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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.
CD-Record? It works on NetBSD and MacOS X is based on Unix.
I feel like a broken record.
Surely in this day and age you should feel like a copy protected CD
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
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.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
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.
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.
- 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
Discribe for OS X is a great product- simple, does the job, without DRM hassles.
You can't commit mass murder with an iPod.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
legal to give copies of music to up to five friends.
** Begins madly scribbling notes **
Step 1: Grab source to random open source P2P.
Step 2: Create counter for each file. Initialize to 5.
Step 3: For each file request add user to Buddy list.
Step 4: Decrement file counter.
Step 5: Send file.
P.S.
Version 2.0
BUG FOUND: Program is still sending the file when counter reaches zero.
EXPLANATION: Forgot to check the counter.
BUG FIX: Insert "Step 4.5: test counter", do not send file if counter = zero.
Version 3.0
BUG FOUND: Program no longer sending file when counter is zero, but then resumes sending the file on subsequent requests.
EXPLANATION: Counter is erroneously decremented past zero and rolls over to MAXINT.
BUGFIX: Should test for zero BEFORE decrementing the counter.
Version 4.0
BUG FOUND: Some files still being sent 1000's of times.
EXPLANATION: Rollover bug in versions 1 and 2 left many files with corrupted counters set to MAXINT.
BUG FIX: Reset all counters to 5.
Versions 5.0
BUG FOUND: Program send each file up to 5 times each session.
EXPLANATION: Counters erroneously being reset to 5 during program initialization.
BUGFIX: Mover code to reset counters from program initialization to the installer.
Version 6.0
BUGS FOUND: NONE! YAY!
This release improves speed, stability, and ease of use.
Version 7.0
BUG FOUND: Files that shouldn't be sent anymore are being sent again.
EXPLANATION: When installing new version the counter is always reset to 5.
BUGFIX: Only reset corrupted counters. If counter = MAXINT then reset counter to 5.
VERSION 8.0
BUG FOUND: Version 7.0 is still allowing some files corrupted by versions 1 and 2 to be sent 1000's of times.
EXPLANATION: Corrupted counters may have been further decremented past MAXINT.
BUG FIX: Reset counter if counter > 5.
ToDo for version 9.0:
Add international support. Different countries have different limits on how many times files may be shared. This will complicate the counter code signifigantly. Perhaps counter should start at zero and count upwards? Will require much debugging.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
thales wrote:
e place "intellectual property owners" with "artists" and even Mothra would be happy.)
> 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.
(R
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.
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.
This was posted to VerionTracker.com last night.
;)
I am the Toast product manager. I wanted to set the facts straight with respect to the 'Restrictions' section in the end user license agreement (EULA) that is displayed at installation of Toast 5.1.4 and Jam 5.0.1 (both the latest versions of our software). 1) Toast and Jam do not include any digital rights management (DRM) software. 2) Toast and Jam do not dynamically download and update any software on your system, either automatically behind the scenes, or upon your request. 3) Toast and Jam do not store and collect any personally identifiable information about you or what you record, or transmit anything to Roxio, any of its partners, or any content provider. 4) Toast and Jam do not restrict you from recording any content that you have the legal right to use. Toast and Jam use the same EULA that Roxio's PC burning product, Easy CD Creator, uses. Easy CD Creator leverages aspects of Windows Media Technology, which does include DRM components. Hence, the language in the EULA. Our EULAs are shared across both products because it saves time and money with respect to legal, documentation and translation into multiple languages. So no need to worry. All is well with Toast. Thank you for your continued support. Regards, The Toast Product Manager BTW - yes, you'll see that I have given our product 5 stars. I couldn't resist.
Can someone update this story or what? Moreover, next time I adise -using- this software before posting a rant to slashdot
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"