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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""
To the perspective of the networks, don't they want MORE people watching their shows? Plus, taping shows is already legal, what's the difference with letting people put it on computer?
copyright issue.
Trading copies of the program(regardless of medium) to people is a copyright violation.
sure, you can record a show for your own use, but not for distribution.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I wouldn't be surprised if a time-to-live feature is added to "swapping" devices. I.e., you can swap all you want, but the swapped copy has a limited lifetime and then erases itself. Like those disposable DVD's.
This could be easily done by the folks at TiVo or ReplayTV.
Even if the DMCA does not prohibit sharing TV shows, regular copyright law probably does. However, software and hardware which allows TV show sharing might be legal to sell if this article is right. OTOH, they didn't need the DMCA to shut down Napster, so my guess is that the TV networks will use similar contributory infringement arguments if they want to go after ExtractStream and friends.
Taking the poster's "legal analysis" as true "sharing" copies of television shows is still a violation of other copyright laws. As the MP3.com case proved, no one has a right to make a copy for you. Only you have the right to "space shift" (transfer to VHS, CDR, etc) an mp3 file (or television show). This is where Napster and MP3.com were found to violate copyright law. Not the DMCA's anticircumvision.
I have a ReplayTV. Love it! Can share my files directly off the Replay to the net (with some firewall rules). Not to mention software like DVArchive that "emulates" another replay on my network allowing me to dump the files from the replay to my fileserver and share them back again for later viewing.
The dingo ate my sig.
Compare this to open source software:
The code is freely available. You can download it from the internet and do whatever you want with it. Anyone can watch a TV show and record it if they want.
So why do people pay for things like Linux distributions? It's the convenience. They're not paying for the code, they're paying for the packaging, the tech support, etc.
Same thing with the TV shows. If people want to record them and share them for free (essentially providing a service), that's their perogative.
Lets just hope we the people manage to stay one step ahead of them.
Louisiana prosecutors rebuked for wearing 'noose' ties in court
I believe the reporter missed the point.
Digital or not, copying copyrighted content without the consent of the copyright holder (beyong fair use) is illegal.
Hollywood is already going after people who share digitaly captured content from analog signal (no circumvention device used) using the DMCA and other copyright laws.
The fact that you don't circumvent protection mechanism does not allow you to share (beyong fair use) copyrighted material without the holder consent.
If the show is copyrighted, you can not distribute copies. DMCA has nothing to do with this. It only adds criminal liability in case when the copy was created by circumventing a protection scheme. The civil liability is always there.
Just because the DMCA doesn't forbid it doesn't mean it's legal. Show-swapping is still a violation of ordinary, regular copyright, whether done via TiVo or VHS tape, regardless of what the DMCA says.
If you pay to receive programming, and you make a videotape of it, and you give that videotape to someone who doesn't pay to receive the same programming, you're violating copyright and are breaking the law. Using a TiVo doesn't change that.
Hmmmm
TV shows are digitally stored and transmitted
A + B = C
Can you "C" the answer?
What could it "B"??
Is this really "A" hard question???
Just shake your head and smirk
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
The wonderful (not) thing about the DMCA is that anything can be considered a protection system, because protection is in the eye of the content provider. The only way you can tell if your actions are unlawful circumvention are to try them and see if you get sent to jail.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Pulling video out of a TiVo and burning it on a DVD is just the same as taping the TiVo show onto VHS tape. The only difference is the media. Now if you go and give (make available for download or copies on DVD) the recorded shows to multiple people it's distribution, and I'll wager that it'd be as illegal to do this with VHS tape as it is with DVDs or MPEG files. The usable time to live quality feature of a VHS protected it more than the infinately copyable DVDs, so I figure that the DVD copies may very well get more attention than VHS.
All I can think of is that a PC with a capture card could be used to re-capture if you played it from the tivo
Indeed I use my PC straight from my Digital TV box to do just that. I dare say the tivo files are a pretty standard format. Maybe you could stick the tivo HD in a PC?
It's always been illegal to swap TV shows under conventional copyright law, nothing under fair use covers that. It covers time-shifting, and using small portions in various ways.
What DMCA added was that it outlawed any tool or information that could be used to circumvent protection mechanisms (and screw any fair use or other applications it might have).
I really don't see the point here...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The networks better keep their gripes to themselves or Bill might just make "My TV" a reality..
Trolling is a art,
Seriously, though, the governments and corporations of the world have taken advantage of us by pawning off all these "digital" versions of laws that are already in place. This is why the EFF keeps fighting it, and why everyone should too.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Then they get to choose the commercials that exist in the de-facto standard download for that episode. And the advertisers will know that, and pay more for the privledge.
Nah, because it'd be even easier to just cut out between the first keyframe of the brrak and the last keyfram of the break and reshare.
They wouldn't even have to do the capturing, the network would have done the hard work. It would literally be a 30second job.
It's in mpeg2 format (hardware encoder/decoder), and if you go via a capture card, you're going to lose quality and colour balance. Digital transfers all the way please, just get a network card for your TIVO.
Even more problematic is that ratings systems (the way networks determine how many people saw a show and its commercials and how much they can therefore charge in the future for commercial time) cannot currently effectively deal with the TiVo:
If you tape a show and watch it months later, how does it count? The ratings have already been published!
If you fast-forward through commercials while watching a program right after it actually aired, should it count?
While these aren't huge problems today, as more people get PVRs the problems will become larger. Neilsen has spent time investigating VCRs in the past and are working with TiVo right now to address these issues in the future.
Well to another hardward MPEG2 you shouldn't lose too much.
But absolutely the best idea is to try to get the original capture. Or just to buy a hardward MPEG2 for your PC/MAC/Amiga with Video Toaster
Here's the deal. It is just fine to have a VCR, because VCR's are capable of substantial noninfringing use and don't get sold primarily for swapping. It is not fine to have a centrally managed PTP file sharing system like Napster for reasons only the 9th Circuit can fathom, and Napster couldn't afford to bring to the Supreme Court (which reversed the 9th Circuit's opinion in the Betamax case). Now, there is also the claim of DMCA, which I agree is not an effective circumvention method, particularly when used just like a VCR -- the content that was broadcast was in the clear, and not encrypted.
But this does not mean that a mechanism for sharing TIVO files digitally would be lawful, or that any particular sharing would be lawful -- any more than it means that a VCR tape copy made of a movie may be freely shared (it can't be). If someone contributes to the infringement of another, and there is no substantial noninfringing use, there may be liabliity in the contributor as well -- in most every case, the TiVo user who swaps files is very likely an infringer of Copyright.
In short, the devil is in the details, and there is no meaningful TiVo exception to the Copyright Act. That the DMCA might not apply (and it probably does not unless the original content were encoded in some manner) is beside the point, they might get you the same way they got Napster -- straightforward and good old-fashioned claims of copyright infringement.
..by reporting statistics like "Our show is the most swapped on the internet" which would probably do wonders for in show advertising.
I.e., imagine Stan and Kyle drinking Pepsi and belching. Or Cartman eating Hormel Beans and... well, you get the idea.
.
Personally, I'm waiting for the content faction (RIAA, MPAA, et al...) to take on Microsoft for "contributory copyright infringement" . It is illegal to market a device whose primary purpose is to facilitate copyright infringement, and it appears that the new Windows functionality does just this*. It's only a matter of time before:
- The content faction sues Microsoft, or
- Microsoft "retroactively" (via Automatic Update...)incorporates DRM into its OS
From my standpoint, it seems as if option 1 is better for Microsoft; DRM could hamper the widespread adoption of the new Windows OS's. Though Microsoft would like to push Palladium, I think they realize that they'll sell more operating systems without it - simply because people need a good reason to upgrade. Being able to record and swap tv shows is a significant reason to the average PC buyer; without it, Microsoft might have a harder time selling upgrades, especially in this stagnant economy.Personally, I'd like to see Microsoft buck the content faction, and get sued. As both Microsoft and the content faction have lots of money, it would be interesting to see them embroiled in a legal battle against each other, rather than trying to screw their customers...
* - yes, ATI has produced hardware which allowed PC users to record tv shows, however, it is not nearly as universally recognized or used as Microsoft. Microsoft's backing of tv recording programs has a much bigger impact, as the software will be on virtually every desktop sold.
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Although this may not violate the DMCA (depending on how courts construe "circumvention"), it violates several other criminal statutes. First, it violates the No Electronic Theft Act, which criminalized copyright violations even without a profit motive. While the Act requires a value of $1000 of content to trigger its provisions, courts have allowed this threshold to be met by production or "black market" prices rather than realistic costs. In addition, this may violate the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act, which criminalized unauthorized access to servers. While this was intended as an anti-hacking law, perhaps it could be extended to unauthorized intrusion into one's own server (Tivo) if (and this is a HUGE if) owning the thing doesn't automatically authorize one to access it.
While the second of these is speculative, the first can and has been used to prosecute warez folks so I have no doubt the Justice Department of John Ashcroft would use it should entertainment companies begin wailing about TV piracy.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I disagree with that. You compress then decommpress with a loss of quality. Performing the same process again will not cause you to lose the same "pieces of quality", especially with a physically different encoder and the lossess/changes associated with the analog stage.
Try it with an mp3. Encode, convert to wav and repeat using a different encoder. It sounds baaaaaddd! ;-)
You will get more signal loss than you expect. Remember, you are turning the signal from digital to analogue and back again. This will add more noise to the picture and amplify any MPEG atrifacts in the original encoding.
If you do not already own a TiVo, look into a ReplayTV. I can suck the files off of my ReplayTV via the ethernet port on the unit with no additional loss in image quality.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
When I learned that Series 2 Tivo cryptographically signs the kernel and uses filesystem checksums, I quickly packed mine back in the box for a full refund.
Now I'm happily running MythTV.
They only sell Tivo here.
I'll just go with Plan A and capture it to PC in the first place,
Is it circumvention of copy control to copy mp3s off cd and put them on p2p? No. Is it illegal? Yes. /DeCSS/ was circumvention.
I don't know who got the idea that the issue with p2p was circumvention. The issue with p2p was straight-up copyright violation, illegal for well over a century prior to the DMCA. The issue with
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
They don't sell ReplayTVs where I live, either. I ordered my from SonicBlue's website.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
in the DMCA. The DMCA is a "loophole" in *copyright law.* You have to understand that fact clearly.
The loophole in the DMCA is that if you take steps to *protect* your digital data new, and otherwise unsupportable, laws apply.
If you do not do so the "old" law that allows you tape a show on VHS applies.
This may well be a relevant story if people don't understand this, but it's hardly a surprise.
KFG
Transatlantic shipping might be painful.
And that's if it even handles PAL.
On one hand, I want to say "GO TEAM!" On the other hand, if this just whips around and Big Brother tries to address the problem by removing PVRs from the equation entirely by going after TiVO, et al, I'll be very, very depressed. On the TiVO Community board, discussion about data extraction are banned for just that reason... no one wants the lightning rod.
My TiVO is very near and dear to my heart. As just about every member of the TiVO Cult chants, "It changes the way you watch television." I want this technology as much freedom to develop as we can squeeze out of our rapidly gestapoing society.
YOU ARE A CRIMINAL!
;) I think there's a reason fair use has never been written into law, its just common sense. Content was never meant to be this restricted.
GO TO JAIL!
Er, at least that's what the cable company would say if they caught you.
---media advertisers don't have a direct way to see who's watching the ads, but they sure as heck have an indirect way, and that's if the advertising *works* or not. Ads that work and sell widgets keep getting run as widgets keep getting sold. It's a multi zillion a year industry that's been up and running for generations now, so it must be "true facts". It's kinda like spam, they use mass scale to be effective,and repetition. x-million of people see a tv advertisement, a much smaller number buy the product. On the internet it's different because there's a much smaller number of people seeing the content as compared to the cost of providing the content. Add in "stripping" the ads, the big companies will come up with what you are seeing-legislation to "crack down" on sharers as the first step.
Personally I have never seen a comparison. although vcr's and copying over the air or cable shows has been around for awhile now, there hasn't been any huge explosion of people "sharing" vcr tapes, not anything numbers-wise like the "sharing" of stuff you see on the internet. the people who produce the content are not going to stop their efforts until they get paid for as many single "viewings" as they can come up with, practically speaking, and I wouldn't put it past them to go so far as trying to do huge numbers of arrests and fines (via court orders) in order to drive home the point, that and getting people kicked off their isps for sharing-either "just" leeching or full sharing. I don't expect them to give up, nor do I expect the countermeasures to cease, I just think they will most likely "win" once joe average starts getting busted and fined all over. Right now only the huge sharers (by bandwith) and outright mass production-for - profit copiers are getting busted and harassed, but as soon as it gets to 'anyone', file sharing will slow down tremendously. It won't stop, but it'll slow down significantly.
It's the golden rule in action, them's that gots the gold makes the rules,and it's always been that way.
Now this could be interesting...
Until now, the DMCA has been battling independant developers and companies that bend under the smallest pressure. It may be very interesting to see MS take on the DMCA, cause we all know how they practically bitchslapped the US justice system. This might just be what we need, ironically...
I don't think MPAA and their ilk will be able to stop PVRs - I certainly hope not. My PVR was provided with my Satellite receiver (Canadian Bell Express Vu), which probably could create interesting situations for them - on the one hand they are getting the networks out to the viewers, on the other hand they are providing the means to strip off the network's source of money.
I think that odd commercial time slots - both in length and schedule will make the commericals harder to filter - although it won't stop the die hard file sharers - but you won't stop them anyways. Not sure how much I'd like 4 times more commercial slots with 15 second commericals though...
But seriously cramming commercials down people's throats is really of dubious value anyways - I don't think they'll get any more purchases even if they could forcefeed the commercials Clockwork Orange style. Under the current model, even with a PVR however, I have stopped to view an interesting looking commercial once and awhile- commercials for products that I may actually be interested in purchasing. Me seeing a commercial I'm interested in one more time is far more effective then me being forced to watch a commercial that I have no interest in 1000 times.
The TV industry is just going to have to adapt in some way or another - pissing off customers by *forcing* them to watch crap ass commercials multiple times isn't doing anyone any favours.
If the Studios did decide to try and sue Microsoft and TiVo for this, who's side would you be on?
THe enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
You gotta admit, nobody could put the Kibosh on the DMCA faster than MS could. Especially with that $40 BILLION pile of cash and the battalion of lawyers they have. I'd like to say that it would be the fight of the century, but they'd just end up settlin gout of court, and we'd get screwed anyways.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I'd like for you to explain to the rest of us precisely how you get 100% analog signal onto a magnetic hard drive.
tivo's a video/audio encoder with a hard drive built in and input/output capability. everything that's stored on the hard drive is de facto, digital. the parent of this thread is still wrong, it IS a valid point that the DMCA does not cover this. however, it's still illegal via normal copyright laws.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Contributory infringement, admittedly, already existed, but there is a redline test involving "primary purpose or effect". The DMCA doesn't require any such test to be applied if "circumvention" has occured
Actually, the DMCA does require such a test to be applied, in 17 USC 1201(b), for devices designed or marketed to break "a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title". The right to exclude others from making unauthorized fair use of a copyrighted work is not such a right. Thus, section 1201(b) merely codifies the guidelines developed in e.g. Sony v. Universal.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure about 1201(a).
Will I retire or break 10K?
The DMCA is intended to protect copy-protected material. As the article mentions, no one at Tivo designed any sort of copy-protection into Tivo, so if someone figures out how to swap files, they haven't circumvented any copy-protection. As far as older laws go, fair use says you can share recorded material with friends, I believe. Only if you share the content p2p with strangers, do I see any possible violation of the law.
Vote for Pedro
Actually, I'd like to see a per channel charge, if you could specify the channels you wanted. At $5/Month/Channel I'd be paying about $25-30/Month, provided tha channels I wanted could learn to behave.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
No.
Actually, the networks aren't afraid of copies. They're afraid of *perfect* copies.
... Grrrr!" Valenti goes on and on about the danger of "perfect" copies. I've seen him speak twice -- a amazingly underwhelming experience -- and find him to be much to old to actually "get" what's going on.
s o-I-have-something-to-fuck-on-weekends executives will be a helluva lot *more* worried if one day we wake up to see goofy Donald Rumsfield breaking into 'Days of Our Lives' to tell us that we've just stopped and boarded an unflagged North Korean tanker headed for an unspecified port with 100 kilograms of plutonium on board.
Hence, the fear of digital.
Geriatric Jack "Maddog
He doesn't get what's going on. His staff does, but he's the spokesperson, and he's not a very good one. Valenti is much more interesting -- and actually engaging -- when he talks about his time in the Kennedy (that's right, JFK) White House.
But this digital stuff -- and the fear that Valenti loves to spread -- just doesn't resonate when Valenti is doing the talking. He's like some old guy talking about "The Pink Floyd" while watching a PF video and then pointing, saying, "Is that Pink? Is that guy Pink?"
He's the sort of guy that would do the much-maligned "Funky White Guy" dance -- squinting, sorta pursing his lips, lifting his hands, and trying to shake once or twice to the beat. It's not only not effective, but it's not funny. It's abymsal, in fact, and that's exactly the sort of aura that Valenti projects among the 20/30/early 40 crowd -- at least when he's doing his public speaking thing.
People look at him and have this: "Is this guy for fucking real?" look. We all clap politely but know nothing's gonna change until he takes his retirement, leases that new Lexus, and heads out to Tuscon or Phoenix or Palm Desert or wherever has-beens go to relax and prune-out.
The other issue -- at least when I saw him speak -- was the fact that Valenti was talking about digital copying as if it were a fate worse than terrorism. I mean, for fuck's sake, let's be real.
The neo-Islamo-fascist weapons trade is serious.
Kim "Look at my lofty bouffant hair-do" Il-Jung proliferating his plutonium and U-235 is serious.
Angry Chechen mobsters with lead-lined cannisters that are warm to the touch are serious.
But a copy of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- even if it's a perfect copy -- is not serious.
Yes, yes, I understand that a good portion of media America is concerned and worried about "proliferation" of perfect copies. But believe me, that same group of Italian-suit-wearing-hire-me-a-nice-young-intern-
And the other issue with Valenti is that the word "compromise" is simply not in his vocabulary. Several folks asked him about whether or not he could find a "happpy medium" and his response was always, no, digital copies must be protected. Period.
So he didn't score any points -- at least not with me and booze-whores I hang out with.
Yes, copyright already makes infringment illegal, but personal violations are hard to enforce.
However, the DMCA adds onto it by creating a super-broad definition of "contributory infringment", allowing the FBI to target the 10-20 hackers who post messages describing how to copy the shows. Otherwise the cops would be stuck trying to arrest millions of people doing the actual copying.
The TV networks can't feasibly hope that an armed police response to copyright violators will protect their profits streams- there's just too many targets. But pilloring a few people for DMCA infringment? That might work! (As long as their defense attorneys fail to argue the "no-circumvention" exception described above)
Unless you're buying your DVDs somewhere strange, you don't have a license to anything. You own a single legal copy of the movie as encoded onto the DVD. There is no license either granting you additional freedoms or taking freedoms away from you. You are free to use the DVD however you like, within the limits of copyright law. You are free to watch it, destroy it, sell it, give it away, and loan it out without any license needed, just like a VHS tape, a CD, a book, or a magazine. Assuming you can get around the Macrovision and CSS without violating the DMCA, you're even free to make copies for personal use. Copyright law does places some limitations on behavior, including prohibitions on distributing copies of the work and publically perform/show/broadcast it. (The DMCA part of copyright law effectively bans software capable of breaking the encryption on DVDs.)
The idea that you need a license of some sort to make personal use of copyright protected content is wrong. Many copyright based businesses are spreading this erroneously idea because it increases their effective power. Don't buy into it!
(The claim that a publisher can use a click-through license on software is based on some very shaky assumptions and still lacks a good national test case. Any attempt to spread such behavior to DVDs or other media would likely fail miserably.)
Search 2010 Gen Con events
They ran ExtractStream. Video extraction is expressly prohibited by the TiVo terms of service. In order to run this app, they had to crack open the TiVo and install custom software. With the series2 TiVo's, this is definitely a hack, breaking the encryption and hash verification they have on the kernel and binaries (well, not breaking, really just avoiding - aka "circumventing" - this protection by inserting shell code into the boot parameters as a BASH_ENV variable). With the series1, you have to modify the prom to do this, unless you have a very old TiVo that you have prevented TiVo from updating the boot code for, again "circumventing" the code TiVo has in place to prevent this sort of activity.
I would consider heavy reverse engineering of an unpublished disk format, installing custom software by circumventing the measures they have in place to prevent that, and violating the Terms of Service to extract video equivalent to "cracking" or "hacking" - no matter how you define those terms.
And they say they didn't have to crack anything...
If you tape a Pay-Per-View movie and give the tape away, you're clearly violationg copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
If you pay to get a basic cable channel such as Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, and you make an AVI file of a show on that network, and you make it available to folks who haven't paid to receive those networks, you're clearly violating copyright in a way not covered by fair use.
Consumers want: To be able to get good quality copies of shows they missed and/or would like to see again.
Networks want: To sell advertising.
PVR Vendors want: To sell PVRs and subscriptions
Dumb solution: Networks yell at PVR vendors about enabling piracy, and yell at consumers about being pirates. Consumers yell at networks about not giving them any means to see the shows they missed. PVR vendors yell at networks, because consumers are reluctant to buy PVRs given the network's attitude. Nobody wins, except the lawyers.
Smart solution: Networks do a deal with PVR vendors: we give you copies of our shows, with commercials intact, that you provide for download to your subscribers to view using their PVR...the combination of PVR firmware and show recording format is such that the commercials can't be skipped (there are ways to deal with the hackers). Consumers get to view shows whenever they want, as often as they want. Networks sell more ad time because more consumers will be watching the shows. PVR vendors sell more PVRs and have a service to add to their subscription offering, so they sell more of that, too. Everybody wins, except the lawyers.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
"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.
I believe it is phrased to cover anything that picks up tv signals. (granny's dentures etc... :)
You can buy tv's that have been modified (or built) to just be usable for vhs or whatever, and not tv, and so you don't need a license for them (But I've never seen them around - just heard they exist.)
You have to pay the license on a per household basis. In my halls of residence we have 8 people to a house. If we wanted to put a tv anywhere in our small house we would have to pay 9*120 (+1 for in-nobody's-room e.g. the living room)
I can't remember if it is £105 or £120.
But, the judge ruled, MP3.com was not allowed to rip the MP3 once, keep it in a central directory, and then download it to customers who possessed the CD.
Yes, the digital copies would be identical. Yes, it would be impossible for any outside agency to distinguish which MP3s were ripped by the customer and which by MP3.com. Yes, this seemed to be a natural (and non-infringing) extension of Fair Use. And no, I have no clue what the judge was thinking that day.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
How can they prove they lost so much money with peer to peer when they don't even charge us for the show to begin with?
They don't have to prove it. It's still illegal. You don't need to show damages to get someone on copyright infringement, you just need to show that they copied your copyrighted material.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
You're absolutely right. That's another issue that loses Valenti all sorts of credibility points. He keeps saying "perfect digital copies" when he means "point-and-click-easy-enough-for-the-average-idiot -to-do" copies. I might have a little more sympathy for that argument, if anyone at the MPAA were honest enough to make it.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"