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MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!
A month ago, the MPAA filed
its report [PDF]
with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terrors of analog
copying. I quote: "in order to help plug the hole, watermark
detectors would be required in"
-- are you sitting down? -- "all devices that perform analog to
digital conversions." At their page
Protecting Creative Works in a Digital Age,
the Senate lays out the issues they'll be looking at, including
briefs from corporate groups, and provides a
comment form
so your opinion can be heard as well. As Cory Doctorow writes:
"this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than
the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed.
...the
Broadcast Protection Discussion Group
is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood."
Doctorow's article on the "analog hole"
for the EFF does a great job of explaining the issues to
non-electrical-engineers, and has many thought-provoking
examples of how requiring such technology would be a giant step
backwards.
They just don't stop, they just don't listen, and they NEVER LEARN. I contact my congressman over this stuff every time, and I will continue to do so.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!
:P
You know, I've made a similar comment to the MPAA before. Come to think of it, some Senators too.
There's no way the MPAA can succeed in this. All analog-to-digital conversion equipement?? I remember using a really simple A to D converter in one of my courses in University. I bet that chip costed a buck or two. Putting anti-piracy measures in it will increase the cost significantly, and for a really simple A to D converter? That's just ridiculous! Who are these morons coming up with this crap? This won't fly... no matter how dysfunctional these law-makers are.
....as I can't see the el-cheapo manufacturers in Taiwan wanting to comply with this. What's the betting that equipment from the Far East will come with DVD player style hacks to turn off watermarking?
Do these idiots realize that this proposed 'policing' of ADC(analog-to-digital converters) would include things like microphones and portable tape players? I'm sure they use these devices during their board meetings and hearings, and probably discuss confidential and/or copyrighted issues. Who's gonna police these?? Also, they will have to stop using their portable tape players to dictate notes for their executive assistants to scribe, since the information they want scribed could also be considered copyright material!
Bah, I'm getting my old VCR to plug up someone's 'analog' hole!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
So say i'm using a digital camcorder in the mall and britney's new single starts playing from the loud-speakers does my camcorder shut down because it detects the watermark?
Total BS, this would ruin consumer electronics if ever implemented.
to the midle age.
What ? Me, worry ?
FFS, after reading so much about VCRs, the MPAA, ADCs, the BPDG, the CBDTPA, p2p, the FCC and CDs, I wish these guys would just STFU.
"...Watermark detectors would be required in all devices that perform analog to digital conversions..."
Mary and Her Lamb Want Back Royalty Too, You Thief!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
What they really ment was that there are some A-holes in the MPAA that is in desperate need of plugging.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
So does this mean that every decent Electronics course or manual would be outlawd under the DMCA? After all, an ADC without the fingerprinting layer would be a circumvention device!
I guess the supreme court ruling is irrelivent huh.
n ot-republican idiots who are in the pockets of Big media.
this is the problem in america today. Industry has TO MUCH DAMN POWER. they think they can just ignore rulings that the court places on society. THEY CAN'T, and for the Senate to even consider the issue leads me to believe that those people do not belong where they are.
the House Majority whip said yesterday, "In a time of war, we can not concern ourselfs about the constitutional problems when passing laws"
these are the idiots we have working for us. on the one side, we have warhawk who support big Industry, on the other, we have psudo-wanabe-whatever-is-popular-at-the-time-and-
yes there are a few with redeaming qualities and are not part of the larger crowd, but for the most part, we have a corupt, inept, retarded set of leaders who pass legislation based on the cash they get rather than what their constituents would want, or what there best intrests would be.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This is getting amusing. The farther they go with this, the more crazy they sound. At this point it's just a question of whether they'll realize they're trying to dig a hole in water and try to make money off the new phenomenon rather than trying to suppress it, or will they just totally flip off the deep end?
In a previous ??AA article on CBTPTBPAPAwhatever, I mentioned I felt safer because they were unlikely to use the tactic of asking for something much more ridiculous than what they actually wanted, so they can get what they actually wanted in a compromise. Since having copy controls in all devices is what they want, and what they are asking for, the tactic won't work.
Welp, looks like I was wrong. Bet a dollar this fails, and they "compromise" by only having DRM (digital rights mangler) tech in digital-only devices.
How the hell did they get so much lobbying power?
The enemies of Democracy are
Since politics is often the art of compromise, I find myself wondering if this particular proposal is deliberately extreme so that the Hollings Bill suddenly looks more reasonable and has better popular and political support.
I always had the notion the copyright is a compromise between content providers and consumers. I do believe that creators should be compensated, but it seems to rein in piracy, our fair use rights should be removed. Why is it that we always lose our rights as a "preventive measure" to protect something that really isn't in much danger, in this case, IP? The movie and music industries continue to rake in the big bucks (suject to economic recessions, of course!) while our fair use right to time shift or format shift is taken away?
I am the evil aardvark!
In spy movies it's common to run the shower and muffle the sound to evade listening devices.
Any analog watermark is going to have to be quiet enough so that listeners can't hear the watermark tones when listening to the radio -- but loud enough that any recorder can hear them.
Wouldn't it be possible to watermark a recording of silence and play it loud enough to disrupt all recordings for miles?
Does this mean that if they had their way, then if I spoke copyrighted lyrics into a speech to text system, it would shut down?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Don't see any more movies, don't buy any more CDs, just stop giving them money. Like all of you people who saw Star Wars, you're helping to make useful digital cameras a thing of the past. (I mean digital cameras for the little people since the bigshot movie people won't have to follow this law.)
Do you understand the implications of this? You can't record a couple's first dance at their wedding because the copyrighted music in the background cannot be allowed to be converted from analog to digital. Plz use this example to explain how sick these people are instead of talking about abstract coding ideas. Not being able to record a wedding reception will hit pretty close to home.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
So we've got the CBDTPA to (hopefully not) let them "own" all the digital devices, and now they want to go after analog. How long before they claim people are using 802.11 and come up with something to let them steal the airwaves?
--
"Hey, good thing they're coming after my 28.8kbps modem...this thing is just like a crazy piratin' machine! I got 2 mp3's this month!"
Page 2, under "The Broadcast Flag" "Detection and response to the Broadcast Flag does not mean less functionality for video devices, including PCs that receive DTV. Rather it adds to these devices the ability to determine the difference between protected and unprotected works. The MPAA and its member companies have no desire to reduce the functionality of PCs or other devices and in fact want them to be MORE functional, not less. That is, so that they are able to provide a secure environment for digital over-the-air broadcast television content, in addition to everything else they do today." That is right up there with "[insert Spyware of choice] doesn't infringe on your rights as a consumer -- it is giving your PC more functionality by allowing us to market to you in select ways with select business partners."
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
The big deal here is that they are putting restrictions on devices which have legitimate usage.
My car does 140mph, legally I can only do half that. No legislator would consider requiring all cars to be blocked from these speeds unless the road told the engine manager that this was a race track.
This is the same thing. I like knowing I can copy CDs - its nice. Most of the time I'm just copying my own stuff, work, photos, etc... all of which would become a pain in the ass with this type of blocking technology.
Congress is spending more and more of its time considering legislation that requires technological enforcement of copyright laws.
It occurs to me, that if they are keen on using technology to actually enforce laws, rather than relying on the people's own good judgement and respect for the law, then they have much bigger fish to fry.
Why is it than we've not seen a legislative mandate that requires car manufacutrers to prevent drunk driving? How about limiters that prevent aggressive driving or speeding? Why have we not seen legislative mandates that require gun manufacturers to make guns that can't kill innocent people (or, at the very least, cannot be accidentally fired i.e. by a child)?
After all, these are issues that *kill* people. And human lives are more important than money, aren't they? Aren't they?
It's not that the technology in either of those cases is beyond the state of the art. It's that there's no money in it for them. The money in those two cases are in the hands of the automobile and gun manufacturers.
In the case for building copyright protection into the simplest A to D converters, the money is on the side of the MPAA. The electronics industry's position is unclear for now... they could stand to benefit by this legislation ('oh gosh, Mr & Mrs. Consumer! All of your electronics are now incompatible with the current releases from Hollywood! Tsk. You'll have to buy a totally new set of consumer electronics.'). They can also count on hackers breaking encryption scemes every few years, leading to another change in standards... forcing yet more upgrades.
I just have an image of all the senators manning a fast food joint "...that's the super legislative combo... would you like fries with that? OK... it'll be $5 Million in campaign donations, please pull up to the window."
Cory Doctorow writes: your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo.
:)
That would put a pleasant end to all those wankers who use their mobile phone in movie theatres.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
My freedom, blah, blah, blah... out of touch legislators blah blah blah. Wanna even a chance to be heard?
1. Fill out this form. Really. Don't just read the comments, and don't just post here. Take a minute and write a thoughtful, well argued comment. Senators don't give a damn what people on Slashdot are saying, but they'll give a damn if it's on their own fancy website.
2. Vote with your vote. Get the hell out there and support candidates that see through all of this crap. As a community, we rant and rave that the whole system is munged then turn around and skip the vote en masse. Ever wonder why no one wants to mess with Social Security? Talk to this very consistent voting group. Senators listen to votes, not money. They only listen to money because it helps them buy more votes. Don't vote? Don't complain.
3. Vote with your dollar. If you rant, then continue to support these businesses, you have no one to blame but yourself. Just as politicians only respond to votes, most businesses only respond to money.
It's got to be more than talk, guys. If we don't start backing any of this up, we'll just be the cranky tech curmudgeons who desperately hang on to the antiquated notion of "freedom."
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
How is this an emergency situation? Please, PLEEEEEEASE tell me you're not serious?
As an electrical engineer student, I have built my own A/D converter circuit along with a sample and hold to signal inputs and put them into the computer. They are relatively simple both in overall design and the ADC chips themselves are also very simple: only about 16 pins with a single input and several outputs to represent the input voltage as a binary number. It is both ludicrous and impossible to convert this into something that checks a "digital watermark". Forget the linked article's references to how your cell phone would turn off if it were on near a copyrighted song.
A huge portion of our technology involves A/D chips. Your car uses one for the speedometer, for the fuel injection, etc. Digital audio amplifiers use it. VCR's use it. Any and all digital sensors use it. Adding in digital watermark checking functionality would increase the complexity of this simple, ubiquitous and cheap chip (prolly less than 10 cents, but that's just a guess) several orders of magnitude. It would be like the difference between your solar powered calculator and your desktop. Expenses in electronics industries would jump to compensate for this added complexity, because unlike the movie industry they operate very close to full efficiency.
In short, there is absolutely no way to make this request by the MPAA workable. None at all. Their execs wanting to control A/D conversion is just indicative of how far removed from reality they are. Unfortunately, that might not prevent them from convincing congress to allow this idiocy to go through, so i STRONGLY recommend submitting in the feedback form that NO you don't support it, and furthermore there is only one rational viewpoint on it. Feel free adopt my examples or argument.
Other examples of A/D :
How the telephone company decodes the tones when you press a button into a number
How digital cell phones work
How fax machines work
Digital medical equipment (measuring blood pressure, heartbeat, etc)
Literally any digital sensor
Your themostat in your house
etc
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sadly, the third part of the report's summary - 'Controlling the Internet' - is much easier than the EFF report on the BPDG suggests.
All it would require is a law banning all ISPs from forwarding incoming TCP connections, UDP packets etc on to a subscriber, unless such subscriber has a license to operate as a 'server'.
Similarly, anyone directly connected to the backbone would need a license to accept incoming connections.
The US could threaten trade sanctions against any other country that doesn't pass similar laws.
The licensing regime for 'servers' would be onerous, and include things such as mandatory logs with IP addresses, times etc going back 3 years, also a cache of the last 200GB of data transferred. Anyone trafficking in unauthorised protocols, or using unauthorised cryptography, would lose their license.
That way, only medium-large sized companies would have the funds and resources to fulfil the administrative requirements of license compliance.
This is war - no sooner has the internet exploded onto the world stage, than the powers that be are fighting tooth and nail to protect their monopoly.
The most powerful way to fight - stop going to movies, even 'Star Wars' etc - discourage your friends - boycott Hollywood.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Emergency situation?? What are you talking about!! Could you be referring to this new-fangled technology that allows home users to record sounds on wax cylinders, or shiny compact discs ("CD"'s)?? Please explain yourself, because you come across sounding highly clueless.
The initial comment was written by "Glenn Thompson" from Gold Beach , Oregon.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
With this as the norm, and advertisers increasingly pushing new and more invasive ways to get their "content" to you, the abillity to record anything would be put in jeopardy. Billboards could prevent a photo of the skyline. Political speeches could be buried by someone playing "Who let the Dogs Out" on a boombox. Homemade Christmas videos would be a thing of the past, with copyrighted logos and packaging preventing recording, not to mention sound effects and music from toys.
MY question is: Is content really in that much trouble? Are books, movies and music copyrights being violated so much, that oppressive hardware solutions are the only answer?
I grew up thinking that copyright was to protect ME. If I wrote a song, or a paper, copyright would prevent someone from taking some or all of it and repesenting it as _their own work_. It now seems that that is not the case anymore, and copyright is being used to prevent duplication for ones own use (FAIR USE), and CREATION of content by the individual.
I urge everyone reading about this on /. to bring the message to people who aren't /.ers. The 'average joes' (w/ apologies to average joe ;) need to hear about these proposals. Too often, these things remain unheard of by the voting public. The media owned by the media protecting the media. Please spread the word.
"CONTENT" = BULLSHIT
Now that in the USA bullshit is more important than reality, this shows that the USA are decadent and does not contribute anything to the global welfare.
If a $600G/year industry cannot defend itself against a $18G/year industry, it doesn't deserve to exist.
So I take it you've missed the campaigns for BreathAlyzers in cars, the various efforts for engine governors, and the "Smart Gun" that can only be fired by its registered owner?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
So we're in a world where ADCs have been set up to detect watermarked material and suppress it. Think how much fun you can have with this!
...uh... performance. Turn it on. At the very least all the outbound broadcast feeds die; if you're lucky and the hall has a digital sound system all the microphones just stop working.
Envision a small device that emits a fairly low level of white noise with the watermark in it. Perhaps it's just an MP3 player looping a watermarked recording of John Cage's 4'33".
Bring one of these to a political debate or a religious
Walk into a bank carrying a running DVD player. Say! What happened to all the security cameras?
The possibilities are endless.
--Andy Hickmott
What are they going to do about the ultimate analog hole? You know the one, you all have it.
It's the "analog hole" that runs out of the speakers, into the air, across the room, and into your ears.
Or off the screen, into the air, and smacks into your eyes.
That's one big fooking hole right there, and I know for a fact that unprotected digital music and video are passing through that hole every day. Just the other day I was in a room where Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was flowing right through the hole, unencrypted, right into the eyes of about 150 other people besides me.
This hole must be plugged. I hope they're drawing up the legislation and mapping out the new devices right now. In fact, I saw such devices being used just the other day on Star Trek...this advanced race has these cool so-called "borg implants".
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Memo from Senator Hollings, et al.:
To Wit:
Given that there is a tremendous number of devices that can A/D music and video illegally and that once we have banned unmodified A/D devices, illicit A/D devices will soon be smuggled into our beloved country disguised as routine cocaine shipments, we are forced to take the next logical step:
Congress shall pass a law wherein all persons in the USD (United States of Disney) shall be retrofited with Digital and Analog Watermark devices on their visual and aural receptors. Said persons shall be prohibited by law to remove these devices once implanted and any person found to be without shall on the first offense be sent to a Intelectual Properties Reeducation camp. A second offense shall result in the permanent disabling of their Intellectual property receptors. Any child born in this country after the date of passage shall be impounded until such time they have been properly indoctrinated and fitted with their devices. All alien persons visiting the USD shall be fitted with temporary devices for the duration of their stay.
Since many people in this country have not been properly indoctrinated (or those who have resisted initial efforts to implant their devices), informational messages shall be fed to the subjects of this great land to inspire them to lead a better more wholesome life.
The honorable Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General has requested that to ensure that persons capable of excessivly creative thought or possess unfair physical capabilities or attributes, be required to have installed on their person, devices to render their unfair capabilities neutral.
Thank you.
Senator Ernest Hollings
In Walt We Trust.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Good thing 51 votes are required then.
I think at least part of the reason why we are seeing these proposals one right after another is because the ban on soft money is right around the corner. When it takes affect, it will be at least a little harder for these groups to line pockets and buy congressional delegates. The MPAA, RIAA, etc. are really wanting to do these things while their influence is at it's max.
you must have missed the /. article last year (don't have a link handy, sorry) that politicians someplace (UK, I think) were considering doing just that. The plan was to pack a GPS and a speed governor in every vehicle, and depending on where the GPS said you were, the governor would limit you to the speed limit on the road. I would be continually amazed at all the really stupid stuff governments and corporate executives try to do (come to think of it, there really isn't a whole lot of difference except that in democratic countries there are laws against what the former can do while corporations run roughshod) except that I've seen so much of it I just shake my head at the next ocurrence of stupidity.
What is your Slash Rating?
When people like us say A-D converter, we think of devices that convert a continuous signal into discrete levels.
However, when the **AA says A-D converter, they're thinking about content stored on analog media being moved onto digital media.
I'm sure the MPAA ain't thinking of digital thermometers or such lower level devices (though if a black marker can be a circumvention device, why not a digitherm?). They're thinking of analog content, in the form of audio cassettes, VCRs, TV, the like. Same 2 words, but their interpretation is completely different to the technical interpretation we're used to. Almost, a storm in a teacup. The MPAA doesn't care about your wristwatch, your alarm clock! (I suppose they're not smart enough to realize the potential circumvention uses of such harmless devices *grin*)
What would be an absolute tragedy though, is if this misunderstanding of a technical term became enshrined in law. Then, one day some idle lawyer could pounce on the idle wording and start issuing C&D's to, say, alarm clock manufacturers.
They want to go all the way. They want automatic electronic enforcement of laws, using the level of smarts that can only determine that the user might be breaking the law currently, which is sufficient justification to allow them to immediately stop you. This is judge, jury, and prosecutor on a chip that can only make a few and/xor/nor decisions.
What's next, they ask congress allow digital cameras to use a stun gun on the user and call the police whenever it thinks the user might be doing something wrong?
Those are all good examples of other attempts to legislate personal responsibility through the manufacturer.
That being said, however, I think what the original poster was pointing out was the speed with which federal government listens to things when business wants something as opposed to individuals. There are movements to do all of the things you mention, but they don't seem to have had the same impact as what the MPAA is doing. Maybe the MPAA sounds just as reasonable to legislators as smart guns, but I don't think so.
I think the original poster was pointing out that all those things haven't been passed (although the MPAA stuff hasn't--but c.f. the DMCA), and it may be because the manufacturers don't support them. If they did, we might see engine governors, smart guns, etc.
The fact that there have been so many efforts to get engine governors without any real legislative attention whatsoever, but immediate attention when the MPAA wants anything, is disturbing. I think the original post was pointing out a disturbing trend in which individual citizens have to comprise a massive number before they amount to anything, but business merely has to mention something.
Why doesn't someone just design and then patent an ADC that has this watermarking technology built in? I don't imagine any of the *AA's have done it yet, and ADC's are pretty simple circuits...just come up with some lame watermarking scheme, implement it and patent it. Guaranteed you'll get the patent. Then, you have THEM at your mercy (or they haul your ass into court trying to void your patent).
they are perfectly justified in getting out a blanket law right away and then tweaking it to allow certain behaviors afterwards.
I would say that we are perfectly justified in opposing a blanket law. If they want to pass a law that we feel would infringe on our rights, we shouldn't say, "oh, it'll be alright, they'll give us our rights back later when they realize that we really need them."
Don't believe me?
Income Tax.
Social Security numbers.
I'm sure there are more.
The government doesn't like to change laws if the laws give them more power, or if they give those who they are indebted to more power. If we let Uncle Sam into our houses or our computers today, he's not going to leave, and he's going to help himself to all our Bawlz and Code Red while he's there.
Synergy is your friend
Now the MPAA wants to make a device that is used in MANY, MANY devices cost 3 or 4 times as much, including massive redesign efforts throughout the electronic components industry. Tell me that that won't cause our electronics industry to slow down... (after all, we were just surpassed significantly in supercomputer performance)
The increased cost of the ADCs will be presented to the consumer... EVERY CD player, EVERY VCR, EVERY other electronic component will increase in cost something like $5.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
these are the idiots we have working for us. on the one side, we have warhawk who support big Industry, on the other, we have psudo-wanabe-whatever-is-popular-at-the-time-and-n ot-republican idiots who are in the pockets of Big media.
Big Money, Inc. has bought and paid for the legislature and the presidency long ago.
Support any and all campaign finance reform that regulates the contributions -- limits their size, limits their frequency and mandates reporting. It's the only chance to elect candidates whose mission in life isn't serving corporate interests.
Don't these guys have anyone /technical/ advising them? Let's say I go to a Big Budget Movie with Anti-Piracy Watermark (TM) and take my Anti-Piracy CamCorder (TM) with me to bootleg the movie. (I don't do that sort of thing, but this is an example...)
We'll ignore for the minute that most of the piracy of movies that goes on is by insiders. We'll also ignore the fact that you can get the movie from less than legal channels without taping it, allowing you to actually enjoy the movie in the theatre rather than taping it.
Back to my case. If I'm taping this movie, there are two suppositions involved related to watermarking: audio and visual. The technical question is: How on earth do you put watermarking in a visual medium without people seeing it and in an audible medium without people hearing it? On a movie screen, if you put a visual watermark in, even on every Nth frame, it's still going to be apparent that something is going on. Likewise with an audible watermark. If you insert some kind of sound clip, you have to avoid the low frequencies (it'll be drowned in the bass) and the high frequencies (people will take notice).
I don't frankly see a legitimate technical way to do this. Sure, you can try putting in embedded electronic codes to keep someone from copying something (e.g., CD/DVD to tape), but there will still be enough legacy devices running around that you can't retrofit, and in any case, people will crack the protection-scheme-of-the-month.
Maybe I've missed something (please let me know what, if I have), but I don't see that these propsed laws are technically feasible. Mind, I'm not inclined toward protectionist laws anyway, which is all this is. There's no difference between trying to get laws passed to prevent people from exercising their right to fair use and trying to get laws passed to increase tariffs on, say, steel. In this regard, unfortunately, the Bush administration is likely to be supportive of the recording industry...after all, we can't let the high-rolling Hollywood execs (who fund political campaigns) suffer in abject poverty because of the thieving consumers.
What is your Slash Rating?
Hollywood says to NASA: All of the ADC's on your future Mars rovers will have to include a cop-chip to make sure that your sensors shut down if they sense any Metallica songs on the Red Planet.
NASA says to Hollywood: We're going to sue you for every time the "NASA" logo has ever appeared in a Hollywood movie.
Hollywood: Okay, never mind...
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I'll make this short, but sweet.
The United States was founded by people who believed in the public good. They set up commissions for public libraries and promotion of the arts, while at the same time granting inventors and authors the ability to profit from their works until they faded into the public domain. Our most hallowed documents, our most cherished music, even our national anthem come from the re-use of work written by authors and musicians a generation before.
Yet, the MPAA and the RIAA want to tell *me* that this is Unamerican. That my role in society is not as a citizen, or a voter, or a patriot -- but solely one as a consumer. Had this been the prevailing attitude in the late eighteenth century, there would be no Congress, no Senate, no President, no freedom; we would all be loyal subjects of the King, and Benjamin Franklin would be remembered as an eccentric intellectual imprisoned and executed for copyright violations.
I am not a consumer, or a "content provider", or a market statistic; I am a *citizen*. Please treat me like one.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
The purpose of copyright law is to promote wide distribution of quality content and information.
The mechanism of copyright law was designed to protect powerless content producers from powerful content publishers.
Custom and usage has turned that on its head. The law now primarily protects the powerful publishers, and it does so more each year. Copyright law does not promote quality, nor does it encourage migration into the public domain, the original and quite explicit goal.
The goal of commercial publishers is now clear. It is to buy laws that - de facto - prevent self publishing by raising the technological and cost bar so high that only established interests will be able to distribute work that can be used by a significant proportion of the people. Instead of protecting talented people from ruthless publishers, copyright laws will soon mandate the effective enslavement of the very people they were meant to protect.
This is not what copyright law was invented for. And it was an invention. There is no "natural" or "social" law or convention that prevents people from sharing or repeating information. Copyright law was invented, and it was invented with a particular purpose in mind. We have now very nearly inverted that purpose through creeping amendments and fiddling with the original laws.
If you do write to your elected representatives, I'd suggest that you make it clear that you understand this, that you haven't been brainwashed by Disney into believing that only huge commercial publishers should control all distribution and dissemination of information, that you want a complete cleanout of copyright laws, and a return to the original intent.
Once more for luck: the original and explicit intent of copyright law is to promote the distribution of information and content from individual producers to individual consumers by ensuring that distributors - those with the money and power - could not dictate terms, steal work, and become even richer and more powerful at the expense of the people at either end of the chain.
I'd say we're well overdue for a return to that situation, and I'd bet good money that a vast majority of (nameless, faceless, powerless) authors, musicians, scriptwriters, and garage inventors would agree.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm no biologist, but aren't our 5 senses "analog to digital" converters? (timpanic membrane/tongue/retina/olfactory/skin => Na, K electrolyte pump => neural stimulus....you get the idea)
Get bent MPAA. There will be no watermarking near me anytime soon.
This technology is beyond Star Trek. Hell, it is even beyond capabilities of most humans (who are most adaptive computers on the planet so far, that we know of.) If I were to sit in a chip, how would I know legal status of the work and of the recording? And what if the legal status changed after the recording was made? And what if the recording is done with permission? And what... -- forget it.
You can send them your opinion if you want, but I'm pretty certain that they have employees whose sole job it is to laugh at all submissions and then shred them. We can hang around all day on Slashdot and whine about the evil RIAA and MPAA, or we can take action. I'm fully prepared to not visit any movie theaters, not rent any DVDs, and cancel my subscription to DirecTV for one year, just to send a message. If enough members of the geek community (who probably exhibit above average consumption of media products) followed through and put their convictions above their addictive urge to see AOTC etc, we might just create a significant enough dip in revenues for one year to get their attention.
If your will power isn't strong enough to resist visiting the cineplex, at least try buying only used CDs and DVDs (locally or from Amazon) and avoid renting new releases. Also, get a TiVo and set it to grab movies from free TV. Get a TiVo just to piss them off, if nothing else.
"Owners of copyrighted works remain concerned that valuable digital copyrighted works are subject to infringement when distributed in American homes to analog television sets in free over-the-air terrestrial broadcasts, and in peer-to-peer online services."
I have three comments on the above statement.
The first is that valuable works are already being transmitted over-the-air via terrestrial broadcasts. And consumers in their homes can record these broadcasts already using a VCR. I cannot understand how one can differentiate between digital content and analog content when displayed by an analog television set. While placing rights management on analog television signals may look like a solution, it places the full cost burden for protecting those copyrights on the owner of that analog television set. If such a law were enacted, every television set currently in use would be unusable and have to be replaced. And anyone who owned and used their current television set would be a criminal.
In addition, the airwaves are a public resource whose use is governed by the FCC. If a law were enacted to halt free and public use of the frequency spectrum, doesn't that defeat the purpose of having that frequency spectrum be public?
The second point to be made concerns the aggregation of the public frequency spectrum and peer-to-peer networks in use over the Internet while discussing potential law. These two must be kept separate, as they fall under two very distinct categories of governance. As the frequency spectrum is regulated and licensed on behalf of the public by the FCC, the Internet has no such regulatory rule or licensing. In addition, the FCC can license only those transmitters that reside inside US borders. With the Internet, any regulation cannot be mandated by a single country.
The third point is to examine, honestly, why the current copyright laws are inadequate. In the case of analog television sets, what has changed since the advent of the VCR? Can't the VCR be used to make unlawful copies of copyrighted material? The fact that the signal is digital or the content is digital is immaterial to the violation of copyright law. Can it honestly be said that other copyrighted works, such as books, are less vunerable to having their copyrights violated? The question for the content providers to answer is why does a digital representation of a work deserve a higher standard to protect it.
In the end, the costs to the public must outweigh the needs of one industry to protect its business model. America has always been called "the land of opportunity." Rather than squelching opportunity by legislating, the US Government in all its branches should be promoting new ideas and opportunities. I would hope that the public of the US, and the potential opportunities they have, will be a more powerful ideal to uphold.
This came out a month ago, right? So, is there any analysis from "Management-approved" sources about the "All A/D Converters" bit? I mean, a source that my management would consider viable, not just some guy's blog (no matter how smart he is). Engineering trade publications might be a good place to look for non-Disney bias. I read a few of them, and haven't found something like this.
My company works with A/D converters, and if this is interpreted by "management-approved sources" as something that can really effect "All A/D converters", you can bet that someone here would be interested in contacting the polititians about it. And, we all know that my company's word (and campaign contributions) are worth far more than my own.
(By the way, even if you can figure out where I work (which you can't), these opinions are my own and not those of my company.)
When you make a budget, always include a bogus item (example: .5 million paperclips) for the bean-counters to eliminate. Otherwise, they will cut something real. The beanie boys have to justify their existence by quantifying how much money they saved the company through budget analysis and streamlining.
When you lobby for something from the government, always extend your request well into the realm of the ludicrous. That gives the lawgivers something to eliminate, thus demonstrating their statesmanship, technical savvy and willingness to compromise.
So; if you want to pass a law requiring digital copyright protection in all computers, ask for digital copyright protection in toasters and vibrators too. Then weep crocodile tears when your real legislative objective becomes "a reasonable compromise between affected parties".
"You know, a DEAL deal. Maybe he's a republican!" -Crapgame (Don Rickles) in "Kelly's Heroes"
No audio watermark scheme has ever succeeded. I remember schemes for record, tape and CDs and none of them survive. What are the odds this one would?
Remember, the one audio recording format that RIAA did manage to enforce copy restrictions on, DAT, is dead.
The limited play CD is dead.
People may not understand the legal technicalities
and will just return equipment to the shop if it doesn't record what they want to record. If that happens to much the shops will just stop stocking the hardware.
Wrong. That's the point. Nice ad hominem attack, by the way.
Here's my take. The record companies are the milkmen of tomorrow. In the old days, milk was delivered door to door by milkmen. There was a certain convenience involved, but refrigeration, pasteurization, and the fact that you need to go to the grocery store anyway pretty much eliminated the need for them. They were optimized out of the process.
:)
Artists today make their money performing. A very tiny percentage of artists make significant money from their recordings. Total, open promotion of their music is really in most artists' best interest -- they can fill their shows with fans who'll pay $10 a ticket, and buy a T-shirt for good measure.
In this world where fans listen to tons of different music for free, directly support their favorite artists, and creativity (rather than marketing) is rewarded, the record companies are...milkmen. Say goodbye.
Here, though, the milkmen have enough money to buy friends. And to buy laws that keep them in business. Push back, whenever you can. When M'shell releases an MP3 for $0.99, how much of that does she get? When broadcasting rights are negotiated with online radio stations, where does the revenue go? 90% artist? Somehow I doubt it.
Actors guilds have contracts that state the maximum amount an actor can pay an agent (10%). Great woe would become a record industry faced with an organized public, or organized artists. Deserved woe.
In the mean time, GENERAL COMPUTATION IS AT RISK. Your right to make any program you'd like, for your own purposes, to explore Raymond's noosphere, is at risk. Milkmen want laws and circuits to keep them in business.
Stop giving them a hard time. They're just trying to prevent illegal copying. Oh, damn, I've just illegally copied 26, 27, 28, 29 words from Webster's.
If bits have inherant value, like cash (the Hollywood stance) then what Hollywood wants is bits which are as hard to copy as cash it, or preferrably harder.
We call it copying, they call it counterfeiting.
I can see their point: if I could walk up to any photocopier and digitally reproduce my twenty dollar bill, our economy really would be in trouble!
If it became impossible to protect cash from copying, all we'd have left is credit cards and other centralized systems for storing money: banks and the like, which prevent copying of money via tools like "accountancy".
I think, if we're serious about the so-called "digital economy", we better face this as a serious problem and propose a constructive solution, rather than running around like a bunch of children complaining because they can't photocopy twenties any more.
[ok, how much karma can I burn in a single post, huh?]
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
"I think everyone here should take pains to let the Congress know about the direct, measurable economic harm that will befall other industries if this type of legislation passes."
I agree wholeheartedly. But who do we contact? It'd be great if the story submitters or the editors or just some AC poster put up the details on who is sponsoring a bill, which committee is in charge of it, and on contacting them or your own senator/representative by mail, phone, fax or email.
I'm sure crap like this analog to digital "protection" outrages a lot of people here but not everyone knows who to complain to! Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the oil....So we need to start squeaking! The MPAA/RIAA have been squeaking too loud and too much!
I'm Australian, living in the Netherlands, but anyways,
I remember as a kid, I wanted to go to America to work, I remember having to wait for months for games to come out on the NES/SMS, yet I would read American games magazines and they where out there....same with movies, we could wait 6-12months for new movies......
Things still havent changed much, music releases are mostly on par globally, games and movie releases arent (BladeII is coming out in June I think, maybe July....) and I think this is a large source of this piracy (I already saw a dodgy screener of BladeII)....the reason being not for gain or to subvert the system, mearly because of the fact that we have to wait so long to see/play anything over here.
Which I actually find pretty amusing. I could imagine that alot of this perceived problem is actually caused by us outside of america, so when in america, we see a bill being passed like this, its kinda amusing....its not right, but its still funny.....its almost like in america, they believe the internet is theirs, they own it, they can regulate it....trully arrogant and bound to fail.
but I appear to have gotten myself sidetracked....as a kid, i wanted to live in america, but after recent events, the government openly telling people "dont question us", the feds with almost absolute power to get any info on anyone without reason, the tracking of H1B visas and now, chips in ADs....I am sure that if they are putting in cpus in them, i'm sure tracking functionality cant be far away, i mean, i could imagine they would mainly target techie gear, soundcards/vidcapture cards.....i think i will stay away from america now, far far away.
all you are, is all you are, i'm so sorry for you.
I have been thinking about this. If there was a boycott against the RIAA and the MPAA, and those boycotts were able to have some monetary effect, do you actually think the MPAA and RIAA would realize that? Hell no. They would say "See, pirates have stolen our profits!" How can the MPAA claim that pirated copies of Spider-man and AOTC took millions out of their pockets, when these movies had a couple of the largest opening weekends EVER?! Yeah, pirates cost the RIAA tons of money, which is why bands like N'Sync sell millions upon millions of albums, breaking sales records.
It is definitely a double-edged sword. If enough people boycott them, they will spin it to show that pirates have stolen their profits. If you don't boycott them, they will have no reason to change their ways.
The only way to F them, and F them HARD, is to have some kind of legal alternative that shows exactly where their lost business is going.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It became necessary to destroy the content in order to save it.
I have a strong belief in the Second Amendment.
If this doesn't work then they are going to make everyone install shutters over their eyes and ears that close whenever you get near or look at an unauthroized sound/symbol. That way you won't be able to enjoy the copyrighted material unless you pay them for it.
Laws like this make me want to steal all my music and movies because that way I can't support these bastards. Too bad I still want to support the people actually doing the work to bring these movies and sounds to film and record.
The MPAA doesn't seem to know delta sigma analog to digital conversion. You can easily build a ADC with just one digital in and one digital output pin, a capacitor and some resistors.
If they ban these components, you can still build a capacitor with aluminium foil and paper, and you can make resistors with pencils.
Jan
Legislators often won't consider exactly how basic the technology they're banning is; if you want an example, look at firearms. Do you know how complicated zip guns are? Not very, and though they aren't useful at a distance, inside a few feet they're deadly.
Do you have any faucet washers in your tool drawer? Beware; they could be called "silencer parts", and people have been prosecuted for it. The same is true of auto muffler parts.
The government wants you to speed.
The government wants drunk drivers on the roads.
And in any case - The government really can't control either. But to back up my statements; There is an industry of crime in the US. There are too many people making too much money on the status quo to turn back now. When you speed, the government writes tickets; It's kind of like every highway is a toll road, but only for those who utilize it to its fullest. A lot of money is made based on speeding tickets. In fact, Texas eventually had to pass a law saying that a given county could only make a certain percentage of it revenue from writing tickets. The city responsible for this is Johnson CIty, where I - shock amazement - got a ticket.
As for wanting drunk drivers; That's an important part of the system as well. Remember that the government (like the new RIAA/MPAA wing of the government) exerts control through FUD. The drunk drivers keep people scared. The penalties don't begin to keep people off the street.
And in any case, people would only defeat them anyway. They'd tamper with the systems and override the speed limiter, or replace the sensor element in the breathalyzer, or something. BMW tried to make cars too complex for a drunk to work with that new car control system, but it turns out that didn't work. :)
All in all, there are too many people making too much money for any part of the system to change significantly. Marijuana is illegal because of DuPont, more or less, and it stays illegal because of the poverty industry; Selling it puts money into the hands of minorities and the poor, which the government doesn't want because it wants to keep those people in poverty - Again, maintaining the social order from which they profit. Then they get to bust people for selling it (or occasionally for owning it or buying it) and fine those people, or sometimes throw them in jail. Prisons are a multi-billion dollar business in this country, largely as a result of our drug laws, whether directly or no. You can't stop putting people in prison, running them through the judicial system, and so on, because we'll have a bunch of unemployed prison wardens who let's face it, are not the most retrainable people around.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wouldn't it be a fairly straightforward matter to run interference on the watermark signal? I wonder what they have in mind. The spec on watermarking would have to be pretty public.
That said, I think this sucks.
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
Here's something else to consider, in the furor over whether or not these *koff* "creative sources" are to be "fairly" compensated for their works...
My guess is, that 99 out of 100 of these measures are going to "fail safe" -- in the event that an access control cannot reliably determine if you are authorized to view a protected work, it will default to "not authorized" and prevent you from accessing that work.
So what happens when a glitch in your hard drive scrambles the access key for all your DRM-enabled MP3 equivalents? Sorry, you're not going to be listening to those any more. And I'm sure the tech support for EasySafeAudio.com will be more than happy to just issue you a new access key, for free, right? No, they'll probably convince you that it's easier to pay for another access key -- in effort, you get to pay TWICE for the same "right to listen". And you have to, because otherwise your 80GB of rights-protected media files sitting on your hard drive are useless unless you do...
I wouldn't like these "features" even if they WERE 100% error-proof and reliable. I sure as hell don't want them if they're buggy and easily corrupted -- which they will be, because monopoly control and lock-in is all about making easy money, not pushing quality products.
Jay (=
Hmm, a lot of telephone equipment does analog-to-digital and vice-versa conversions. Looks like the baby bells are all in big trouble now! Hahaha.
They'll just get an exception.
Of course the exception won't cover the converters in your computer's sound card or any add-on VoIP adapters you could use as the hardware component of a network telephone. So your alternative to their service will cost more, and will flake out if someone is playing a watermarked recording or radio program in the background.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Whatever crack they're smoking, i want in on it. It really seems to make reality look much different.
today is spelling optional day.
3. Vote with your dollar. If you rant, then continue to support these businesses, you have no one to blame but yourself. Just as politicians only respond to votes, most businesses only respond to money.
<SARCASM>
But then I might have to miss seeing Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones, or Lord of the Rings!
</SARCASM>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Our phone system is on an analog copper local loop. It plays on hold music (which we have paid a copyright fee for!!). However, the backbone network it is carried over is likely to be digital these days. People phone us, get put on hold and ... BANG!!! the phone goes dead, because the telephone exchange does not know we actually own the rights to this stuff??
Doh.
So say i'm using a digital camcorder in the mall and britney's new single starts playing from the loud-speakers does my camcorder shut down because it detects the watermark?
Imagine the effect on police "wires" if crooks take to playing watermarked music in the background.
Heck: I bet there'd be a big market for "watermarked silence" recordings just for making bugging more difficult.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's a thoroughly ridiculous concept. You can't ban an A/D or D/A converter any more than you can ban air or kittens or potatoes.
Trying to ban A/D converters is like trying to ban tea or koolaid. "Oh, my tapwater won't work with this teabag from Japan."
It's obvious that nobody involved has talked to an Engineer, or even an Engineering student. You can make an A/D converter from a handful of resistors and an op-amp. Any reasonably intelligent person could wire one together in, say, 5-10 minutes. (More time = more bits). Then you store the digital data stream in whatever digital format you want, and use the same converter (essentially, but not technically correct, wired backwards) on the other end to do the D/A conversion. It's super easy to do.
Ooh. On second thought, maybe I do want this legislation to go through. I'll make a friggin' fortune making mod chips for all kinds of devices. It's not like US law applies to me.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Really everyone, think about the potential here!
Play a copy of Pocahontas out of your car window, and never get another speeding ticket again. You are now invisible to radar.
Plan to hold up a bank? Bring along a portable TV and shut the cameras off. Also works at ATMs.
Worried about being wiretapped? Develop a tolerance for N'Sync. Always play it in the background.
Still want to rip cd/movie/analog data? Replace your a/d chip with a simple resistor tree and bank of opamps as comparitors and you're good to go.
This is a hacker's dream come true.
Weaselmancer
PS: It's a sad, sad world when a frikkin resistor tree is illegal because it's a circumvention device.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A few years ago, the RIAA pushed for laws to protect them from "exact digital copies". They played this card for years claiming these exact digital copies were a problem killing the industry. Now they seemed to have changed thier mind and this was a ploy to set the stage for further restrictions. MP3's, movie bootlegs, and other derived sources are not even close to exact copies of the original. This seems to be what this legislation would prevent. Maybe they would like to return to the days when everyone chucked thier 8-tracks, albums only lasted a few years and tapes were destroyed by sticky mechanisms. People were re-buying the same thing over again. Almost a pay-per-view concept that would ensure a revenue stream or repeat buyers.
As others have stated...
They can create thier own technology and sell it to the consumers. Why should someone expect an entire industry to change for them? Sadly enough, the winner will be determined by the best lobbying effort..
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Legislators need to realize that with their power to legislate also comes the responsibility to understand the issue. If they fail to understand the major ramifications and issues they're legislating, then some form of the Hippocratic Oath ought to hold: "First do no harm."
When literate, educated people are forced to frequently violate laws because they are impractical and unreasonable, it will lead to a general disrespect of all laws good and bad. This is the slippery slope toward anarchy.
Were this the only such misguided proposal floated in front of Congress I would say it's the industry association's fault or it's congresscritter ____'s fault. But this is not unique. It happens at all levels of our government on a regular basis.
The problem is that the technically literate people are not adequately represented in government. We do not normally review stupid legislative gaffs unless they're so egregious that they would change the lives of everyone in our society for the worse.
The technical groups in our society are getting soft. There is more to this fight than working for the EFF. The EFF only fights the dumb laws already on the books. Other organizations ought to advocate sustainable, reasonable technical policy and legislation. The issue isn't whether a decision benefits liberals or conservatives, but whether it is understood well enough, and whether it can work at all.
With stuff this egregious, where are organizations such as the IEEE or ACM? Can't organzations such as these have point out that this legislation is impractical and misguided without passing judgment on the RIAA's and MPAA's efforts?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
"Digital economy" is a null term anyway.
But the real problem is that CBDTPA and its ilk are attempting to make it impossible, in your terms, to photocopy our own artwork on the pretense that we might also try to photocopy $20 bills.
"We" do not have a "serious problem" here. It's the "content industry" that has a problem. It is up to them to solve it or go away.
On the off chance that you're not trolling.
Just remember, we may not have the economic muscle to BUY Congressmen and Senators, but WE can do something the MPAA CAN'T do. We can VOTE. Mybe we can't BUY them, but we DAMN sure can REPLACE them.
... "If you don't vote, you deserve the government you get."
As my father always told me
If you breathe and are eligible, register and vote. Even if you are NOT eligible, volunteer to help in a campaign. Only by participating can we take back our government.
utter rubbish
No, I'm not trolling, I'm dead serious: just because their solution is broken doesn't mean that there is no problem here: either bits have no value, or if they have value, that value has to either be:
1> given away
2> protected
Do you see any other options?
Stealing things is wrong: if Microsoft sold a product based on a modified Linux kernel, we'd scream blue murder and drag them into court.
But it's OK to download music?
We've got a double standard going on here: the GPL rests on copyright, but we don't want to enable big companies to implement technical measures to protect their copyrights....
If we don't take responsibility and solve this problem, it's going to get solved for us and we aren't going to like it one little bit.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I have now officially lost any respect I ever had for US legislative bodies. That anyone could even SUGGEST such a ludicrous idea and get it floated this high in the media shows that the very concept of Law as a construct of civil society is dead and buried. How ironic it is that the *AA seem to have read Gibson, Stephenson et al, and decided that they're happy to be the bad guys. Well fine, if that's what you want, that's what you get. I am going to do anything I can legally do to destroy those companies and their businesses. It's a shame to have to expend valuable cycles on destruction but it's going to be destruction through the creation of something better, which is what I will be trying to help with. Cos these bandits, these crooked, thieving, coniving, hypocritical, moronic, flabby, complacent, lazy, arrogant, greedy BASTARDS have decided that they want to do this the hard way. Well, *AA lawyers -- (you know they're out there, scouring these comments for more posts to try to damage the name of the Free Software community, as Seth thingumebob of the FSF pointed out eleswhere, they've already done this with deCSS in New York - read the court docs, there are quotes lifted straight from Slashdot!) -- to those lawyers I say, enjoy your fees, folks, and I hope you can sleep at night.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
In order for this work the law would have to stipulate
The other issue is A-D conversion, this is crazy. We are talking about everything electronic.
Phone system, digital cell phones, the switches and routing. Cameras, video cameras, flatbed scanners.
Heck you want to be crazy point out your computer mouse, your driving wheel and that joystick all infringe.
I think we'd all love to have our drive by wire system overriden because we drove in an "infringing" manner
Well, the Feds find out, and put the owner of the shop in prison for multiple violations of the analogue hole act. Maybe at the behest of one of his law abiding competitors, such as Walmart, who have been scrupulously complying with the analogue hole act and only selling screwed-up camcorders.
You, the uber-geek individual can still take a trip to Hong kong, Taiwan or wherever they still sell non-screwed-up camcorders, and probably get it back into the U. S. with no problem. Just as individuals purchasing pirate DVDs in those places probably won't have a problem, but shops that import them are basically only able to operate under the protection of organized crime.
Of course, God help you if you get someone with any governmental power after you if you have any of these things. They will cheerfully see to it that you, the individual, are prosecuted for the crime of having a non-screwed-up camcorder, even if your real crime was embarrasing them politically.
I wouldn't dismiss this, it can and will be used against us.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I'm pretty sure there will be test modes to disable the copyright control circuits also - during development, they may need to disable the controls to acurately evaluate the device performance.
:)
Also, perhaps some magic marker tricks might do the job too
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I just have an image of all the senators manning a fast food joint
... only it's a fantasy that the people will rise up and turn the scoundrels out of office for selling out like they have.
I have a similar vision
utter rubbish
I am a test engineer with an electronics manufacturer. This proposal by the MPAA to require watermark detection in all analog to digital conversion (ADC) devices would affect virtually all modern electronic equipment, most of which is NOT capable of doing anything with copyrighted material. Digital thermometers are based on an ADC chip. All test equipment is based on ADC chips. Even the automatic teller machine controllers we build include ADC.
In making this proposal, the MPAA has shown that they do not care how much havoc they wreak on the economy in general. You should not only reject this particular proposal, but take steps to reduce the power of the MPAA and similar organizations in the future.
Feel free to copy and paste, but please make some changes so they know each of you has commented individually.
But there are also significant similarities:
* each copy of a given bill degrades it's value (dilution of currency by counterfieting)
* the owner of the bill (the Federal Government - well, probably the Federal Reserve actually) asks you not to copy it and takes technological measures to ensure that you do not.
The analogy is worth while if only because it highlights what I see as the real problem: you can't run a digital economy without property rights.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
24 May 2002
I am particularly concerned about the "Content Protection Status
Report" filed by the MPAA on 25 April 2002, which speaks of an alleged
need to ``plug the analog hole'' (their words) in the distribution of
copyrighted works such as movies and music.
The MPAA would like to implement universal analog watermarking of
their music and movies, and would like to encourage legislation that
requires all A/D converting devices to detect (and, presumably,
respond to) their watermark signal. This idea is fundamentally
flawed, because it seeks to solve a global problem with a local
solution. The MPAA's tract contains at least three hidden assumptions
that are wrong: (1a) that it is possible to prevent _all_ illicit
production of digital copies of analog works, or (1b) that reducing
illicit A/D conversion will also prevent illicit distribution of those
works; (2) that it is reasonable to require manufacturers of A/D
converters -- extremely general devices with applications throughout
society -- to include useless (to most applications) detection
circuitry; and (3) that it is right to prevent citizens from enjoying
the fair use of copyrighted audio and video information that they own.
In short, the MPAA idea is wrong because it cannot work; because the
restrictions they propose would be overbroad, imposing impossibly
difficult restrictions on an entire industry; and because the restrictions
would violate the quid pro quo exchange of rights that is the basis of
copyright law.
(1) The MPAA proposal cannot work
The MPAA hopes to solve a problem -- the allegedly widespread copying
and illicit distribution of audio and video works -- by attacking a
slightly different one. The current proposal seeks not to prevent
digital copying but to prevent the conversion of analog signals to
digital ones, presumably preventing widespread copying by making it
more difficult to convert hard-to-distribute analog signals into
easy-to-distribute digital ones. The problem is that, once a single
digital copy is made, that digital copy may easily be spread far and
wide via file sharing or the world wide web. Raising the difficulty
of the initial conversion will not prevent the production of
high-quality digital copies.
A very similar case now exists with ``pirated'' digital movies which
are often recorded in the theater by people with digital video
cameras. Considerable effort is required to generate a digital movie
by copying it in the theater, but (as the recent pirated pre-release
of the _Star_Wars_ Episode II movie shows) once a single copy is
available tens or hundreds of thousands of copies may easily be disseminated.
Even if, as the MPAA suggests, ``analog watermarks'' become universal
in movies and audio streams, and A/D conversion devices that do not
recognize those watermarks become illegal, such A/D conversion will
still continue both within the United States (by scofflaws) and
outside of the United States (by foreign nationals who are not
restrained by U.S. law). But because of the power of the digital
distribution medium, even a tiny number of people can let the digital
cat out of the analog bag proposed by the MPAA, nullifying the goal
that they hope to achieve.
(2) The MPAA proposal unduly restricts an entire industry unrelated to
the publishing industry
Analog-to-digital converters are simple, general purpose circuits with
uses at every level of society. For example, digital still or video
cameras, nearly all modern automobiles, all cellular telephones, all
digital telephone answering machines, and most PC computers contain
A-D converters that are capable of digitizing music content. A-D
converters have too many specialty applications to mention, both as
individual modular integrated circuits and as complete appliances.
Preventing analog to digital conversion of copyrighted material would
require every such circuit to have a watermark detector and
corresponding digital signal processing capability. That would impose
undue burden on the manufacturers of such devices.
(3) The goals of the MPAA proposal are flawed and contrary to the spirit
of copyright law
The MPAA seeks to prevent certain types of access to copyrighted
analog audio and video works, but doing so would also impopse sweeping
restrictions on perfectly legitimate activities using those
copyrighted works.
For example, once a piece of music is digitized it is possible and
(with modern software) easy to analyze exactly nuances of voice and
timing that are otherwise very difficult to discern. Furthermore,
music is often stored much more compactly in compressed digital form
than in the original CD form. By copying and compressing the music on
CDs, a music lover can store the equivalent of 2,000 CDs in a single
hard drive with less volume than 10 CDs (in jewel cases), reducing the
need for large racks of CDs. By digitizing and compressing music
signals, users can transfer audio signals to much more mobile and
convenient devices for travel, remix sequences of audio tracks, enhance
particular aspects of the sound, and generally make much better use of
their copyrighted material than they could without doing so.
Similarly, broadcast video is often digitized by the modern digital
equivalent of a VCR -- a digital personal video recorder such as those
made by TiVo. This enables much easier time shifting and storage of
video than is possible with a conventional analog VCR. These uses of
broadcast video have been upheld by the Supreme Court for analog recordings,
and digital storage is simply a more effective way to engage in these
legal uses of broadcast material.
Conclusions
In general it is not wise to restrict the _tools_ required to engage
in an activity rather than the activity itself. Doing so requires
legislators -- who are wise but not inhumanly so -- to anticipate
every possible use of the tool. For example, an unmodified hi-fi
stereo amplifier can be used to fill a room with music, as a high
precision AC power supply for delicate equipment, for degaussing video
monitors, as a sound synthesizer, as a PA -- all legal. But it can
also be used for public performance of copyrighted music, for
telephone wiretapping, for eavesdropping, or to make unlicensed
LF radio broadcasts -- all illegal. Yet we distribute hi-fi stereos
without requiring them to have subsystems that prevent them being
attached to the telephone network or to a large external antenna, and
without limiting the amount of output power (which would prevent using
them for public performance).
A/D conversion of electrical signals and even of audio and video signals
are general enough activities that the MPAA's ideas are not only infeasible
but also just plain wrong.
In Progress: Open heart surgery.
Someone turns on a walkman and the sensitive medical instruments pick up the pulses from the electro-magnets in the headset of the user
Every screen goes black ..
"Collateral damage" it will be called.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Yes, duh. It's symmetrical. Drag the copyright violators to court, just like you said.
Clean, simple, and (unlike the crap legislation they're trying to hand us) totally constitutional.
Next problem?
I would like to urge those who claim to represent me to please recognize that the existing proposals are clearly not in my interests.
* Enacting the type of controls proposed by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America would, if perfectly implemented, completely eliminate my ability to exercise Fair Use rights in the content I have legally acquired.
* Any attempt to implement digital watermarking on every Analog-to-Digital converter would make literally thousands of common products impossible to manufacture economically. For a few examples: Consider that you would, as a conservative estimate, more than double the complexity, size and cost to manufacture of hearing aids; design of medical sensors and tools would be set back decades as the increased size of components would make them unsuitable for microsurgery; automobile emissions controls would become less efficient as their behavior would be dictated by artificial constraints imposed by the watermarking technology.
* Common consumer devices would function erratically as they attempt to prevent recording of watermarked content. For example video cameras might become non-functional at wedding receptions if the DJ is playing any watermarked content. Digital telephones would cut out if there is a TV or radio nearby playing watermarked content.
* Content would be unavailable after copyright has expired. Any content controls would have to be automatic, with special actions necessary to access it. Once the copyright term has expired, there is no economic incentive to the previous copyright holder to provide this mechanism. All content controlled by such a mechanism would disappear forever into a vault to which it is illegal to create a key.
* Finally, even if it were possible to create a technological solution that provided exactly what the content industries are requesting, there is no precedent for requiring the $600 billion tech industry to absorb the expense to satisfy the $35 billion entertainment industry. It is not at all unreasonable to suppose that the direct costs of complying with these requirements would cost more in real dollars than the entire value of the entertainment industry. Given that the only possible justification for enacting these controls is to protect the entertainment industry, it seems that causing a greater loss to the technology industry is the wrong way to go about it.
Nope, no sig
In today's NYTimes (registration blah blah) there's a big op/ed piece on the subject of Hollywood versus, well, everyone else, and why the public and it's representatives in Congress just don't get it.
This is beginning to sound a lot like the "Temples of Syrinx" movement of Rush's album 2112:
"The massive grey walls of the Temples rise from the heart of every Federation city. I have always been awed by them, to think that every single facet of every life is regulated and directed from within! Our books, our music, our work and play are all looked after by the benevolent wisdom of the priests..."
We've taken care of everything, The words you hear the songs you sing, The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes...
Creepy.
I'll say that at least the true colors are showing through. (I hope some go back and check Congressional testimony too, and see if perhaps it wasn't exactly truthful.)
If I recall correctly, when industry folks testified they indicated they wanted to protect the digital formats because piracy would be permitted of exact pristine copies of the original digital format. They indicated they didn't want to interfere with VCR's, etc, but the digital originals and that people could get 'fair use' through those analog type devices; fair use didn't guarantee that copies had to be in the same resolution and quality as the original. I think they believed they could say that becuase they figured analog devices (VCR's etc) would disappear as the digital age devices replaced them.
But the truth shows through since they have decided they won't disapper fast enough. They want to now insure that these devices can't even make analog copies (so much for the 'protecting digital copies' testimony). It also means the comments that analog copies degrade as copy after copy is made so that's not a problem to them like digital copies would be. (That was lame anyway. I'm sure pirates don't make copies from copies from copies.)
They figure since digital TV will force the replacement of sets, they'll incorporate all of their controls in the sets to let them have control over all of the remaining devices, the VCR's, old PC's with tuners, etc., and that DVD audio or similar will replace CD's so they'll insert that in all the new DVD players.
The TRUTH??? It's ALL about CONTROL. They never accepted betamax and figure they can circumvent it this way. It also lets THEM decide the when, where, what you can see on their timetables and basis.
Two questions for the industry. For those of us who went the HDTV route early; If our sets don't work, are you going to replace them for us? If cell phones have these chip cops, what are YOU going to do the first time someone tries to call an ambulance and can't because the user is too close to an audio track or concert that has watermarked audio. Are you going to accept the liability? Of course not, you'll say the government made you do it. (Though it'll be interesting when a politician like a Hollings is slandered by an opponent in a speech but nobody will be able to record it so they can be exposed. ha ha ha. Maybe there IS a plus to this chip cop)
I've never pirated. I've never p2p copied music. If all this stuff comes out? I'll be the first in line looking for the black market devices. This makes 1984 look amateurish.
They keep passing insane laws- ones that we swear are too nutso to be allowed and strip away what all save the businesses consider to be rights.
The people in the government tend to not listen to anyone except those with the most cash- because they're unafraid of being held accountable for their actions by their constituencies.
Both groups think nothing of what we want- they just view us as a resource, a source of funds or a "vote" that they can strip-mine at their whims.
This is because the populace has become apathetic- they view that there's little that they can do about it. There's nothing for them to take a stand over.
You HAVE to spell it out in clear, understandable terms what you're doing and why. You have to use analogies like the wedding recording one to show people just exactly what RIAA and MPAA are asking their legislators to make into law. And you have to stick to your guns and not go and buy their stuff. Make sure you explain to people exactly why you're doing this (incl. that lovely example...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Now, that would be cool, a watermark emitting device that shuts off a cell phone. No more having to listen to someone babble on the train, no worries about current jammers which (are illegal in the US) use rf on the same frequencies as the cell to jam them.
I'm sure hackers will find away around watermarks for anything we need to do, but I doubt the guy who's going on and on about his hot date won't have a clue.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I say that watermarks will always be easy to defeat. They have to already be at a low level in order to not interfere with the content enjoyment. Eventually, it will be known exactly how these watermarks are formed. But that doesn't even have to be known in detail to defeat them. And this defeat only needs to be done for the analog to digital step, unless watermark detection is also implemented elsewhere (the current proposal being to detect it at the analog to digital stage).
An example of such a watermark might be a very slight change of brightness level between frames or groups of frames with sufficient redundancy over time to eventually be detected despite scene brightness change. The codings might even be specifically "fitted" to the brightness changes in content in order to be detected. The key to making this approach work is that over the course of some time, but not over the entire content, there is enough brightness stability averaged out to allow the signal through.
To defeat this, a radical noise signal can be added. It would have spectral components at all frequencies so as to have a greater probability of impacting a watermark of unknown specifications. While this might not be as practical with a hidden camcorder in a theatre, it certainly can be in the confines of your home. Still, an LED injecting luminance behind the lens in a little hole drilled into the camera can do the trick even on a small scale.
Once the recording is made and the watermark detection fooled, you now have to remove the "countermark". But this is easy if the original noise is known. If the noise generator uses a pseudo random number generator with a known initial state, it can be precisely reproduced by replaying from the same initial state. Just get it syncronized (not hard to do in software) and subtract it back out. If linearity/gamma of the analog pickup is an issue, you can simply play the whole "countermark" against a white or gray solid background to measure and compensate for the effects.
Doing this for audio would be similar, but with a different range of spectra and signal levels.
The goal the ultimate watermark protection scheme has to have is to not only prevent attacks like that, but also do so for 100% of those attempting it. Let just one accomplish the task and P2P will see traffic.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
To identify copyright violators online, and drag them to court, requires strong identity verification for transactions on the internet: you'll be accountable for everything you do on line, and surveilance will be mandatory to enforce copyright law: it's the equivalent of the russian system of watching every photocopier to make sure nobody is copying anti-Sovient propoganda.
Is that what you want?
I didn't think so. Next solution?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
You may laugh! Once you realize that this is really about an industry trying to get the same protection for it's warez that the government gives cash, the whole thing takes on an entirely different light, doesn't it?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
This isn't just horrifying, it's impossible.
It seems to me that the implication is that I need a license to purchase a single transistor, since I can build an ADC given a few dozen of these and a few resistors and some wire.
Unless the law is construed to require licensing possession of any electronics whatsoever, it's not hard to build an ADC. Real pirates aren't finnicky about such licenses and will have no trouble finding a supply of unlicensed op-amps and flip-flops in old equipment.
Parts houses, small-scale electronics board assembly shops and their suppliers, research institutions and small engineering shops, on the other hand, should be completely freaked out by this. If they've been silent, maybe it is because they find the implications of this lunacy so ridiculous as to be unable to give the matter any credibility.
Ultimately, physical reality is unlicensed. Of course the proposed law will fail miserably to "plug" the "hole" a.k.a. "physical reality", but it could do an amazing amount of damage in the process. This is like trying to license every food item everywhere on the grounds that it might contain alcohol or be used to create alcohol, which is justifiably a regulated substance.
If this passes or even gets out of committee the way it's described here, the congress is dramatically less competent than one would hope.
mt
> The technical question is: How on earth do you put watermarking in a visual medium without people seeing it and in an audible medium without people hearing it?
I've heard this over and over again, so let's put this issue to rest. Believe it or not, human beings cannot see the entire spectrum of light, and human beings cannot hear the full range of possible sounds.
A visual watermark would be right smack dab in the middle of the picture, displayed in some harmless band of ultra-violet or infra-red. Audio watermarks would be too high pitched for us to hear (though hopefully they'd also put it out of dog hearing range too.)
And, of course, it'd be illegal to own an output device that couldn't display these innocuious signatures.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
What makes you think the Internet is so special?
Copyright enforcement is up to the copyright holder. Why should it be different for certain favored "industries"? The burden is on them (you) to justify their intrusive legislation, not on the public.
Right. You can't buy beer w/ a warezed c0py of "The Matrix." So a digital copy is not always the same as counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is the act of making a fradulent replica with intent to deceive (usu. by offering for sale). There is no deception in warez because it usually doesn't involve a sale, though warez is still illegal. Counterfeiting is the making and selling of fake copies of "The Blair Bitch Project."
However, counterfeiting is rampant in asia. The factories that pump out the real stamped copies for consumption also pump out pirate/counterfeit copies for the local black markets and gangs at 1/4 the price. Go anywhere in asia and your sure to find a Region 1 copy of Titanic for about $5.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Go ahead. That way you can literally ban ANY ADC! Sound waves don't carry a digital signiture, and personally, I'd get a real kick out of hiring lawyers to crack down on every audio equipment maker on the face of the earth, who couldn't BUY enough engineers to even BEGIN to figure out how to do something like this.
next story: "the MPAA want to ban unlicenced light: light can carry visual signals which can DESTROY OUR COPYRIGHT!"
It's not scary at this point, it's funny. It's damn hilarious. If there was a way to copy protect analog signals, it would have been everywhere by now. At this rate, they will want little Timmy to give up his little tape recorder because he can record the latest Metallica CD in the best tinny, bassless, mind shatteringly low quality recording that little tape recorder can manage from 2 inches away from Billys CD-Player.
It's been a long time.
function MM_jumpMenu(targ,selObj,restore)
That's not a Microsoft_Menue is it? I did not see the Front Page advert, but it looks like front page bloat.
The front page EULA forbids use of front page in the pulication of anti-microsoft material. This is something I mentioned in passing in my comment before I checked the page source. If you take that statement as anti-microsoft, the page is now not in complience with M$ EULA and must be taken down and all coppies destroyed. I love irony.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It isn't: minidisc went through all this ten years ago, resulting in abominations like the "data / music firewall" (which is why you can't buy an MD drive for your computer, and why MD was never sold as a data storage format on a significant scale), why you can't copy your own music infinitely on Minidisc, and why hardware which unsets the copy protection bit is so hard to find.
The internet is just the next digital technology to come under the hammer.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
What we need are some brave souls to do the following:
:)
1) Intercept a shipment of DVDs and/or CDs.
2) Call the local & national press to cover the following:
3) Have a protest while dumping said shipment of DVDs and/or CDs in the sea (or local river).
Note: This is illegal. You will be fined and/or jailed for this. So do this in a liberal community. Boston would work best.
Note 2: Try to make it so that the DVDs & CDs are easily retrievable so you don't pollute the river.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Here's the comment I submitted:
The CBDTPA is something that the government should not be involved in. The bill should be dropped immediately. The measure is not about copyright protection, but the protection of a stagnant industry unwilling to adapt its business model to new technology.
The technology industry is, to quote a widely circulated figure, a $600 billion behemoth. It arguably funds more jobs in two years than the $35 billion per annum entertainment industry does in twenty. However, the entertainment industry has an erroneous belief that it is entitled to legal protection from future challengers, and this bill is proof that fair use is nothing to be considered when profits are at stake.
Mainly, the crux of the issue is the purpose of computing devices. Computers have three main purposes: to read, write, and copy data. The entertainment industry is proposing nothing less than complete destruction of one of those three purposes, and for what? To protect their monopoly on an image of an animated character for a few more years? The idea strains--no, breaks--the limits of rational thought.
Contrary to the statements of Hollywood, computers are far more than expensive media devices. Their uses range far beyond playing audio or video clips; they are also instruments for content creation, for creativity and development. One wonders that if such "solutions" to copyright infringement were in place a few years ago, whether some recent movies (i.e. Shrek) could have even been developed. Given the heavy use of parody in that film, the answer is no.
Under this proposed bill, creating anything will become prohibitively expensive for the common person. Disregarding other obvious problems regarding the feasibility of such solutions (and the lack of appropriate technology to create them), this bill places inordinate constraints on technology with numerous legitimate uses to allay the fears of a small industry.
The entertainment industry seeks to exercise complete control over its content, trampling on the fair use rights of consumers and users everywhere. The CBDTPA is a product of monopolistic practices by a group of companies unwilling to submit to market forces. It should not be debated nor even considered; it is not viable, it is inefficient, and it is wholly irresponsible.
Let industries solve their own problems. Congress has no right, and no responsibility, to ensure the continued profitability of any company or monopoly.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
Minidisc went through SSSCA-style legislation? Did it really?
I must have missed that.
But you still haven't explained the need for the geek community to provide an alternative to Hollings-style legislation. That's an extraordinary claim; it requires more than an emotional rant to be justified.
Here is what I wrote...
Dear Sirs or Madams
The effectiveness of DRM will be proportional to the damage it does to both the Personal computer market and to effectiveness of enforcing United States intellectual property law overseas. The global market will not accommodate the legal enforcement of digital rights management and will benefit financially from the restricted position of American business, while American business suffers. The personal computer market is as successful and lucrative as it is as a direct result of the flexibility personal computers allow, if that flexibility is reduced it's value to the information market and it's positive influence on the economy are reduced as well.
Discouraging American citizens from infringing on copyright would be just as effective and far less financially damaging to our economy if it was done through compulsory licensing. This would more closely match an ideal free market. In addition, shorting copyright stay would force the industry to become more competitive with their time limit and subsequently more appealing to customers with their products. A copyright reform solution would also match more closely with a strict interpretation of the constitution, which explicitly states copyright is to be for "limited times", "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
As a strictly technical matter, DRM is only effective if the free use and processing of information on computers is diminished to nearly nothing. As an economic matter, we should not cripple the massive industry of flexible electronics in the United States for the smaller copyright industry.
Thank You for your time.
Matthew Newhall
A.S. Computer Science
President of LILUG
Long Island Linux Users Group
http://lilug.org/
president@lilug.org
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Talking about A to D converters is pointless...
1. They will obvious make exceptions if they want this law to pass.
2. As long as you're debating about A to D converters, no average person is going to care what you're saying.
Make this situation relate to people
If you tell people this bill aims to outlaw thier Tivo's, and copying from VHS to DVD, they will wonder why.
THEN you can talk about A to D converters
There will be more laws
Even if the MPAA doesn't pass this bill, they will submit another. I'm sure they've gone through a number of ideas for bills and scenerios for getting them through.
One will get passed
As soon as this issue reaches a critical mass the MPAA/RIAA is BOUND to pass another law, as the general sentiment from the public will be, "they had to do something, we can't let mass piracy go rampant."
How can we detour mass piracy while preserving fair use?
Unless you don't believe in copyrights, you should be talking about this question, because it's the question the public wants an answer to. You're trying to convince the average person we need to preserve fair use, right? Isn't P2P piracy an abuse of fair use? People want to preserve fair use, but not at the expense of the copyright. How can we return the system to what it was before Napster?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
The comment form on the senate's page that was linked had it's last (visible) post on April 15th. We REALLY need to get everybody who has read this story and cares about their computer to put in intellegant comments about why this doesn't need to fly. All of those who say "it can't happen" read the story again... it's running virtually unopposed. Nothing's more scarier than that.
It cant just be me, is this making any of you people actually want to go out and sell a few pirate CD's just to show two fingers to the MPAA & RIAA?
:(
I wonder if an attempt to implement these laws in the UK would work. Sadly, under the new "Yes Mister Bush, No Mister Bush, Three Bags full Mister Bush" Tony Blair, It probably would
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
What the quote actually says is perfectly respectable, if a little obvious.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
As others pointed out, this could outlaw much we take for granted.
Hearing aids would be useless.
Medical sensors (CT, MRI, even digital thermometers)
Your mouse, or your drive by wire car controls.
Even your answering machine and digital phone (digital signal, not touch tone)
This is crazy
Neither will contacting your senator.
What will help is supporting geekPAC.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
As best as I can tell, this would break all UDP-based apps, since there is never a connection set up and the ISP could not tell which is a client and which a server. Although I suppose if such a draconian step were taken, breaking all UDP apps (I think games generate the most UDP traffic) might be a small consideration.
I doubt this comment will get noticed amid the Screamings of an Outraged Slashdot (TM), but here goes...
This is in a report provided by the MPAA to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is looking into the matter. The chair of the committie is Senator Leahy (D-Vermont), an old-school proponent of citizen's rights who has delayed the SSSCA by a whole year. The ranking minority member is Senator Hatch (R-Utah), who is most definitly not in the pocket of the MPAA or RIAA.
This isn't even a bill yet. Be alert, but don't lose your heads.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
In the way of a thought experiment, let's create an imaginary scenario where the tenets of this bill are accepted by the Congress, and the legislation passes, thus causing all the changes desired by the commercial proponents of this bill.
Is there any guarantee that the above scenario would result in an increase - or even maintain the status quo (in terms of real profits) - of the digital content industry? What if profits continue to decrease?
What happens if widely available workarounds to CDBTPA-inspired technology are created and made available via distributed networks - do we turn the hardware industry and consumers upside-down again to keep the creators of digital content happy?
What if some creators of digital content *want* - as a part of their business model - to encourage the free copying and distribution of their digital content? What if the number of people/companies desiring this as a means to distribution eventually *outnumber* those who currently hold copyright (e.g. the proponents of the CDBTPA legislation)? How then does the proposed CDBTPA technology *impinge on the rights of this new group*? Furthermore, what if variations of the latter model were so successful as to be adopted by current producers of digital content? CDBTPA legislation would make it impossible to do so.(note: there are already profitable examples of this model in existence - more will surely appear as creative entrepreneurs find ways to attach unique value to digital content in ways that result in profits *in spite of* the prolific (encouraged by said companies) reproduction and distribution, by consumers (i.e.viral marketing), of their digital content)
The problem scenarios listed are but just a few that could occur if this bill were passed.
The proposed CDBTPA legislation - if passed - will cost consumers, technology equipment manufacturers, and ultimately the very producers of content that it purports to protect , *more* in terms of lost revenues and inconvenience than the theoretical savings promised by the bill's proponents.
Additionally, if one considers 1) the massive task of altering probably hundreds - if not thousands of discrete hardware and software products slated for manufacture and distribution to consumers; 2) the cost of infrastructure to monitor (police) behavior at both the commercial and consumer level; 3)the real confusion - and likely mass resentment - caused by introduction of a technology that forbids behavior (fair-use copying of digital content) that has heretofore been understood as a non-issue by consumers (who, by the way, are voters); 4)the real cost of consumers having to either replace current hardware/software products that permit the copying of digital media.
If one considers the above - in addition to the fact that eventual workarounds to even the best digital copy protection technologies (whther implemented in hardware or software)are all but inevitable - one has to wonder how the CDBTPA legislation has made it into serious consideration.
Let there be no doubt that copying digital content for free distribution to others is stealing. New technologies have made it possible to make this kind of theft easy. There is however, no excuse for theft - whether it is easy to do, or not.
However, to make the assumption that because individuals who have access to the means to copy digital content for illegal distribution *might* do this - and further force upon those individuals real social costs and inconveniences to keep them from doing what they *might* do - is to in a not-so-subtle way criminalize those individuals, and make them pay penalties for the wrong behavior of a relative few.
My hope is that the Congress will take a more robust look at the original intentions of copyright; and, that the purveyors of digital content consider that as social and technological landscapes change, so can their respective business models. Change coming from the creators of digital content - constructed in a way that enhances current products, while adding new kinds of value that digital technologies permit - will in the long run be much more productive than creating inconvenience and cost to millions of consumers and thousands of consumer electronics manufacturers.
One possible method would be to have something BEFORE the ADC that plays with the analog signal. For example, if you invert and phase shift and generally muck with the signal such as it is no longer the same, I doubt the 'cop' chip will find a signature whatsoever.
Then, after the ADC, an algorithm reverses the original filter to produce the now digital-copy.
Perhaps they would have better luck trying to make our ears and eyes illegal.
(Btw... what would happen now to someone who had purchased copyright use... no equipment would allow them to use it, regardless. idiots)
I'm quite aware that humans have limited A/V ranges, both in terms of spectrum and perception (e.g., I'm stuck with glasses and don't have perfect pitch). Still, unless I failed to gather something, you can't project an non-humanly-visible spectrum from film onto a screen (yeah, if everyone switches to digital, and you have IR or UV sources, maybe). Same thing goes with the audio portion. You can jack up something's frequency until it annoys every animal in a 1 mile radius, but are consumer electronics capable of detecting that? Particularly, are they capable of detecting it amid the backdrop of all the other spectrum noise out there?
If you really want to do something, maybe bounce a low RF signal around a theatre or something...but even that is susceptible to being cracked....
What is your Slash Rating?
This is the key belief which places you on the side of the ??AA. You believe in ownership of information, even after it's published. I do not, our founding fathers did not, and our Constitution reflects this.
Our western idea of ownership comes from Locke - he who mixes his labor with nature owns the product. Ownership does not expire after some set period of time. Legal ownership is simply the legal recognition of a natural principle. Copyright, in contrast, is a completely artificial construct, created for utilitiarian reasons. It does not reflect a fundamental right; rather it was created to promote the Sciences and Useful Arts. Copyrights are constitutionally mandated to be for a limited time.
Copyrights are not property, and nobody can own a song or an idea.
If you have not done so, I recommend you read Thomas Jefferson's oft-quoted letter.
How incredibly braindead are these hollywood people? Do they quite realize how simple of a device an analog to digital converter is?! Do they realize the "installed base" of sophisticated ADC chips and hardware that will *never* conform to their desires? Do they realize you can build an ADC from a few dollars worth of simple electronic components? (sometimes even circuits that outperform their IC counterparts..)
Attention Hollywood: the cat is out of the bag. The game is over. You lost. Get over it and innovate instead of being a sore loser.
For the rest of you, consider boycotting the folks that are doing this crap. Vote with your dollars. That means supporting local bands / indie films, not going to the movie theaters, not purchasing any CDs or DVD's distributed by offending parties, etc. Put your money where your mouth is and you'll see change. This need not last forever--just until this kinda nonsense stops. If that means hollywood dies because they refuse to adapt to the market, so be it.
How is this supposed to work? I mean if there
is more than one kind of watermark then storage
and look-up requirements will make ADCs slower
(more costly too but that's an aside). The only
way not to loose performance on ADCs would be to
build watermarks and their detection circuitry
into the ADCs itself in hardware, and you can't
physically do that for more than just a few
watermarks because chips can only be made so big.
So now all music/movies/pictures etc. would have
to be protected with the same watermark and a
pretty short (simple) one at that. But then it
will offer almost no protection from copying or
retransmitting.
The senator said that, in wartime, they must not dawdle/delay/waste time in carrying out their constitutional obligations (i.e. the obligations that senators have placed on them by the constitution). In other words, they must do their constitutionally assigned job, and do them quickly.
The *only* anti-constitutional meaning I can draw from this is the inference that in peacetime senators can waste time in carrying out their constitutional obligations. But there's no reason to read that into it either; he was clearly expressing that there was more need for haste during time of war.
I think you're trying really hard to find a way to twist this statement into something worth criticizing, but the only thing I can really find wrong with it is its banality. That and the premise that we are at war.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And who is going to define what drunk driving is? You can't have it be hardcoded, as different localities have different ratings. So what are you going to do? Have the dealers set it? Make people voluntarily drive their cars in to have it set? Broadcast the setting?
And how long before a device shows up on the black market to set it yourself? Or to ignore settings/disable it/etc? Or just instructions on bypassing it?
Who is going to handle the liability when that woman being chased hops in her car and it malfunctions and won't let her drive it to get away?
Who is going to pay for all the older cars to get retrofitted?
How about limiters that prevent aggressive driving or speeding?
And when that out of control truck is bearing down on you and you can't get away? What about when you swerve lanes to avoid some idiot who doesn't have one and it thinks you're being aggressive? When you are being stalked/chased/etc?
Who is going to pay for all the older cars to be retrofitted?
Why have we not seen legislative mandates that require gun manufacturers to make guns that can't kill innocent people (or, at the very least, cannot be accidentally fired i.e. by a child)?
Despite what many people would like you to think it doesn't happen that often. More children die from drowning in buckets per year than die in a gun related incident. (If you wonder why your liberal friends figures don't match that, ask them to remove the numbers for gang-bangers that kill each other and compare again. Sorry, those aren't "innocent children"). Again, what are you going to do when those "smart" guns fail and someone who desprately needed to protect themselves from a rapist, stalker, mugger, deranged psycho, etc can't do so because it fails?
This is an issue for markets. Not some goon in government. The answer to bad laws and stupid lawmakers is not to try to redirect their evil at some other group. It's to stop the evil.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
According to this analysis of the composition, an inaudible watermark would not violate the intent of the piece, however any recording of it would.
The point of the piece is that even in the absense of intentional sound there is always the presence of incidental and unintended sound. The wind, people shuffling, the turning of the pages, the sound of your own heartbeat. A recording of a specific set of incidental sounds destroys the concept - the listener is supposed to be hearing his current enviornment.
If we take both of these points into consideration we get a rather peculiar result - it would be completely fine to add a watermark - but only to the live proformance. Yes, you could add a watermark to live sound. What a truely twisted concept, lol!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Yes, I think a successful government needs a steady flow of the right kind of criminals. The ideal criminals would be middle class, so they'd have property to seize - they'd be relatively nonviolent, so it would be pretty safe to process them, they should have no unity or code of honor, and yet they should be networked - thus investigators can leverage one arrest to product more with minimal effort. They should be harmless to the general populace. And their crime should involve tiny, hard-to-see objects, to justify lots of intrusion and searching.
Now witchcraft met these criteria pretty well, but seems to have fallen into disfavor. The drug war is the current staple crop, but it looks like IP infringers will be a highly desirable addition.
Minidisc never got to the legislative stage because Sony cut a deal with the music companies.
If we don't provide an alternative, then eventually one of these completely brain damaged pieces of legislation will pass, and then where will we be?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
You're an optimist, aren't you? Don't expect the "industry" to fight this battle for you. So far they've given no sign of caring. The law won't hurt them. People will continue to buy new hardware to replace old, and if a few dollars are added to the purchase price by this protection, nobody will notice. Better yet, a few years down the road the government will probably declare the older, non-compliant hardware illegal, which give the industry another spurt of sales.
The electronics industries interests are not the same as yours.
As for customer outrage - where's the outrage over Macrovision? Where's the outrage over SCMS, which effectively killed consumer DAT?
It's fun to claim that they can't do things like this because of unintended consequences, but actually they're smart enough to separate the intended from the unintended. They will inconvenience us; they will not inconvenience themselves. They will infuriate us; they won't infuriate the majority. They will cripple hobbyist use of computers without hurting professional use.
>minidisc went through all this ten years ago
No, that was different. Things like SCMS come about because manufacturers enter into voluntary consent agreements.
What we are talking about today, is Federal laws being passed to enforce such design decision with the force of law to back it up.
There is no law that says a minidisc storage device cannot be made, or that a non SCMS MD recorder cannot exist, or making it a crime to unset the bit.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Amusement or freedom? Stale dreams provided by the media or the future? Docile brainwashed masses of consumers or free, creative citizens?
Are the RIAA and MIAA really going to force us to make that choice? I will resign my membership as a part of their audience if bills like this go through and I suggest you do the same. 120 years ago all people could do for entertainment was read or have people they knew provide it to them. Humanity survived quite well. And more importantly - at least in the US, they were free to do it. Do we really love our babble boxes so much we would give up our freedom for them? Why the hell can't we have both?
Now all those CDs I bought will actually be worth money fifty years down the road, when we all pay $10 per track, which we can only listen to once, or our brains with be zapped with 50,000 volts and our credit ratings ruined.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
Right. A set of commercial agreements which completely stifled fair use of the technology. Does this sound familiar to you?
The BPDG is the same routine, all over again, but with more government backing.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Copyright protection serves an important function in our society. It is a careful balance designed to benefit the public at large. I fear that powerful corporate interests - the publishing industries - have presented our lawmakers with an extremely unbalanced view of the situation.
"ensuring that the public is able to enjoy a growing selection of new and different educational, entertainment and other copyrighted works"
I beg our lawmakers to remember that they have also been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the public is able to enjoy FAIR USE of the growing selection of new and different educational, entertainment and other copyrighted works.
By definition fair use is legitimate. It is also valuable to society. Corporate interests consider fair use to be a nuisance to be eradicated.
I further urge our lawmakers to remember that they have also been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the public is able to enjoy a growing selection of new and different educational, entertainment and other works in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
All copyrighted works are required to fall into the public domain after a limited time of copyright protection. This is so all of society may freely benefit from it. Disney's most famous movies were created on this principle. Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules are ALL based on books that fell into the public domain. Disney was able to draw upon the public domain, and we were all enriched for it.
The current crop of "copyright laws" do not regulate copyright. They regulate technology, innovation, fair use, and hardware. They are motivated by corporations with a vested interest in old technology and a disregard for the public interest.
The latest proposal suggests mandating that all analog to digital converters must contain a "copyright cop" to detect the presence of a "watermark signal" and to disable the device if one is detected. I would like to point out that some PACEMAKERS and most aircraft contain analog to digital converters. It is ludicrous to propose a "copyright cop" in these and all other devices. Imagine the results if a pacemaker or aircraft detected a false or interference "watermark signal".
We already have laws to prosecute copyright violations. These new "para-copyright" proposals attempt to make copyright violation impossible rather than illegal. Without exception they have a far reaching negative side effects like the pacemaker example. The harmful side effects are inherent in para-copyright, they cannot be repaired.
Often the simplest way to make these flaws obvious is to consider what would happen if these laws applied to traditional media - books. It would eliminate photo-copy machines. It would eliminate used book stores. You could go to jail for changing the order of the chapters in your book. The publisher could make it impossible to skip a page. Libraries could not exist. Scientists/researchers could not analyze the text. You no longer own the book - the publisher just wants to give you a LICENSE you to view it once, and only in the manner they approve.
I urge our judges and lawmakers to stand by existing copyright protections and to refrain from meddling in the rapidly evolving market forces in the digital realm. Some companies will fail to adapt and wither. That is free market capitalism. Other companies will seize new opportunities and grow. These are the companies that will bring the benefits of new technology to the public. It is not for the legislature to pick winners and losers.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
And who is going to define what drunk driving is? You can't have it be hardcoded, as different localities have different ratings.
Having it hard-coded to the highest BAC that is legal anywhere in the country seems reasonable to me. A quick google search revealed that all states but Massachusetts and South Carolina (which don't use a numerical limit) are either 0.08 or 0.10, and Mass and SC could work something out with car manufacturers (a la California emissions).
And how long before a device shows up on the black market to set it yourself? Or to ignore settings/disable it/etc? Or just instructions on bypassing it?
Devices for de-scrambling HBO and Cinemax exist, but no one seems to view that as a reason to make cable theft legal.
Who is going to handle the liability when that woman being chased hops in her car and it malfunctions and won't let her drive it to get away?
Who handles the liability when your brakes malfunction? Or when your gas pedal gets stuck in the full open position (this really happened at a Wal-Mart near me, an SUV pinned someone against the wall of the building and crushed him to death)? Or when the tread of your tire separates from the rest of the tire?
Who is going to pay for all the older cars to be retrofitted?
Presumably older cars will fall under a grandfather clause, just as they do for modern-day emissions laws.
And when that out of control truck is bearing down on you and you can't get away?
Umm, pull over and let it go by me, just as I would if I didn't have a speed governor in my car.
More children die from drowning in buckets per year than die in a gun related incident.
And more people die each year of heart disease than are murdered. Should murder not be illegal?
Again, what are you going to do when those "smart" guns fail and someone who desprately needed to protect themselves from a rapist, stalker, mugger, deranged psycho, etc can't do so because it fails?
Despite what people would like you to think, none of these happen that often. I'd be willing to bet that a person who pulls a gun on the rapist/stalker/mugger/deranged psycho is more likely to be killed than someone that doesn't, just like the person with the gun in their home is more likely to be killed by that gun than they are to use it to protect their family.
Most of your questions could also be asked of the ADC watermark checking law (i.e. how long before a device shows up on the black market to bypass it? Who is going to handle the liability when someone's [insert device which contains an ADC here] fails at an inopportune time, resulting in a serious accident or death, etc).
Finally, I'm not necessarily agreeing that all the things the original poster asked for should be made laws. But I agree with him that if legislators are so bored that they just NEED to write a new law, at least make it one that's going to save lives and not line the pockets of some rich, old white men in Hollywood that don't need any more money.
I speak of Marijuana separately from other drugs because it is in a fairly unique position. Everything points to it being safer in every way than the three legal drugs, caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine - Say what you want about diet pills and the like, but these are simply drugs. At least some people actually take diet pills to get thin; Caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine are solely intended to alter the mind. So Marijuana is really better for you than any of those, it's cheaper than the latter two, and it's illegal for purely political reasons.
Other illegal drugs, however, including MDMA and other Methamphetamines, Opium and its derivatives (including the legal ones), and extracts of cocaine are much more dangerous than the legal recreational drugs. Sure, alcohol can kill you, but you really have to work at it. In addition, since it's legal it tends to conform to certain standards. You never know what's mixed in with the drugs you buy, if you buy them from strangers (a dubious practice at best) and all of those drugs have been known to kill people somewhat frequently.
Anyway, yes, if you're talking about Heroin, Speed, or Coke, addicts do become poor, and in some cases even dead. MDMA has the additional danger of permanently fucking up your brain chemistry. But marijuana would be good for this country in many ways yet is kept illegal to maintain jobs by putting more people in prison. This of course puts more minorities in prison than non-minorities (IE, whites) due to societal momentum and immigration. (If you just rode a raft to America, you probably aren't flush with cash. If you are flush with cash, your life in your homeland probably isn't so bad.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You probably already know that you can make an ADC from a resistor string and some op-amp comparators. It might not be the very best one in the world but it would be an ADC. Is the government going to force a recall of all semiconductors? Will you have to pass a lie detector test and an FBI background check before you can buy a government-approved soldering iron that has to be connected to your phone line as well so that it can "phone home" to report what circuits you used it on? Will lead-tin and other conductive alloys with relatively low melting points become controlled substances? Will the Solder Police break down your door late some night on an anonymous tip? Will they trip over the Semiconductor Police when they do?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Sorry, you're only going to be allowed to use sealed armatures with built in copy protection. No more winding your own with plain old magnet wire.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
On this issue, it might also have helped if you've ever designed anything using ADCs, but that's 4 years worth of schooling I'm not sure you have the intellectual ability to profit from.
You don't see any problem with turning a 50 cent part (quantity 10K) into a $10 part (same quantity) which requires $10 worth of handling due to paperwork that goes with the regulation?
You don't see any problem with passing this cost along to the consumer, making a $10 consumer toy a $50 consumer toy that doesn't work as well as the gadget it replaces?
Get some glasses, d00d before you stumble into a tree.
Anybody working with electronic hardware who intends to continue to do so will have to move out of America to do this... from the individual to IBM and Apple.
I don't see this restriction happening anywhere else on earth... I think what we'll see is world product lines and "USA-compliant" product lines... the USA-compliant will be much more expensive, will show up a year or two after the world versions do, but nobody will be able to afford them because our economy will be sliding towards Third World status.
Basically, the proposals if turned into law in any form having the slightest resemblance to what's described is economic suicide for this nation. America could lose Hollywood... and a few thousand jobs... which would probably be replaced rapidly as people suddenly realize that desktop computer = video production studio.
If it becomes impossible to design or produce electronic equipment in the USA, welcome to the Third World.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Well, they're already grabbing every piece of computer equipment in the house when the evidence is only on the hard drive or other discs because they can auction off the complete system for more money, so expect to see video on the news of guys in blue windbreakers hauling off speakers and amplifiers and receivers and probably every piece of entertainment-related electronics in the house (except perhaps the microwave used to make the popcorn eaten while the illegal music or movie is enjoyed).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.