the DMCA as, "The Dirty Money Copyright Act". The phrase hasn't shown up on Google yet, and I think it should.
How does that sound? Any other suggestions?
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
IN my opinion they "BIG MEDIA" want to leverage the content (perceived as services) to almost equal position with goods, and implement almost one to one relationship for seling them just as if they were goods. Well what a bs... Please take look at this situation and draw your own conclussions... You go to a theatre (Broadway musical or something)... Actors get paid on per performance basis... and will they get anything if some media company records their show and then starts making copies of it (which is virtually damned cheap these days btw)... Is it fair that they would charge almost $20 for a copy of that performance? Are the media costs so high that they have to charge $20 a piece for a copy? I would like to see who's getting what from that pie...
Everyone in this food chain is apparently very greedy
Thinking hurts...
Hollywood (the studios) don't produce content, they control it. A few "content people" like to think they're on top but people like Spielberg are small time next to the likes of Eisner and Valenti.
Wow! That was one of the best articles (transcripts) I have read in a long time about this issue. The worst flaw in it is that Valenti and Eisner weren't present to present their side of the case. Had they been there, and had the even been run in a structured format that was three times the length of that one, with 1/3 for Grove, Lessig and Arthur, 1/3 Eisner & Valenti, 1/3 Jerry Springer style free for all, they might have actually come to some sort of compromise and plan for the future. Sadly, though, most probably didn't read the transcript of that event, and the content industries will continue to play their stupid little games.
.
No doubt. Great transcript. Like I said in another post, it would have been REALLY interesting if Valenti, Eisner and Rosen were present to state their case in a second segment and then have a third segment where the two sides discussed everything together. Personally, I don't think the content side would have been able to provide even a simulacrum of a convincing argument. I'm biased, though, which provokes me to want to hear a reasoned point blank response from the content industry to the issues enumerated by the panelists. Oh well, maybe another day..
.
I was really happy to read a transcript like this. It's great there still are sane people in this country, but I feel like adding a comment:
- although I agree with Andy Grove let's not forget that there was no counterpart from Hollywood just to make the discussion completely fair
- one of the main incentives for consumers that PC (and related) vendors and ISPs advertise is digital multimedia content on the Internet:). You could be doing fine browsing just text pages over dial-up.
- I particularly like 2 of Grove's comments:
- I like that he reminded about buying a CD for $15 to get just one song.
As for me, there're not many discs where I like more than 2-3 songs and I assume I'm not an exception here. For example I burned a couple CD's for myself simply because nobody would EVER sell me a CD with such a combination. And I probably wouldn't mind paying $15 for those ones.
- technology always wins in the end
- Sony is one of the main OEMs of CD-burners as well as a major media company in Hollywood
- Andy Grove represents one of the hitech monopolies himself
- I like Grove mentioning the consumer rebellions since I consider open source which he didn't mention:) just another one.
- musicians in particular have another excellent way of making money - concerts
- they mentioned MS as an innovative company (obviously for Grove's political reasons) although we all know about their near-criminal business practices, privacy invasion issues (MS-passport) and methods of fighting alternatives
- piracy loss estimations be they from software industry or from content providers always assume people would have otherwise paid for their product, though in my opinnion, many wouldn't have used it
Anyway it's been a great interview!
The real joke here is that the film industry is riddled with software piracy on a scale that I am sure is unheard if in most other industries. I have worked on a number of large Hollywood films and I bet none of the production offices would pass a software audit - hell most of the time there's only one copy of MS Office for the whole office! On the few occasions that I have needed to get a production to purchase a software package the first response is - "go down the hall and see if so-and-so has a copy"...
They don't seem to care that software is the product of many artists and craftsmen. Software costs money - and film productions will never pay for anything they can get for free.
So in the end this has nothing to do with protecting artists rights. Anyone who knows anything about the movie industry knows that the studios don't give a f*ck about "the artists" - hell if they could get away with it they wouldn't have any artists- cuz artists cost money and the only thing film studios care about is money. They try to screw artists out of money all the time - Their infamous accounting system is designed to screw artists and anyone affiliated individual film productions out of money. This is why a film can cost $30,000,000 to make (lots of that money going right back into the studios coffers as equipment rentals and/or other services, and producers and Studio execs pockets) and do $50,000,000 in sales and still be pronounced a flop - so that they don't have to pay anyone who was supposed to get a slice of the profits).
The Studios are, by far, the greediest mo-fos to ever walk the earth and anything they say about "artists" should be taken with a grain of salt.
Forgetting for the moment that no evidence exists to show that the current levels of piracy are actually hurting the industry's bottom line, I still can't believe some of the FUD they sling:
Boston-based Internet research firm Viant puts the daily worldwide number of unauthorized movie downloads at 350,000.
Where the hell does that come from? Even a highly compressed divix rip is about 500mb. I've never downloaded one for that reason. If this statistic is to be believed, there are hundereds of thousands of broadband users doing nothing but downloading rips 24/7.
Really, this is just unbelievable. Reminds me of the "research" the plaintiffs did in the original DeCSS case. IIRC they wrote in the brief how it was "simple and easy" to pirate a DVD with divx and that the average home-user could turn to piracy with no headache. Under cross-examination, it came out that they actually had to hire two consultants for their case study and it took them 2 days.
These people are dispicable. Collectively they are the microsoft of culture: a corpulent oligarcy pumping out mediocre to poor products and fighting like mad to keep their control over the creation and distribution of content.
Howard Dean for president
but the day that i stop writing music is the day that i die. period.
please dont see this as offtopic...i really dont intend it to be..
if i have to go to jail, or use insane copyright protection to do this...i will...but i dont think this will ever be the case. but i WILL keep writing and performing music...and i'm not bad or anything...which means that people wanting to hear music will inevidably come to me...and i will be the one who gets to choose how (*cough P2P*) to distribute my music...
if the content industry wants to fuck itself it can go right ahead...all it does is open up for the little guys...
of course this is only the case at the breaking point ; the point where people cannot afford the 300 $ / cd copyright protection tax...until then we will continue to lose more and more peoples interest...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Sorry my FP are only GPLed. Thats the true path to nirvana.
music.lockup.org
Copyright Wars featuring the Senate Commerce Committee on vocals
-and-
Rip-Mix-Scratch featuring Michael Eisner on turntables
Also search Google for
Eisner
Valenti
Hollings
DMCA
and watch for the "Sponsored Links"
Shameless self-promotion, I know, but we've got to get the message out in ways other than forum postings, websites, peitions and email to congresspeople.