Latest Toast Update Combats Fair Use

gsfprez writes "Apparently, demanding future DRM installations isn't just for Windows anymore. Roxio has added a very Microsoft-esque paragraph to the Toast 5.1.4 upgrade. In part, if you install it, you 'may affect your ability to copy, display and/or play Secure Content through the Software or other applications that utilize the Software.' I'm sorry, but this is a big reason why I'm sticking with Apple, but looking for new CD/DVD burning software..." Let me know when you find it.

Comments

Piracy != Fair use

[ObviousGuy]

I don't mean to sound like a troll, but please consider that your right to rip and burn your own CDs has never been infringed. The only thing that has been blunted is your ability to illegally share those files.

I feel like a broken record.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[ObviousGuy]

I realize that you are trolling, but that's a good question. It comes down to what you consider "sharing" to mean. If it means playing the CD in your car with your friends or lending a CD to your friend, then that is totally within your rights. If you mean making it freely available to everyone who may cross your path, that is quite illegal, as Napster (and soon Gnutella and Kazaa) learned.

Copyright, right or wrong, exists and prohibits the kind of file sharing that P2P networks makes easy. Your violation of copyright is a violation of the law. You can justify it to yourself however you like, whether the tired excuse that you wouldn't have paid for the media anyway so the companies won't be losing anything, or the common claim that you are simply "trying out" the product before actually buying it, or the lamest of all excuse that companies are evil and don't deserve your money.

I do not work for any media company, though I am a software engineer at an embedded systems company. What I do seem to have is a mature sense of right and wrong which anyone who tries to legitimize piracy simply doesn't yet possess.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[thales]

75 years ago it was legal to buy a Thompson machine gun in the United States. Some people bought them because it was a neat toy, and they never used them for anything illegal. Others bought them for gangland hits and armed robery.

The actions of the second group caused the people in the first group to have their toys taken away from them.

The actions of people engaging in blatant copyright infringement are are doing the same thing to people who are doing legitimate fair use as the gangsters did to gun collectors 75 years ago. They are fucking it up for everybody.

Since a computer is as incapable of determining leagal use as the Thompson was incapable of determining legal use, the computer's ability to copy material is likely to suffer the same fate as the Thompson.

The RIAA and the MPAA are asses for pushing this soulation to their problem, but I blame the "file sharers" that are ignoring the current laws as much as the Holywood crowd for bringing this draconian approach to IP protection about.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[ObviousGuy]

If you live in a country that adheres to the Berne Convention, then you are indeed bound by the copyright. It's one of those little things that makes international trade easier.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[lunenburg]

I realize that you are trolling, but that's a good question. It comes down to what you consider "sharing" to mean. If it means playing the CD in your car with your friends or lending a CD to your friend, then that is totally within your rights. If you mean making it freely available to everyone who may cross your path, that is quite illegal, as Napster (and soon Gnutella and Kazaa) learned.

The point you seem to be missing is that there is no way for the technology to know whether someone is going to use a burned/ripped copy for legal/moral uses (portable MP3 player, emailing a song to your mother) or illegal/immoral uses (offering an entire album for download). None. When DRM technology will not let you rip a CD to your brand-new $400 MP3 player, do you think that complaning to the RIAA with "But this is within my rights!" will do anything?

Don't fool yourself into thinking the issue is about copyright law. The copyright cartels have tons of tools at their disposal to prosecute copyright violators - standard copyright law being the main one - tools that they have shown no inclination to use to actually, oh, stop copyright infringement. Their current push for legally-mandated DRM technology is about control, and only control. They want to be the ones to dictate how you can use the CDs and DVDs that you buy, the music that you download, the TV shows that you watch. Your rights to perform the "legal" copyright violations that you mention will be subject to the whims of Hollywood lawyers and profit margins.

If that's the future you want, so be it. I personally find it extremely distasteful that a small band of "special" corporations (MPAA, RIAA) are going to be allowed to have the blessed stamp of "producer," and as such determine what technology can be developed, and who is allowed to distribute "authorized" content. The issues are as old as copyright itself, only the distribution method has changed, which is allowing Hollywood to paint a doomsday picture of "You must allow us to control the technology in every digital device, or else the great Republic will fall due to a lack of HIGH VALUE DIGITAL CONTENT."

Spare me. If you work at an embedded systems company, and look forward to the day you have to license DRM technolgy from Hollywood for all of your systems, bully for you. A large number of us, however, see that "copyright" is merely the smokescreen for the larger issue.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[aussersterne]

What I do seem to have is a mature sense of right and wrong which anyone who tries to legitimize piracy simply doesn't yet possess.

What you don't seem to have is the ability to differentiate between piracy and fair use. Every time one of these discussions begins, there is a dedicated group of people who post and say that fair use as a concept is great but we really can't have it because every "fair user" out there might actually be a pirate at some point.

Hey, every citizen out there might actually be a murderer at some point. So what? It's a ridiculous jump to make.

I'm a writer. I have a much greater vested interest in copyright than you do. But I am also a realist -- and you are not. People are going to make copies of some chapters of my books. Maybe they will even copy the entire book and carry it around in a three-ring binder. So what? The value in selling that one copy is very low. The value in having yet another person "spreading the word" about a title I've written is much greater.

The same holds true for the audio and video content industries. Before the "MP3 revolution" I was buying maybe six CDs a year. Afterward, I'm buying 20-30 because my exposure to artists is greater. Most of my (working) friends are in the same position.

The RIAA/MPAA are complaining like babies about slightly decreased sales... and they're doing it in the middle of an economy that is tanking, worse than it's been in years. The decreases are directly related to the lack of disposable income on the part of the buying public, not to the greatly increased exposure they're getting through P2P.

Or maybe what the big media outlets are really upset about is a leveling of the playing field... the fact that maybe 80% of the CD's I've bought this year are indies or self-pubs that I wouldn't have known about had P2P never existed. We tried to do away with the studio system in Hollywood years ago for antitrust reasons, yet the music industry still functions exactly that way today and the MPAA has even managed to recreate most of the old income superstructure using intellectual property ownership rather than real property ownership as leverage. Let's try again to level the playing field, for once and for all.

Sorry, but the issue is not as simple or as black-and-white as so many devout capitalists seem to believe... not all sharing violates copyright. To end sharing because some sharing violates copyright is patently unjust and smacks of the kind of baby-with-bathwater institutional mentality Americans claim to hate.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[Melantha_Bacchae]

thales wrote:

> The actions of people engaging in blatant
> copyright infringement are are doing the same
> thing to people who are doing legitimate fair
> use as the gangsters did to gun collectors 75
> years ago. They are fucking it up for everybody.

[snip]

> The RIAA and the MPAA are asses for pushing this
> soulation to their problem, but I blame the
> "file sharers" that are ignoring the current
> laws as much as the Holywood crowd for bringing
> this draconian approach to IP protection about.

Let me make a few things crystal clear here:

1) The "file sharers" do not harm most of the artists, and in some cases, have been known to actually help artists, especially in the music industry. That is because sites like Napster essentially give them free exposure by allowing people to sample the music and find new artists they might never have bought music from otherwise. Some artists have seen increased sales due to Napster.

2) The people with the problem are the recording labels and the studios.

3) The problem is not theft or lost revenue. After all, they consider playing a CD in your car that you bought for your home stereo lost revenue, and not watching commercials is called theft.

4) Nope, the real problem is COMPETITION. You see, they have nice tidy cartels that have the industries all neatly tied up. They believe that they have been anointed by the government (in a process called "copyright"), as the only legal distributors of their media. They've even started making the artists "work for hire" so they don't have to worry about nasty royalties. And along come these rogue "file sharers" who ursurp their priviledged position and distribute the files from the CD's, etc., they have bought to whoever wants to listen.

5) The cartels that control the entertainment industries are badly in need of an antitrust investigation themselves. While not the best solution to antitrust behaviour, the "file sharers" are at least providing some competition. The solution that would best serve the artists and the public for the music segment would be to replace the recording industry with a set of small businesses that offer services to artists who retain their own copyrights and control over their work. CD prices could be much lower, with the artists getting the lion's share of the profits. It is my hope that Apple uses their recent acquisitions to lower the bar of entry so these small businesses can form. Then we can make a well deserved end to the greedy sharks in the recording and motion picture industries.

6) After all, it is the greedy sharks that are making off with our money in unfairly high CD prices, and tolls on CDR disks. How is that not theft and extortion? Now they want to seize control of our digital vessels, our computers. How is that not piracy? The industry sharks do more harm to the artists and the consumers than "file sharers" ever did.

I am breaking with tradition, and ending with a quote not from Mothra, but from her forever friend, Steve Jobs:

"Apple strives to protect the rights of both intellectual property owners and consumers alike and believes there is a 'middle path' in digital music distribution which actively discourages the theft of music, while at the same time preserving consumers rights to manage and listen to their legally acquired music on whatever devices they own,"
Steve Jobs, 2002 Grammy Awards, as reported on http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020227/1/2jun2.html.
(Re place "intellectual property owners" with "artists" and even Mothra would be happy.)

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[thales]

1) The "Content Cartels are full of shit when they claim "piracy" costs them umpteen Billion Dollars. Just because you download a song dosen't mean you would have bought the CD. On a P2P you might say I'll get this one and this one and this one. Few people can afford to go into a record store and just grab any CD that catches their eye.

2) The "Sharing" advocates are full of shit when they claim it dosen't cost the content providers anything because some of the people downloading material are doing it to avoid paying for something they would have bought if they couldn't get it for free.

3) Nobody knows if additional sales generated by someone "sampling" music outweighs sales lost to people who refuse to buy anything.

4) Copyright holders ARE the only people with the LEGAL right to distribute copyrighted material.

5) Any sleezy action by the RIAA members is beside the point. Didn't your Mother teach you that two wrongs don't make a right? Illegally distributing copyrighted materials makes it damn hard to take the moral highground.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[dbrutus]

At point 4, you could stand to go to the bathroom yourself. What gives people the right to use the state to stop other people from copying their works? The US Constitution does for the specific purpose of 'advancing the arts and sciences'. The only reason that the *temporary* monopoly exists is in order to advance the pool of knowledge and the pool of arts available to our society.

It's certainly a legitimate question whether the RIAA/MPAA actions against fair use/unsanctioned copying are advancing or hindering the arts. Are their enforcement mechanisms raising costs so much that artists are actually being paid less? There's a study that isn't going to have industry sponsorship anytime soon.

I would say that the original subject of the thread (Roxio crippling their burner program) hinders the arts and sciences by crippling the ability to copy music files whether or not such copying is legitimate (the program can't tell the difference). To the extent that Roxio is doing so under legal pressure from the RIAA, such pressure is constitutionally suspect.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[thales]

I Have never been an advocate of the "elastic" Constitution. I feel that we should follow the intents of the framers of the Constitution or follow the procedures for amending it. An "elastic" constitution in effect means it can be "amended" at will by changing the interpation.

The clause you mentioned clearly sets a basis for reasonable limited copyright laws. I Don't consider life plus 95 years to be remotly reasonable, and would be delighted to see the copyright extensions struck down as unconstituional.

A Reasonable law, IMHO, would be 14 years of automatic protection, with the possibility of a one time 14 year extension apon registering the copyright. These are the times that were discussed by the framers of the Constitution, and the original copyright law. After a max of 28 years it enters the public domain.

Disagrement with a law does NOT give you the right to engage in wholesale violation of that law. If someone wanted to violate the present copyright law for the purpose of bringing a test case before the courts, I would be in full agreement with them.

However that is NOT the reason the majority of the filesharers are violating the law. They don't agree with the law and simply refuse to obey it. This blatant disrepect for the law is far more likely to result in more severe laws than to result in an improvement in the law, as many recent examples of "Anti-piracy" laws show. It makes it hard to establish the moral highground when the RIAA can paint you as a scoffatlaw at best and a thief at worse.

Mass distrubation of a song that was written last year would be illegal if the original copyright laws were still in effect. That would hardly make a good test case against the many extensions of the term of copyright. A test case would involve a song that was published over 28 years ago, something that would now be in the public domain under the original law.

Re:Piracy != Fair use

[thales]

" But perhaps you feel that the founding fathers were authoritarian sons of bitches who didn't want you to think for yourself. Or do you?"

What part of "or follow the procedures for amending it" is too complicated for you to understand? Or do you prefer a non-constitution that lacks any meaning?

" I disagree. A (really) wrong law should not be followed. I'm glad that some jews were kept in hiding and thus escaped the gas chambers during WWII. Do you consider the people who disobeyed the law to help these people to be criminals? Or are they heroes?"

Are you trying to compare risking your life to save the life of another human being to demanding that ENTERTAINMENT be provided to you on your terms regardless of the wishes of the people who created the entertainment?

"Many people I know would gladly pay for fair-priced, full-featured MP3-downloading service or for fair-priced CD's. I don't feel bad at all about keeping the money away from these government-sponsored criminals (RIAA). And many decent people feel the same. They would gladly give money to those who deserve it (the artists), but don't accept being ripped off."

Criminals? And you are going to be the vigilante that decides the RIAA are criminals, and that your kangaroo court entitles you to violate the law? Music is a LUXARY. You aren't going to die from music hunger if you do a legal protest like boycotting CDs sold by RIAA members. Don't bother trying to take the moral highground, you lost that when you violated the law over the price of entertainment. Two wrongs don't make a right.

"Copying software illegally is different however, although I believe it's OK for foreigners, students and others who simply cannot afford the price that companies ask (and thus cannot learn or advance their society). Of course it is different when these groups get cheap deals."

I Want a restored 427 Cobra but can't afford it. Does that make it OK for me to take one? Hell No. So I make do with a Chevy. Ever hear of free software? Can't afford Windows XP? Get Linux. Can't afford MS Office? Then Get Open Office. Can't afford Photo Shop? Then learn to use the Gimp.

"Of course, the US is not exactly a fast learner with the war on drugs either. But copyright infringement can only be stopped with fascist laws. I don't expect the american public to accept these. Although you'll probably accept every law, which begs this quote:"

I Read that before most people on this forum were born, read it when I was speaking out against segration in the southeastern USA at a time when you could get your ass kicked or lynched for doing so. So forget the vain attempt to prove yourself "morally superior" to me. I wasn't afraid to speak out for the people who were having their rights violated back then, and I'm not afraid to speak out for the people who's rights you want to violate with your cockamamie "IP can be taken from those I don't approve of" campaign. I don't limit myself to only speaking out for the rights of groups that are considered "correct" by the left or the right.

"Perhaps I should impress them by buying all their crappy, overpriced CD's. I'll bet the bastards will be thinking about changing their ways when they sniff the line of coke that my money paid for in their favorite brothel. Having all the money in the world will worry them!"

Don't buy the damn CDs if you disaprove of them. Just don't bitch when they write you off as a deadbeat that's too cheap to pay for entertainment because you lacked the conviction to NOT use the product instead of trying to grab it without paying for it. Boycott the Music and you send a message of Moral outrage. Steal the music and you lose the moral standing you claim you want.

Drawing a CLEAR line between...

[3seas]

I really don't want to be one to have to deal with trying to figure out what I can or can't do with a system.

I think the DRM supporters need to focus their efforts on making their dedicated systems that don't allow the user
to do anything by play or run the DRM stuff ony as they intend to allow the consumer.

and then we should have another type of system that allows creativity, innovation, etc.. by and for those who want
such a system.

And so that there is no conflict, the open system simply rejects DRM stuff, where to use DRM stuff on such a system,
a special version of that item must be purchased.

Some of us bought a Computer in order to be creative, and I think it's theift for others to sneek in and take this
away, especially in doing it the little by little way.

Why don't they just go make their own DRM system, or do they know it won't sale? And if so, then isn't it theift by intention?

All I know is that I don't want the maybe it's work, maybe it won't crap wasting my time.

DRM is like a virus infecting and crippling what is otherwise a versatile system.

I rather make a clear distinction between what I can be creative with and not.

I'm not a pirate, and I don't like my creativity being taken from me because others feel they have to muscle in on it.

In the meantime

[Choco-man]

use a version of toast below 5.1.4. 5.1.4 doesn't really add anything earthshattering and necessary, and it forces you to agree to unsolicited, unnotified, unreviewed software installation on your machine.

bottom line, don't use the software that offends you. if people stop buying the software, they'll stop doing this sort of thing. use 5.1.2 or whatever version you currently have.

Looks worse than it appears?

[fjms64]

First some context:

- I have a legal copy of Toast.
- I have used Toast since version 4 came out and have been very happy with it.

I am a computer consultant and regularly have to deal with reading contracts, usually written in legalese. While I am not a lawyer, my take of these things is that they are usually worse than they appear. So my take on that clause is that it gives Roxio the right to download updates to you computers at will, even when you are not looking (remember, it is allowed if it is not prohibited).

I dont know many people who would be happy with that. Suppose they decide to download some piece of DRM code which crashes my computer, requiring me to spend a day rebuilding everything. Not good for my business and I cant sue Roxio for that even though they are responsible.

This is not acceptable, it is like letting a car company come into your garage at night to mess with your car without your consent? I know I wouldnt let any car company do that, so why would I let a computer company?

This type of restriction is unacceptable, I have gone back to the previous version of Toast and have let Roxio know about this.

Cheers

Whaaa?

[overunderunderdone]

I'm sorry but what did this post have to do with the story? Roxio is not Apple and Apple hasn't crippled their CD burning in iTunes or the Finder the way Roxio has with Toast.

The BSD people where so desperate for someone to use their os that they didn't realize this is just another corporate exploitation...

I don't know that "desperation" was part of it. That is the whole POINT of the BSD license (well at least part of the point). They WANT their software used as widely as possible, even by money grubbing corporations.

What exactly is wrong with being a money grubbing corporation anyway? How exactly do you feed and clothe yourself? Subsistance farming? Even if you are working for a non-profit, the government or a university where do you think the money people donate came from? Sure "money grubbing" can be taken to obnoxious and even evil extremes but "money grubbing" seems to be a necessary and in itself morally neutral activity.

I would have thought slashdot people would at least be able to see through apples marketing hype but i guess not.

I think we can. At best the marketing hype gives some indication as to HOW a company may try to "grub for money" and they will abandon "enlightened" money grubbing methods if they fail to grub enough money. I'd even argue that they have a higher moral obligation to do so than to make you happy with their enlightened policy. They are responsible to pay their employees paychecks & benefits and still have enough left over to fund the retirements of many thousands of people who bought the stock in their IRA or own it through their employee pension fund. If you like their product enough to give them your money then you have nothing to complain about. If you don't like their product enough to give them money in return for it (or if you ARE a subsistance farmer to barter a few chickens & a cow) then they will change it so that you DO like it - because they are money grubbing and it's your money (or chickens) they want to grub.

How is this going to add shareholder value?

[artemis67]

I know that if I was a shareholder of ROXI, I'd be pissed right about now. They are taking on a battle that they don't need to fight, and treating the customer as a criminal.

The only thing this is going to result in is a decrease in sales for Roxio, as people turn to alternative CD burning apps. As a management decision, it's just plain stupid and somebody needs to be fired.

Re:Just FYI

[dbrutus]

When you abuse a privilege you screw it up for everybody. Rights are remain such even when people screw them up. Take a look at a majority of the US bill of rights for examples. 1st amendment heroes are very often scumbags. By your logic we should eliminate free speech on legitimate topics such as elections because some jerks distribute child porn.

No. It just doesn't fly.