Slashdot Mirror
DMCA Loophole For Peer-to-Peer TV Show Sharing?
An anonymous reader writes "Fortune.com asks, "Is TV Show Swapping Legal? For those using TiVos or new Windows PCs, it just might be." Why? "The law that ensnared ... DVD hackers, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, doesn't specifically address the question of [personal video recorders]. But when it comes to the legality of hacking digital media, the law zeroes in on 'circumvention' -- did hackers have to circumvent protection to copy the video? Several hackers who have published their techniques online say they didn't have to crack anything to extract video from their TiVos""
Hey, in case you all didn't know this, the DMCA is NOT the only law in existence. TV shows are copyright protected, and that protection exists outside of DMCA.
Jeez.
What's next, "Is murdering Bill Gates' entire family legal??" based on how murder isn't covered by DMCA or of any real interest to the MPAA or RIAA?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
"fair use" is not an fucking ironclad structure. It's a general principle that tries to balance the need to reward and incentivize authors (and publishers, as proxy) and the need of people to have reasonable access to intellectual property.
so, that's why all the slippery slope napster-type arguments that attempt to define the issue as "because transaction Y has the same shape as transaction X (even though the scale is different), and transaction X is ok per fair use, transaction Y is ok per fair use" are (generally, as a practical matter) FULL OF SHIT. When fair use is concerned, scale matters and SOCIETAL IMPACT matters.
It's not something that you can reason with through general principles--it's a measured idea. Now, yes, occasionally media companies try to clamp down too hard. But when some moron on slashdot posts something that is a "loophole in DMCA" for you to exploit then you know it's going to be a de facto fair use violation because these sort of loopholes in the digital world, reminiscent of a recent piece of spam email that I got recently advising me that young women would stick their arms up the orifices of other young women "up to the elbow" encourage abuse and increases the scale of the activity which then pushes it over the edge.
Yes, if you record "when buildings collapse 12" on VHS and give it to your friend as is, it's probably ok per fair use. But when you start doing it digitally, 400 times per day, with the commercials removed, then all of a sudden even though fundamentally it's the same action going on, fair use is violated, DMCA or no DMCA.