Slashdot Mirror
File Swapping and the Analog Hole
forehead writes "Lawmeme is running an interesting piece on piracy in the digital age. It covers a number of the logical fallacies often cited by the major media companies and certain lawmakers."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Ernest Miller on Monday, May 13 @ 10:28:40 EDT
Newsbytes reports that bootleg versions of the wildly successful Spider-Man movie [Damn good in my opinion - Ed.] are already being distributed via the Internet ('Spidey' Already Being Swapped By Online Pirates). While Spider-Man was only available a day before it hit the big screens, the LA Times (reg. req.) reports that Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones has been bootlegged a week before its actual release (Latest Plot Twist for 'Star Wars': Attack of the Cloners). This is not surprising. At a minimum, within a day or two of any movie being released, bootleg videos based on camcorder recordings of showings are available on certain streets in New York City. Within a week, pirated VideoCDs pressed in Asia are available in the US. Even Seinfeld did a show with a plot thread about this bootlegging process, The Little Kicks. Should anyone be surprised that these bootlegs will subsequently be made available via the Internet? Is there any real significance to the fact that these bootlegs are being made available via the Internet?
Yes and no.
For Hollywood, the significance of this piracy is (they claim) that it can be used to justify laws such as the DMCA and CBDTPA. After all, the piracy is taking place via the Internet, thus it must be digital and we all know how dangerous digital piracy is (perfect copies ad infinitum). As the LA Times puts it:
The pirating of "Attack of the Clones" lends fuel to the film industry's efforts in Washington to crack down on piracy. While the studios' trade association steps up its enforcement activities, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would require computers and consumer electronics to be modified to deter unauthorized copying.
Of course, this is a non-sequitur.
For reasonable people, the significance of this piracy is that it undermines justification for laws such as the DMCA and CBDTPA.
The Analog Fallacy
One of the most prominent and recurrent arguments of the copyright interests is that "digital piracy" is far worse than "analog piracy" and thus justifies the imposition of draconian paracopyright laws, such as the DMCA and CBDTPA. I refer to this argument as the "analog fallacy." The fallacy is that analog piracy is not nearly as threatening as digital piracy because analog copies degrade with every generation while digital copies remain pristine no matter how many copies are made. While true in a strict sense, the fallacy is that most of the assumptions necessary for this argument to be true are not realistic. For example, one prominent proponent of this argument is Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), who made this statement when introducing the CBDTPA:
The reality is that a lack of security has enabled significant copyright piracy which drains America's content industries to the tune of billions of dollars every year. For example, the movie studios estimate that they lose over $3 billion annually by way of analog piracy. In order to pirate copyrighted movies via analog formats, an individual makes an illegal copy of the movie (sometimes by taping it in a movie theater with a personal video recorder) and then distributes it, in analog form, at discount. However, because subsequent copies of analog movies degrade over time, there is a limit to the success of this type of piracy.
In a digital age, however, the piracy threat is exponentially magnified. So on the Internet, copyrighted content -- be it a movie, a book, music, or software -- travels in a digital language of 1s and 0s, and every copy of that content, from the 1st to the 1000th is as pristine as the original. Also, unlike an analog pirated movie, which must be physically packaged and transported, a digital copy can be sent around the world on the Internet with a single click of a mouse. The copyright industries are justifiably worried about distributing their content on the Internet absent strong copyright protection measures. As Internet access becomes increasingly available over high-speed, broadband connections, these worries will only heighten.
In the first paragraph of the above quote, when Sen. Hollings refers to the $3 billion figure as "analog piracy," he is being either ignorant or deliberately misleading. I choose to believe that he is being deliberately misleading. The $3 billion figure from the MPAA is not "analog piracy" -- it is all piracy that takes place without the Internet. Now, certainly, all piracy that takes place over the Internet is digital, but that does not mean that piracy that takes place without the Internet is analog. If someone is selling pirated CDs, those CDs are just as digital as the MP3s downloaded off the Internet. The same goes for the bootleg DVDs that were part of the first DVD burner arrests, according to this MPAA press release (First Ever DVD Burner Lab Raided in New York). Note this press release, I will be referring back to it. Slashdot readers noted the raid at the time as well (MPAA Finds First Actual DVD Copiers in U.S.).
As far as I can tell, the MPAA does not publically break out its piracy statistics as either "analog" or "digital." However, they do break out domestic and international piracy. Apparently, domestic (U.S.) piracy costs, according to Hollywood's own figures, $250 million per year (Film Studios Settle Civil Action Against Internet Pirate). Even assuming that the CBDTPA would entirely eliminate this form of piracy (yeah, right), is it likely a cost-benefit analysis would favor the law? $250 million seems a relatively small figure to me.
Is this the first time a troll story fools the editors?
how can you claim a "loss" for pirated materials if the parties in question would nevcer have paid the retail cost for the materials?
This consistently boggles my mind, all these companies saying "piracy costs us $500 mil a year". Listen, some third world family that makes $100 a month isn't going to pay $700 for office, alright?!?
-rt
mpaa.com that is link to in the header seems to be a legitimate business, but mpaa.org is the cartel we seem to be concerned with.
.com and .org domain rules where .org's are supposed to be "non-profit!"
So much for the internic's rule of
....that the link above points to Management Partners and Associates and not The Motion Picture Association of America
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
"Senator Fritz Hollings (D-Disney)"
Just thought that was funny.
In digital, you can create perfect copies and send them out to everyone you know... at the click of a button.
With analog, you actually have to work at it. You'd have to tape the tape (lossy), make copies (lossy), and give it to friends/fellow pirates manually.
Computers make things much easier for pirates. That's why there's so much focus on swapping music digitally. It's much more of a danger to the Music Industry, and they have a right to protect themselves.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I for one, won't bother watching an analog (tape) copy of a film that's in the theaters, mostly because of the quality. I want to see it in it's full glory. However, thanks to DVD ripping, file sharing, and a cable modem, I sometimes will download a movie and watch it on my PC, as I can get a decent picture and sound. I rarely do this though, as I mentioned before that I like movies in their full glory, and sitting a few feet from my 17 inch monitor and my okay sounding speakers doesn't really cut it.
Then again though, I'll gladly watch a movie on my TV where I can lay on the couch or bed (that's what I'm talking about full glory) with just the TV's internal speakers.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The article says:
One of the most prominent and recurrent arguments of the copyright interests is that "digital piracy" is far worse than "analog piracy" and thus justifies the imposition of draconian paracopyright laws, such as the DMCA and CBDTPA. I refer to this argument as the "analog fallacy." The fallacy is that analog piracy is not nearly as threatening as digital piracy because analog copies degrade with every generation while digital copies remain pristine no matter how many copies are made. While true in a strict sense, the fallacy is that most of the assumptions necessary for this argument to be true are not realistic.
But surely the real 'threat' of digital media is actually the close-to-zero marginal cost of copying the original.
With a VCR each copy is a real, physical, medium. With digital everything is, well, virtual.
There are different responses to this - in software, free software is a response. Free software advocates accept that digital 'objects' can and will be copied, so build that in.
I'm not convinced that model works for music and movies though.
Free software is built on a pre-existing cultural norm - ie hacking - that doesn't exist for these other media.
Furthermore, no government contracts (the States), or direct support (elsewhere) is available to create the movie-making equivalent of MIT's AI lab.
. . . and other means of finding files through p2p filesharing services. I figure the C&D letters will go out Monday, and that sharing the higher profile files referenced through ShareReactor on eDonkey will become an unsafe activity (particularly for those with broadband connections in the U.S.) as the MPAA and their toadies at the "copyright enforcement" firms start gathering IP addresses.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
In Australia, where I happen to live, download limits on broadband connections are heavily capped. The ISPs usually offer 1GB plans for about 55A$ and 3GB plans for 75A$. Why on earth would I spend almost all of my precious 1GB download limit on a single ripped movie? For the same amount of money, I can go and see four movies at the cinema AND have popcorn as well!
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
There are three groups that obtain bootlegs: those that didn't care enough for the movie to go pay and see it in the theater, those that loved the movie so much after seeing it (legally) that they want something (the bootleg) to hold onto and cherish marking that momentous occassion, and those that are shut-ins that can't make it to the theater.
The way I see it, the Industry isn't losing money on the first or the third group. They are probably making money off these people because if they actually liked it, they would probably get so fed up with the picture quality of the bootleg that they would jump at the chance to get the (legal) DVD when it's released or even dare to go see it in the theater.
I can see how revenue is lost from the second group because if it wasn't for the bootleg, they would probably go to the theater and see the movie again. But honestly, how many of us know freaks like these or actually ever liked a movie enough to go see it twice?
The word piracy implies "stealing". So who is
doing the stealing? Is it the general public, or the patent owners
who stole what is or would have otherwise been free to all (unless kept secret) and
established claims for monopoly through the
power of the state? I submit the prirates are the
patent owners, who after stole from the liberties
of each citizen they turn around and call the
citizens victims by the name of "pirates". This
sure is a lot of fun, if only it was not so widespread
as to not even question it.
much higher cap than 3Gb....
still, I don't quite get the whole 'let's watch a crappy version of a movie and waste half my bandwidth to get it..' thing...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
For years people have been watching pirated videos copied from studios or screeners. The quality was often not been great, but neither are a lot of the first digital copies of films to appear. People have been copying radio, tv, vinyl, tapes, cd's etc for years. Copying and sharing is not a new thing, but it's being made out to be by certain organisations. I remember people making a fuss when recordable audio and video cassettes arrived on the scene. Have these killed the industry? No, they've grown larger and created new industries. Methodology may have changed, but what people do has not, well, not a great deal. Maybe new avenues have been opened, but isn't that what the Internet is all about? Opening new doors, broadening horizons, breaking down barriers. Lets not use new technology to create extra barriers to peoples freedom and creativity.
>> $250 million seems a relatively small figure to me
:0) Wow, now I understand what kind of deep-pocketed-parent kids study there.
A quarter billion bucks is nothing for this Yale dude.
I've downloaded attack of the clones, I haven't watched the downloaded copy but I have seen it twice at the cinema, and I'll probably go again. I'll most likely watch my downloaded copy during the endless gulf between cinema and the time I can rush out and bye a copy on the first available day. My shelf is stacked full of movies and dvd's I've paid for, I've never downloaded a film I haven't previously or subsequently PAID to go and see at the cinema and rarely have I not bought the film on release and yet I am the enemy. Mr Valenti would have you believe I'm an enemy of the movie industry, Wake up! I'm your friend, I love the movie industry, I'm a fan, I pay my way.
If you thought my subject line was provocative think about it. The MPAA is exactly that, we are dealing with an organisation that is beating the drums of war. They point at a group of people and say "They are your problem, they will take your jobs, they will destroy your livelihood, deal with them and life will bed a bed of roses" . What we have is an organisation that is exploiting the same fears and weaknesses in the people they are exploiting as fascists and warmongers have done since the dawn of time.
Next time your watching your favourite (and presumably legally purchased if not legally played) dvd turn on the directors commentary and listen. Most of the time I hear people who care about the movies they are making, they care about the art form and they care about the people who are going to watch it. These guys are as much the victims of the MPAA as we are, keep making your movies and we will keep paying for them.
Some people might consider me foolish for admitting to downloading films and not posting anonymously but in my own way I'm standing up to the MPAA, supina slashdot guys, get my user details. Come to the UK, let 12 of my countrymen see my dvd shelf and then convince them I've lost you money. You'll probably win but I'll get a fine and you'll get a big stack of mud on your face.
This article, which I though was generally excellent, unfortunately stops short of naming the MPAA's true goal - continuing its monopoly on the production of blockbuster movies by ensuring that no high-quality filmmaking equipment falls into the hands of non-studio filmmakers.
Back in the pre-digital days it was easy for a determined independent artist to throw together some analog video equipment (eg consumer VHS decks, camcorders, and mixers) and make a film. The only thing you couldn't easily do is distribute the result to a wide audience...
Now, thanks to the internet, anyone who can compress some videos and set up a web server can theoretically distribute films.
*BUT* look at where the technology is going... There is no cheap digital recording and distribution system that is accessible to independent artists. (yeah, DV is fairly cheap - except for editing decks - but you can't *distribute* on DV). You can buy DVD burners for a few hundred dollars now, but consumer-level burners do not let you "author" a properly-formatted, CSS-scrambled DVD like the megadollar Hollywood systems can. And there is certainly no low-cost high-definition format on the horizon - HDCAM is insanely expensive, and HD DVD will be read-only. Broadcast digital video systems use obfuscated encryption methods and will only be accessible to studio productions.
It's in Hollywood's best interest to keep recording and distribution technologies out of the hands of independent artists. Using the cry of "piracy!" as a distraction, they are trying to pass laws that will basically make it illegal to use high-quality video equipment outside of the studio system. This way the MPAA companies will maintain their control over what films get made, resulting in fewer choices and higher prices (the inevitable consequences of a successful monopoly).
Incidentally, in my own production work I've already been hindered by the media industry's efforts. On two occasions I've had to perform a digital->analog->digital dub to record copy-protected music, *the rights for which I had legally paid for*... Also, I've been forced to reverse-engineer a high-definition video transmission format, because no such equipment is available to those without a studio-level budget.
> .org's are supposed to be "non-profit!"
Like slashdot.org?
The .org domain is not restricted to non-profit organizations. The original domain rules stated that any "organization" could buy a .org domain. Besides, even if .org were reserved for non-profits, do you see profit here?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just to point out, as the article details, a DIGITAL bootleg of Spiderman was out on the Net the day before it hit the theater. The result? The theatrical release STILL was the largest grossing opening day (and weekend) ever. Its second weekend was the largest second weekend for a movie ever. Its third weekend (this weekend) is sitting at $46 million which is, surprise, the largest third weekend ever.
Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.
Ditto. Movie out in digital piracy a week before opening, and it still makes obscene amounts of money ($86 million this weekend and $110+ million so far).
Wanna check on the sales of Star Wars I: Phantom Menace when released on VHS/DVD? One of the best sellers; ditto for The Matrix -- both of which were floating the web in DivX format before they hit the theaters, much less DVD/VHS.
The last 4 years (1998-2001) are the best on record for revenue generated and attendence at theaters. DVD/VHS sales are thru the roof.
In the "perfect" world, where movies are uncopiable and you have to see it at the theater and/or purchase a legitimate copy, the industry would see only a paltry rise in revenue compared to today -- not the $3 Billion touted by Mr. Valenti.
Most people who get rips would either do without altogether, or wait until the DVD/VHS that THEY WERE GOING TO PURCHASE ANYWAY became available.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The only remedy to that is to prevent digital copies from a camcorder, even if it is for a legitimate, non-Hollywood content use, such as making low-cost digital copies of the images in a patient's medical record for the benefit of that patient.
If you think that consumer video/audio recording equipment isn't used clinically or in medically-related research settings (along with many other serious uses throughout our society), then guess again.
I'm in one of the labs now and I feel like an absolute tool. IT majors are losers.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Here it is boys, come and get it!!!
I think the funniest part of this whole "losses from piracy" thing is that newspapers around the country run a story about piracy whenever a big movie is bootlegged before its release and then go on to mention the "threat" that these bootlegs pose to the box office revenues of the movie... but they never do follow-ups saying, "Oh, I guess not" whenever that massively marketed movie breaks a dozen box office records in a single day.
;)
Gee, could these big corporate newspapers be writing in the favor of their even bigger corporate owners?
Does the MPAA get any money when people rent movies? If not, then I doubt they would actually see an increase in revenue from blocking piracy ...downloading movies is more like renting them; its good for watching 1x or 2x if you don't really care about it that much. If you really want the movie you'll probably buy it.
Someone please mod this parent up! You are exactly right - comparing the ripping and encoding of a CD to that of a DVD is apples and oranges. Any 8th grader with a copy of Musicmatch can rip the latest N'Sync album to MP3 but their head would likely explode if you asked to to DIVX a copy of The Matrix. The process has a steep learning curve and encoding takes a long time and a powerful machine! This is to say nothing of the fact that WAV -> MP3 has a lot less apparent loss of quality than does VOB -> MPEG4. The MPAA does not have the same problem as the RIAA.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Why does no one ever seem to bring up the Constitution in these matters? The Constitution says:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
The progress of science and the useful arts.
Securing for limited times.
Authors and inventors.
The only copyright that is Constitutional is one granted for a limited time to the author or inventor for a limited time for a product that promotes the progress of the useful arts or science. The rest are not Constitutional.
If it's not a copyright to the Author or Inventor, it's not valid.
If it's not a copyright granted to promote science and the useful arts then it's not valid.
If it isn't for a limited time, it's not valid.
Even if one were to agree that internet piracy is decreasing the revenue of the RIAA and MPAA, even if Microsoft (yes, they are doing a similar scheme with their new licences) were actually right about the dangers (to microsoft) of OSS, in my opinion it boils down to a simple problem: Resitance to change.
Why are they resisting the change? Because of revenue. All the above organisation's profits are dropping for various reasons and they are trying to stem the loss with either restrictive laws or restrictive licences. As I posted in another topic, this only changes the response to the laws and licences, but does not stop the actual process itself. Trying to exert control, by American companies, of personal devices and media, in an effort to stop the growing digitalisation of society will only result in even more resistance by consumers and the general move of innovation away from the US and bitter infighting amongst the industry. Trying to outlaw devices such as the general purpose PC, will drive parts of an entire industry, into insolvency (Software and tool developers above all) and will make the US an unpopular place to do business in and shift the impetus of media away from there.
I'm not sure but I think that whichever way they go, they will have to face restructuring in the long term and this means losses. There are so many examples that one could fill pages with them- The steel industry trying to stop change with protectionism (only resulting in retaliation from overseas traders), The car industry trying to stop unionisation with violence and anti-communist propaganda (didn't win there either), the English monarchy trying to stop the US from gaining independance, AT&T trying to hold onto it's monopoly in the communication business. - In the long run it mostly backfires. Musicians who earn next to nothing from the RIAA can and will use these restricive laws to further their own poularity by speaking out against it. Companies moving to OSS because it's cheaper and less controlled. Developers not making products for sale or use in the US due to the restrictions there.
I think, in the long run, laws such as these, are immensly damaging to the very organisations trying to enforce them now, because your average person, who doesn't pirate, will get ticked off that he has to pay more for a DVD or CD (or did you think that they were going to implement all these copy restrictions for free?), the same guy will get ticked off that he has no access to independant media, that everything he does on his non-general purpose computing device is watched and controlled by someone. Programmers in the US will be the laughing stock of the world if they can only code within a strictly defined set of parameters that entails very little freedom.
I'm not a fan of Science Fiction analogies but "Flow my tears the policeman said" by Philip K Dick is good reading for the case that these restrictions become law.(Especially the epilog)
2600.com can't host DeCSS, and 2600 can't directly link to other sites hosting DeCSS, but they are allowed to list the links in plaintext. Is the next step really going to be outlawing links with search criteria embedded in them? I can't believe it.
Anyway, if that actually happened, and a site like ShareReactor was forced to be castrated like 2600 was, and only textlinks were allowed, I wonder how long before a convenient workaround sprang up? e.g. A browser plugin that transformed useless plaintext links like "ILLEGAL://PointerToPointerToPointerToThoughtCrime " into clickable links for external apps.
Oh... Pssssst: DeCSS
--
Power to the Peaceful
I'm apalled at your attempt to make the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act into law.
m e= News&file=article&sid=208
As a Democrat, I find it appalling that you are choosing to side with Big Business in this matter. What's even stranger is that Republicans now have the opportunity to back the Little Guy (i.e. us common folks) for once. This is a really strange turn of events in my opinion.
While piracy is indeed a Bad Thing, what so many of these huge companies fail to realize is that the cost of policing against this piracy often outweighs the cost of the piracy itself. They are so BLIND to that fact that it's really quite amazing.
These attempts to thwart piracy are noble, but even the DMCA is proving that these "anti-piracy" laws are too vague for their own good and are infringing on the rights of the individual consumer... all to appease Big Business interests.
Meanwhile, most of the piracy that takes place is occuring halfway around the world in poorer countries, such as: Singapore, Thailand, China, The Phillippines, The Middle-East, etc. Even IF much of the media they are pirating was available to them at Normal Prices on the street, much if it is in fact not even available to them in a legal format at all.. hence the high percentage of piracy.
So, all these laws end up being fairly useless since there is little enforcement where is is needed. Meanwhile, the DMCA and such do little but anger consumers since it infringes on OUR rights to Fair Use.
Furthermore, these attempts at introducing copy protection have proven to be a big Waste Of Money. You should as Hilary Rosen about the SDMI initiative. The RIAA spent millions of dollars to implement this supposedly "unbreakable" copy protection scheme in order to protect their "artists" rights (READ: try to line the pockets of Big Business executives). Several groups managed to break SDMI, hence the technology was largely Stillborn and a failure.
Now we're seeing these attempts to add copy protection to traditional Audio CD's. I can tell you from personal experience that the millions of dollars spent on these schemes is nothing but a large joke. They are easy to bypass and do nothing but anger consumers such as myself. If I am the rightful owner of a CD, I should be allowed to make a copy to listen to At Home, At Work, and In My Car. The Industry, however, wants me to "license" three separate copies. I DON'T THINK SO...
All these laws do is throw fuel on the fire, so to speak. Those who had no want or desire to "pirate" before are that much angrier that they will do so in effort to raise a collective Middle Finger at The Industry.
Now you are attempting to do the EXACT SAME THING but with television and film content. Do you recall a device called the VCR? The Industry went nuts when it was release, stating that it would cause SO MANY PROBLEMS and MILLIONS OF LOST DOLLARS. Today the industry seems as strong and profitable as ever.. yet you seem to think that more protection is necessary. This makes No Sense.
Please rethink your position on the CBDTPA. Consumers won't stand for it. I, for one, will do everything in my power to thwart and fight it within the means of current laws.
As a Democrat, you should remember who's side your SUPPOSED to be on.. the Little Guy.
As an aside, I thought I would pass along this article from Yale Law, which basically says what I've mentioned here, but in much greater detail. Please give it a read as it is clearly written by someone with REAL technical knowledge; not what you've been spoon-fed by some Corporate Lobbyists.
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?na
Thank you for your time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem with piracy is not now, but in the future. At the moment, due to bandwidth and hard disk size, most videos have noticable artifacts and have lost details in compression.
Now imagine the future. Bigger hard disk, more bandwidth. Now imagine high quality video piracy.
For example: at the moment I'm addicted to a series on UPN. Locally, UPN is unavailable to me, and due to living constrants, a DSS feed is unworkable. So, I go to a certain IRC channel and download the latest eps. They might be poorer quality, and it takes awhile to download, but at least I can watch the show. OTOH, there is no commercials and no trailers.
Now imagine the world 10 years from now. I'll probably find a different show to be addicted to, and there will be other changes. If I wait for DVD, I'm probably waiting years between when the show airs and when the DVDs are pressed. With the DVD I get trailers that some players won't skip over, and I have the problem of copywrite protection and the whole region-x hassle. OTOH, if I go online, I'll find the show within hours of it airing, it will be without commercials, and in a choice of formats that will play on any computer and probably easily be burned to a DVD.
So, for a mental exercize, assume that the DVD is $20, and the online stuff cost $25 for, er, bandwidth costs. What would you rather buy? Now, realize that a broadband connection is less then $100 bucks, which means our $25 figure is rather inflated.
Piracy is a problem, but it is partially because the pirated stuff is a better product. Else, why would I spend hours downloading/burning when I could just walk into Walmart and pick up a copy? I'm not *that* cheap.
Just my $.02
No debate about the DMCA is complete without discussing my Congressman, Bob Goodlatte of the 6th District, VA. He is a fantatical support of the DMCA and has called me a thief and a supporter of theft in public because I stated my opposition to it. He is on his 6th term IIRC and he has currently no true competition worth even mentioning. The Democrats probably ran a guy against him last time in the hopes that they could raise some quick cash because right now he is totally unopposed with no hope in sight. That is bad, it means we have in the house a nearly institutional barrier that dearly loves the DMCA.
He comes from a generally right wing district (though one that is generally quite secular, the most religious person I've met in my area supports marijuana legalization for example!) and not even the LP will try to steal his seat. He has the luxury of having a district that is not dependent on government subsidies and doesn't have a large techie population therefore he can propose stuff like the DMCA and NETA safely (he is directly responsible for the latter and claims to have been heavily involved in the house version of the former).
People like Goodlatte are proof that we cannot rely on either party, we need a multiparty system where at least half the parties have clear cut political philosophies like the LP and Green Party. The LP IIRC is staunchly opposed to the DMCA and all legislation like it. It is the third largest party and that is a constant. The Green Party doesn't have even half the number of people in pubic office that the LP does. The LP is admittedly not very large, but it doesn't need a "celebrity" like Nader to get politically active people to remember that it even exists. In the last election, I could vote for the LP for governor, lt. governor and IIRC attorney general. The same could not be said about the Green Party. We need a party that has a shot of winning and we need to support it whenever possible.
if you use it and don't pay for it its a loss. Your intent does not matter.
I killed someone, but I didn't want to...hmm.
You dumb fucks. Go fuck your dumb asses. Fuck-asses. Eeesh.
Excuse me while I go fap off to her.
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
Ironically enough it's the members of the MPAA who are using science and engineering to advance while the computer industry stagnates and refuses to pay any attention to consumers except for video games. And the video games industry is more a product of Japanese society--Americans are just resellers.
The motion picture industry in the past decade has accomplished the switch to having special effects be the real stars of movies. This results in a more uniform and dependable product where the consumer is guaranteed to at least have some payoff. The mass media also embraces scientific marketting where demographic segments are separately marketted to based on gender, age, etc. The American computer industry on the other hand has disinvested from consumer technology except for Apple. Resellers such as HP/Compaq and Dell add absolutely nothing of importance to their products. If there are cheaper and more powerful devices it is due only to the entrepreneurial hustle of Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese, not Americans. The basic PC experience for users of all categories remains a hellish nightmare of incompatibilities, nonfunctionality, and blatant lies.
The most elementary advances in the computer industry are made impossible by the industry's stubborn denial of mistakes and a refusal to adopt to technology even decades old. As a small example, the original programmers of C developed the language and Unix on a machine whose capabilities are laughable compared to modern machines. The operating system cut back on features that had been planned for the failed Multics project. In such a restricted environment decisions such as deliberately forgetting the true length of arrays were required just to have an operational system. There is no such excuse today, yet the computer industry persists in trying to sell to consumers knowingly defective products which are compromised by simple buffer overflows. The computer industry thinks its just fine that consumers should have to constantly try and engage in a futile endless quest of "upgrading" to patch security holes that would not exist if a proper computer language had been used to write the base system.
It is the computer industry that in recent years has suffered a complete collapse in revenue and valuation. It is the American computer industry that thinks marketting to consumers rectangular beige or black boxes with no style or gender customization is just fine while in Japan there is no reticence to market electronic devices directly to females.
The only reason the American computer industry didn't have a day of reckoning sooner was the incestuous selling between corporations for IT spending, with the last hurrah the bubble caused by Y2K sales. But that opportunity is now gone and the computer industry is openly admitting it has no new ideas. The motion picture industry for the most part spends the money to develop new movies that for a few hours can satisfy the dreams of its customers. The computer industry can't even make a reliable PC. The motion picture industry eventually embraced DVDs and has changed the economics of the industry so that even apparent flops eventually earn more money than was spent to produce them. The PC industry's idea of progress is removing serial ports, parallel ports, and floppy drives because it can't figure out how to otherwise manage the pathetically small number of IRQs. The American PC industry is quickly heading towards Dell being the only reseller to consumers and businesses while Apple fills a niche upper-class market. Meanwhile the motion picture industry keeps on churning out monster hits such as Spider Man and continuations of franchises such as Star Wars and The Matrix, not to mention potential new franchises in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. So who are the dinosaurs and who are dying? It's not the motion picture industry.
Yes, analog Pirated copies degrade over time... but this is a NON issue to the pirate. by the time their origional copy degrades to the point where a good Pirated version of a film is no longer marketable (or even in some cases as good as the video tape released) noone wants to buy it anyways.
Film pirating hurts the studios as much as Piracy hurts the software industry... The little guy with grand ideas that he/she will become a billionare will get the slap of reality from the piraters and the big rich guy will not notice that the piracy happens except for the pretty impressive numbers magically pulled out of an analyst's ass. Look at the Recipts of Spiderman already.. it has surpassed EVERYTHING else at the box office.. What the hell did they expect that piracy stole from them?? another trillion movie goers? BAH, nothing but FUD again from a journalist that is trying to not look like a industry puppet. If attack of the clones fails it's because it SUCKS... I personally felt it was nothing more than TITANIC revisited with a star-wars theme... I dont care about the teen-aged angst and the repeated attempts of our hero to get in the protaganists pants... I saw it to see things get blown up, people chopped in half and hopefully to see jar-jar die...It will not fail because it was pirated, digitized and then shared on Kazaa at a horrible bitrate and over-compressed audio track.
Please, someone take these reporters out of their offices and show them what 90% of the pirated stuff is, and then they'll write a column that "worries about pirating are unfounded unless you like to see films of the backs of people heads, crappy-out of focus, pixelated.."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I spent about a week downloading the Buffy musical DIVX on my modem. I still watched it on TV when it was on here in Australia. The VHS copy I made while it was on TV is significantly better than the DIVX copy (for now at least, obviously it will degrade over time if it's watched enough). When it arrives on DVD I'll likely add it to my DVD collection which, quite frankly, I've already spent enough money on.
I love DVDs. I enjoy hearing the Smashing Pumpkins talking about their videos while I'm watching them. I enjoy the countless remixes with each video on my Beastie Boys anthology. I enjoy Robert Rodriguez pointing out all the snafus in Desperado (shadows of a camera on a boom passing through a shot, the same extra dying multiple times etc). I like the features.
There was a thing on TV here the other day about cinemas in Australia not being able to afford the equiptment to show digital movies, so we get AotC on analogue film rather than the original digital. People go to the Cinema for the large high quality picture and the sound, in short the experience. If cinemas here can't afford the digital technology, what percentage of people are going to have anything approaching it in their own homes?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
they might be able to slow it down, but the inevitable is going to happen. That's not wishful thinking, it's fact.
First off, my video encoder can encode at 6Mbps full frame MPEG2 better than DVD quality. it is a Pentium 133 with 64 meg of ram.
Yes you heard me. Pentium... IT has a SCSI-II hard drive array that will hold 4 hours of video. and a set of 3 full length PCI video capture and audio capture cards. I insert the video tape (Betacam or 3/4 for old stuff) set the start timecode, set length of capture or end timecode and press the BIG RED BUTTON. encoded in realtime perfectly.
It was horribly easy to make a digital rip. I can teach a 12 year old how to do it.
You said..
don't say that making a digital rip it easy, because it is not.
well it is... with real hardware not the toy stuff available to the general public it is mind-numbingly easy....
Yes the encoding station I speak of can be bought for $36,000.00 today with a wasted Pentium III in it... but the new version can let you spit out a DVD of the encoded video after encoding....
Remember, EVERYTHING is easy if you have enough money to throw at it... and even thinking that video encoding, something done constantly by every network, broadcast company, cable company, and TV station, is still hard is plain silly... Please chekc out modern video production equipment.. it's much different than the consumer or pro-sumer crap that is available.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
DRM hardware/software amounts to a tax on non-media industry businesses
Nations which already turn a blind-eye to copyright infringement will likely omit DRM measures in hardware for regional markets. This wll put foreign countries at an IT procurement advantage
The trend of closed hardware makes the media industry less competitive by raising barriers for small independent artists. (alright this one is a stretch, but its large media conglomerates who cater to the lowest common denominator.)
There is one thing that I always think about when reading stories like this. Use every copy protection system in the world, use encryption all the way from the disc to the display; how the _hell_ are they gonna prevent anyone from using a high-quality retina-imitating device (read: camera) to record the information, digitalize it, and spread it?
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Yep. IT majors are losers.
You want to go into engineering, not 'Data Processing.' Otherwise you have a degree, and a mandate to change the fucking toner cartridge in the LJ4 up on third floor.
I'm having a hard time with this concept working with this temp agency I talked to last week. I work with embedded controllers, primarily in the medical device field. They said 'IT jobs are tight right now.' I wanted to scream 'I am not a fucking IT monkey. I develop products that include microcontrollers.'
They'd never understand, because they are mediocre ignorant people, just like the IT drones.
I think that statement requires proof. I would like to see them demonstrate the ease to get a movie from DVD to the internet with a single click. I know where I live DSL is an empty promise.
I think they should give a live demonstration of 'pirating' a movie. (2 hr feature, make it something old and in color (some film with no value). I think the procedures needed to encode, transfer, receive and decode and the resulting 'lossless' qulaity would make a jury snicker (or at least fall asleep).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Analog can be just as "high quality" as digital. It's just a matter of how much money you want to spend on your equipment.
I also have about 60 odd episodes on my hard drive. I like to be able to watch them more often than I'm given opportunity. Presumably, these AVIs and RAMs and ASFs that I've downloaded off iMesh and gotten burned on CDs from my friends are illegal, pirated episodes... But if I'm giving them money every opportunity I get, how can I possibly be said to be STEALING from them for watching The Simpsons every day, instead of the lame every week (if I'm lucky) that it's on in the season? Off-season, it might not even be on at all! Same holds true for the (not all that many) shows that I actually enjoy on the babble box.
Cheers, Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
the argumenty extends beyond software to all media in general. Music, software, whatever, its all the same argument.
Do you think there would be a market for (example) pirated MS Office in Beijing if it sold for a more reasonable $75 per individual license.
And while on the subject, when are the morons who handle the pricing and sales structure for all these software programs (I'm thinking adobe here) going to realize that "hey, guess what, you don't stand a chance in hell of EVER being able to track indivudual user privacy!"
The smarter path (and the one MS first adopted to get where they are) is to give the damned sofwtare away to individual users (who you can't stop anyway) and conentrate on cracking down on licensing corporate users. Its a hell of a lot easier to go into an office and say "100 seat/installs, you owe use $$$$" than breaking down mr. and mrs. smiths door to see what Jimmy installed onthe family machine.
I'd really like to see the figures on Adobe's percentage return from individual (non-corporate/business) users... I'd bet its under 5%.
-rt
Because you said "D-Disney" as Hollings' party and constituancy, where usually it's a place name. How bitingly absurd! You're a genius!
Ripping from DVD and then encoding into MPEG2 is just silly.
I am talking about MPEG4 encoding;
of course MPEG2 encoding is easy, yeesh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The whole $$$ lost due to piracy is just a fabrication... Here is my crazy theory:
The record companies don't care about me, you and john down the street downloading songs off of Napster/AudioGalaxy/Kazza/Whatever. The songs we download and don't pay for only make up the smallest percentage of the companies revenues. Even then, most of us (well I know I do) still go out and buy the damn CD. I believe what the record companies are really scared of is losing THE ARTISTS.
Here in Australia, if an artist is signed to a record company, and they produce a top album, for all their hard work they receive less than $2 per copy sold. Each CD retails for $30+ each. Of this $30, the record company, the distributor, the retailer and even worse, the government take their share. This leaves the artists with very little. In this brave new world, the artists will not need any of these people. They will be able to go into a studio, hand over their $$, record an album and distribute it online, all without the need of some giant company threatening them with contracts, intelectual property etc. Even if they sold online copies for $5 each, and every second person gave it to a mate for free, they still make more money than they did under the record company reign of terror.
The record companies have realised this, but they can't go to the press and tell the public 'Stop Napster, cause it will send us broke, and you will be able to buy albums for $5 each'. The public wouldn't care less for their plight. So, they make up these figures on how much it is costing them, and how piracy is the reason you pay so much for music.
This, I see the same with the large movie distributors like Fox. They aren't concerned with us pirating Star Wars or Spiderman.. We will all still want to go see it in the cinema with the sound, the screen and the atmosphere. They just use this excuse to cover the fact that soon, people will be able to make and distribute movies without them.
What can I say? I love a good theory.
A/./
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php? name= News&file=article&sid=208. does anyone know a mirror to this article?
Thanks in advance.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
People who don't have a clue what the word "exponential" means probably shouldn't use it.
someone forgot to tell him that MPEG2 (the format which DVD's use) is a lossy format, also. Just as MPEG4 (aka DivX). However, most people consider DVD's to be of a better quality than VHS tapes. As for compressing something that would normally take gigabytes into something that can fit on a CD reducing quality... sure, but it's not like it really matters, anyway. It's not like _we_ would be able to see any difference, if it was a quality encoding. Now, if it _is_ dectable, chances are you're just playing it at a higher resolution than it was intended for. If you want to make a DVD look crappy, try to play it on a 50' screen, or maybe just zoom in with your DVD player. Now I'm not saying that the quality can't be degradded, just that it usually isn't, and if it is, it doesn't get distrubuted enough to make much of a difference either way.
Anyway's, I agree what the author is trying to do, but... the only reason the MPAA gets away with twisting the facts is because they have some level of pre established credibility.
The MPAA's using a broken law that assumes that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It's ironic that it sounds so much like zero tolerance - anything that can be used as a weapon will be used as a weapon...
You can also apply the same argument to the music industry. Right now, you can record, mix and master a high-quality album on an off-the-shelf computer, and either have it pressed into CDs or distributed online, with total expenses under the credit limit of a platinum Visa.
What hasn't been mentioned enough is that passage of the CBDTPA would cripple that model. Because any equipment capable of performing an analog recording could be used to pirate music, future audio packages and digital microphones, etc., will need to be RIAA-approved. Will anyone outside a recording studio or a major label be able to invest in recording if that happens?
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
I appended the parent to a letter addressed to the editorial staff of Recording Magazine and Electronic Musician Magazine:
6 21 1
Are you folks following the legislation and debates regarding the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)? It (slowly) appears that the only practical, rational motivation for the act is to curtail the availability of digital recording devices outside of the studio system. A careful reading of the bill will show that it has the power to cripple the recording capabilities of all digital devices. Some of us computer geeks are beginning to think that CBDTPA is a last ditch effort by the established production houses to avert the threat created by the dual availability of professional quality authoring equipment (digital recording) and open distribution channels (the internet.)
An archival source of CBDTA related material is:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/
The above site has the text of the bill online. The clincher is Section 5:
"SEC. 5. PROHIBITION ON SHIPMENT IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE OF NONCONFORMING DIGITAL MEDIA DEVICES.
(a) IN GENERAL. -- A manufacturer, importer, or seller of digital media devices may not --
(1) sell, or offer for sale, in interstate commerce, or
(2) cause to be transported in, or in a manner affecting, interstate commerce,
a digital medial device unless the device includes and utilizes standard security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 3."
slashdot.org is a good place to keep abreast of the issues, though as yet only a small percentage of the members seem to be aware of the depth of the threat from CBDTA. A recent article is:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/19/221
I include a discussion from one of the slashdot members below, the perspective of an independent film maker:
[parent appended]
On any decent stereo, a person with reasonably good hearing can tell the difference between a "pristine" original (ripped from a CD) and an MP3 of that same piece encoded at the standard 128kbps, even using the very best encoder (e.g. Fraunhofer reference coder or a recent version of LAME). Personally, I can (and have) successfully ABX 128kbps stuff better than 90% of the time, and my ears are pretty average.
And yet MP3s, which are somewhat (or considerably) degraded from the original, have become is, uh, rather popular and widespread. The point is that many people will be satisfied with a first-generation copy as long as the degradation (due to conversion to analog, lossy compression, etc.) is not too obnoxious.
And therein lies the fundamental point about the "analog hole." So long as content is eventually reduced to analog form (as it has to be, for a human being to watch or listen), one can always record it (sound card with analog in plus an A/D converter; camcorder in a theater) and make a reasonably good digital version of that recording. From that point on, the recording in question can be spread all around the world, regardless of how well protected the "pristine master" was.
And unless someone comes up with a watermarking technology that can reliably survive an arbitrary analog-to-digital encoding (a few have been claimed, but I've seen nothing conclusive in the literature), like a camcorder pointed at a movie screen, or a microphone in front of a set of speakers, even "certified" recording devices (CBDTPA-style) will still record this stuff.
None of these insane laws will, or can, shore up this "hole." They can, however, do a great deal of damage to the technology industry which would be tasked with complying with them.
The fallacy is that analog piracy is not nearly as threatening as digital piracy because analog copies degrade with every generation while digital copies remain pristine no matter how many copies are made.
Have you ever downloaded anything? There is a slight chance that your copy won't work or something has gotten screwed. Considering most pirates may have Cable, DSL or higher, better access - they are likely getting non-corrupted files.
But! If these digital copies are always so great then how come there is sfv [crc] checking, par files and the rest?
Digital copies aren't exactly 100% point-click-error free-copying. In both cases better equipment makes for better copies.
Get your Unix fortune now!
ppm is a group that should be well known to anyone into electronic music, or say astral projection. They did the mp3.com thing and got quite alot of popularity. but then again techno music will only do well if it gives people a buzz. you can take a second rate dance track and market it all you like but people still wont get the enjoyment that they would from one of higher quality. unlike brittany or the back door boys you cant simply make it with media saturation, in requires intrinsic quality.
I submitted this there as well, just so you all know. I was interested in the responses I might get from either forum.
First, this is a very good article! I have often thought about this, but never really was able to put it quite as well the author did.
Second, I would like to add a piracy method to your collection. Pre-release DVD
screening copies are distributed in advance of an actual DVD release. These
copies get duplicated, or ripped by someone in the chain then are sold for as
little as a dollar overseas. The interesting thing is that these screening
copies are clearly marked as such with additional contact information for those
viewing them. "If you have rented or purchased this DVD, please call
1-800-MPAA-NO-COPIES"
Clearly the quality of the copy has little to do with the incentive for piracy.
Having viewed one of these, I was surprised that anyone could get anything for
them at all. The questionable legality of these things is right there in the
viewing experience!
Finally, my point. I agree with the basic premise of your article in that the
RIAA / MPAA proposals will do little to solve the problem. The answer, as I
see it, has little to do with piracy however.
I believe the primary motivation behind the increasingly draconian copyright
legislation is about control and profit. Media conglomerates in general see
digital technologies as a powerful enabling technologies for "Pay Per View"
(PPV) delivery. PPV technologies provide long tern annuity profits from every
item in the catalog. PPV combined with copyright extension and litigation are
not aimed at protecting anything but profit. If we are forced to get our
content from the source each time, that source is guarenteed profit for as long
as their media content is of any relevance to society.
One more point to consider: Hollywood is not producing new content at the same
rate it is being consumed. WIth analog media, this is a concern, but not a
problem. They get annuity profits from the replacement and resale of older
media. The primary selling point of digital media is long life and high
fidelity. These present a problem today in that the average purchase may
likely be good for the lifetime of the buyer. Our rate of media consumption
is greater than their rate of production. In the near future, if we are
allowed to own personal digital copies, we will only be purchasing new content.
The rights we currently enjoy and the long media life will combine, through
media resale and trading, to sharply reduce the high annuity revenue the media
industry currently enjoys.
It is this future loss of revenue that lies behind the current barrage on our
rights today.
Their answer will be new formats, and delivery methods designed to lead people
away from the durable open media we use today. The switch from analog (vinyl
and VHS) to digital (CD and DVD) made a lot of sense for both sides. Future
format changes have few advantages for us, and many for them.
"Of course I could be wrong..." --Dennis Miller
Blogging because I can...
I boggles the mind, if I have the bootleg, I would have bought the copy, so full dollars lost. Just not so. I can rent a DVD cheaper than I can down load the pirate.
Weak logic, I subscribe to E-Music, 10 bucks a month, no hastles, tons of music.
No grokster stealing my CPU cycles, no popus. No viruses. I get the music I want, easily, so I pay.
If you haven't figgured it out yet, its all about money for those of us who value our time, its cheaper to get this content legally, for the pirates, they would never buy it anyway!
Stop saying "I defend my right to shoot my neighbor because if I didn't have a gun I'd stab him" and start saying "I defend my right to bear firearms."
I completely agree that the principles themselves should stand without explination. The problem is that the few people who haven't made their minds up need something to point them in the right direction. The right to bear arms is severely challenged right now, as are many other rights which were sacred to the old white men who founded the US.
Slashdot has its flamewars, but when we talk rationally we tend to agree on a few basic things which we might be tempted to call common sense. These things are not obvious to the rest of the world, and "because I can do it anyway" is one way to begin explaining why prohibition, strong gun control, extreme intellectual property laws, and other victimless crime laws have never worked and never will. The ones who've made up their minds will trot out their "if it saves one kid" and their "we have to do something", but there's hope for the others, and these arguments are a start.
There is another element of your post which I should address. Your original point seemed to be that we should be campaining for our rights to do harmless things instead of defending the implied rights to do what might be destructive things. That is, the right to bear arms, versus the right to use them against others. This distinction is also lost on far too many people.
There are two sides to this. One is the "prohibit everything by default and allow only what is sanctioned" school of security. Why would you want to own a gun? There's nothing good that could come of it. Why would you want to grow that plant? Why would you want to drink that toxin? It's for your own good. This approach to security assumes that the rule-maker knows everything, and that the rules actually restrict the ruled. These are easy assumptions to be trapped in!
The other side of the lost distinction between freedom to choose and freedom to choose poorly is that people assume that there is a way to elect "better" choosers to make the decions for the "worse" choosers. That is, "we" elect "them" to protect "us" for our own good. The obvious problem with that is that if we are poor choosers we are likely to pick the wrong people. There are many other problems with this, but my post is getting too long and has almost nothing to do with digital vs analog piracy.
What I hate about the RIAA is that they say the artists are losing money. This makes people think that the poor artists are being taken advantage of by anyone who downloads an mp3. The truth is is that if there was any money to be lost from mp3s then the money would have gone to the record labels (the people who make a crapload more for any piece of music than the artist who made it will make off of it!) If there is anyone stealing then it is the record labels for making so much money off of the people with talent. If I could personally send the few cents that an artist would supposedly make off an mp3 I got, I would. I would buy a whole cd but usually it ends up that one song is good and the rest is crap! That goes for at least 50% of cds out there. (*Make a note here, the last cd i bought was a piece of crap squished into the form of a cd entitled Garage Days,Inc. A few people might recognize this poor excuse to spend 20 bucks on to be made by a band of whiney guys that a lot of people used to love until they started their Crusades with the RIAA. After listening to this piece of trash cd and later hearing about how they didn't give a crap about their fans unless they bought stuff from them it turned me off on their music and on buying cds*) So how about I just pay for the one song I want by dividing the cost of the cd by the number of tracks on it? That should be fair! Face it, the music industry is a bunch of assholes who don't give a damn about the artists or the people who buy the cds except for the money they make them. And if anything doesn't go their way then they bitch and moan about it and mp3 is being a blamed for all the losses that they are encurring. They are just going after mp3 because it is mainstream now, everyone that I know now has at least 1. I'm also sure that the recent price hike in CDs is just another way to get more money outta the consumer and the artist is not going to see any more profit from this. It is also another way to try to publicly criticize mp3s for having to up the prices of CDs to make up for their losses. What's next? Keep raising the prices of cds because they are losing more money off of the money that people woulda spent on their overpriced cds? Where will it end for them? I read an article with Courtney Love that explains the whole deal that goes on behind the scenes of a record deal. Basically it ends up that the artists get screwed over long before their record will ever hit the shelves. So who's really to blame?
You know what I think is the strongest form of copy protection? The shrinkwrap around the CDRs. I takes me longer to open the case than it takes to burn the cd once it is out.
This article, while furnishing some interesting info about the numbers, was a sickeningly typical lawyer nitpick. Instead of attacking verbiage with better verbiage, I wish these legal geniuses would address the real issue, which is whether or not copyright enforcement benefits the general public to an extent that justifies taking away other things.
America has always been big on law enforcement, but there have traditionally been limits, like search and seizure laws and rules of evidence. The rights-ownership industry (we're not talking about creative artists here) appears to think that protecting IP should become the central goal of law in America. Privacy doesn't matter -- it could be used to hide infringement. Innovation doesn't matter -- it could be used to defeat protection. Opensource doesn't matter -- it's an evil socialist plot anyway. Everybody's behavior must be restricted so as to guarantee that people like Jamie "skipping commercials is theft" Kellner get a nickel every time anybody reads, views or hears anything other than their own bodily functions.
We ought to do follow the advice put forth in some recent article posted here (can't remember the freakin one) that advocated focusing political contributions to defeat legislators who act as toadies to the entertainment industry. Every time a new tendril appears, cut it off. Blacklist the entertainment industry and see how they like it. Does anybody know who Hollings' opponent is going to be in the next election? Send him or her money. Send letters to every other senator notifying them that you are doing this and why you are doing it.
American politics tends to be a series of one-issue campaigns. Our lawmakers understand that principle very well. Make the defeat of the copyright industry your one issue and let them know it.
...to plug Mr. Valenti's "analog hole".
.. a Beowulf Cluster of analog holes.
If you want to dump it out into another format, say MPEG-4 or DiVX, there are a lot of fiddly bits, as regards how to get the best out of lossy compression. A non-action film may compress much better than an action film, trade-offs must be made. However, you can end up with 1-2CDs of data that are quirte viewable. It may take a couple of attempts though.
See my journal, I write things there
"we need a multiparty system where at least half the parties have clear cut political philosophies"
Move to Germany. Seriously, your political system is screwed, but wasn't it always biased to favour the landowning wealthy anyway?
What are you trying to do, take /. to new levels?
free the mallocs!
not again.. conversion from mpeg2 to mpeg4 (one of the 65billion formats) is as simple as running a conversion. you can do it under linux with mpegtools if you are a guru.. otherwise there are several windows conversion tools that are very easy, and they work fast depending on processor speed and available ram. It's the initial encoding that takes the largest amount of effort. conversion between formats is trivial... what is not trivial is the morons that keep making their own versions of Mpeg4.. those are the people that need to be smacked in the head.. pick one and call it done I say, or don't call it moeg4,DiVx.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Despite what the MPAA might hope to accomplish, it'll backfire as long as there are sufficient numbers of independents who desire to create content. As you said, you can now buy a DVD buner for under $400. This was absolutely unheard of until the end of last year. It doesn't burn in the DVD "authoring" format? So what? If the resulting disc plays your recorded work on people's DVD player, that's all the end user cares about. (If it doesn't always work due to compatibility problems, that'll resolve itself as the general public applies pressure for compatibility. People don't just sit back and accept it when products don't work "as advertised" -- and there's an understanding that the DVDs you make can be played back on typical DVD players.)
To put it quite simply, the MPAA has no way to ultimately control what types of equipment fall into the hands of the public. If they manage to get laws passed that outlaw use of their proprietary equipment, it will instantly become irrelevant. People use formats that they have access to - not ones that they don't.
Um, sounds like your district alrady has a party that has a shot of winning -- the Republican party, which has steamrolled Mr. Goodlatte to victory over and over again.
I agree that voters should not suffer the constrictions of the two-party vote race, but it sounds to me that your district has already chosen a preferred representative in Congress. I'm sorry that he's not who you would have chosen.
I am writing to announce my full support for the CBTPA currently sponsored by Senator Hollings. In order to be fully compliant with the act though I must violate another law and immediately commit suicide upon the bills implementation. As I observed in S.2048 section 4(14) that digital content when converted to analog may be copied or redistributed illegally I have no choice but to terminate. Where I being the receiver of a digital broadcast illegally produced by my parents with improper auditory receptors that convert digital signals to analog (ears) and being in posession of sound generating material (vocal chords) that might be used to reproduce digitally broadcast copyrighted material (albeit badly) without proper copyright protection material (software or hardware based) might illegally reproduce said material in the shower, car, or other locality. Furthermore I recognize that by allowing my fellow devices (people) to continue to function and engage in this, "threat to America's content industries" by the continued illegal reproduction of copyrighted material it will soon come about that the entire US population will be in violation of the new law. I urge Senator Hollings to join me in leading this brave new revolution that will protect the content industry of America from the future proliferation of devices that might be used to illegally reproduce (pun intended) content in analog form.
My apologies to the in Intel article where this was originally posted my fault
> But when one CD costs me 3 hours of work (at minimum wage, for us "middle class teens") it's easier to spend an hour looking for a good quality rip.
And when a Z6 costs me a year and a half's salary, does this justify me spending an hour looking for a good quality Z6 (for me to) rip (off)?
Kudos for rationalizing your theft, but don't bullshit yourself into thinking you're some kind of freedom fighter because you're stealing. I don't agree with IP/copyright laws in their current state (you may not but it's more likely that it's just convenient to say you don't and hedge your justification) but it's still theft.
And what's with decrying the $16+ for 9 song pop CDs? CDs are easy to find cheaper (christ... I can walk into a Best Buy and find plenty of fine CDs for $10-$12) than the exorbitant rates some places charge and if people want to buy overpriced crap, let them. Are you one of those folks buying tripe?
You're still a consumer, just not a paying one.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
whos in the freakin hell needs to know what i do with my PC, eff them...
... leads me to wonder if anyone is investigating the possibility that the pre-release infringing copies of recent movies were made with the collusion of the entertainment industry to help justify the Hollings copy protection bill. Something like the classic "foreign submarine" scares in some countries (Argentina comes to mind) that just happened to occur when their Navy budgets were under consideration.
Anybody who's arguing that it is still hard to make copies of DVDs hasn't used all the software available yet.
check out dvdx which is easily obtainable from a variety of sources....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It's not silly at all, although encoding it to 6 Gigs is silly. Use MPEG-2 to make DVDs into SVCDs -- two or three discs to hold a whole movie. These can then be burned to standard CD-R media, instead of DVD-R, but still played back in (many) standalone DVD players.
So close, but yet so far! No, it isn't about copying, yes, it is about control.
However, it isn't that they are protecting an outmoded business model, it's about protecting the next (obvious) revenue stream.
The "old" revenue model is good, and we should support it: Paying money to watch a movie in a theater, paying more to buy a DVD or tape. The problem is that "pay per view" (and any derrivative distribution techniques) just doesn't seem to work well with rational copyright laws!
Maybe the solution is simple: reduce length of copyrights. If the studios want to come up with a proprietary, integrated device for playing their pay-per-play media, well, go for it! If consumers don't want to buy into it... deal with the fallout! Why does it always get so convoluted?!
it sounds to me that your district has already chosen a preferred representative in Congress. I'm sorry that he's not who you would have chosen.
I could be misinterpreting your implication, but it sounds like you're suggesting that the unliked candidate won fair & square & the poster has a case of sour grapes.
The candidate won in a particular system with rules that are not neutral nor the only possibility.
More parties won't help in most cases because they simply fracture the vote. We do already have a multi-party system to some extent because at least alternative parties are legal. Nader was banned from even watching the debates so there's a ways to go, but there are other alternatives:
At-large candidates. Increase the number of citizens per Representative to free up a few seats. Make those seats national so the candidates can campaign for the black vote, the geek vote or the pave-the-earth vote.
Running a national campaign for a seat that represents 1/435th of Congress might seem unwieldy and impractical, but many Congressional campaigns already receive national attention. Also narrow-cast media outlets such as issue-centric magazines, websites and discussion forums let a candidate get the word out much cheaper.
-M
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is all.
In these modern days of mega-corporations and bloated laws, one of the greatest tenets of the American dream is quietly forgotten. Trust in your fellow American. Trusting your neighbor to abide by the law and not kill you while you sleep. Trusting your bank to hold your earnings and not run off in the night. Trusting the American people to do the right thing and not infringe on copyrights.
If things go in favor of MPAA, I will be trusted by the American government and my fellow Americans to possess a FIREARM that I could use to kill another person, but I would not be trusted to own COMPUTER HARDWARE that I could use to copy a DVD.
Perhaps the greater irony is that the men who created this idea of a Nation of trust--our forefathers--have been replaced by men whose very name now implies mistrust--politicians.
- SignalFreq
someone modded this up to a viewable level.
people, myself included, have been saying this on every single slashdot article having to do with this subject for 3 years.
millions of people now have a clue!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I live in Quebec, the provincial government in all their wisdon has a law that limits the number of movies that can be shown in the theatres in english for a year, so we basically only get the huge blockbusters showing in english around here (only lord of the rings, spiderman, and star wars since x-mas) and my choice to see smaller movies is either to download them from the internet or rent a car for $60 and drive 1.5 hours to Montreal to see it there.
I have watched several movies that I downloaded, but then rented them after they came out on DVD because the quality was less than perfect, just recently I watched a copy Blade 2 that I got on IRC, but the quality wasn't great (a badly compressed MPG), so I am definetly going to watch it on DVD once I get the chance. I am sure that there a LOT of people who live in rural areas that would not be able to watch certain movies any way except to download them.
Anyone here remember when CDDA became widespread, it was more expensive than tape because it was still pretty expensive to make. Then they KEPT the price up because they KNEW and assumed that the medium would be used to produce analog (and not digital) copies. Yet they now think they can maintain this pricing scheme which reflects acceptance of casual copying AND prosecute anyone who dares to continue copying the content on their overpriced CDs? I think not. I even e-mailed the RIAA about this and got no response. figures :)
notice it happened the day after I posted that? sheesh.
ah well. I can cope with 3Gb.
i don't read slashdot anymore.