Slashdot Mirror
Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age
ditogi writes "The Harvard Political Review did a quick interview with the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti. He gives his thoughts on government mandated copy prevention, fair use, and lobbying. In response to his famous 'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.' And what does he think of his current job? 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession.'" My favorite quote: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." Update: 02/05 20:05 GMT by T : Derek Slater writes "I'm the author of the Valenti article you guys linked to. I've made some brief comments about it on my site, and figured I'd send them along."
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless."
;)
Wait till his hard disk dies
Valenti's Views The MPAA president and former LBJ aide opens up on a range of topics By Derek Slater Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries. In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media. But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies. After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics. HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies? Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy]. I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true. Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money. But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world. The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it? It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes... We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know. HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry? JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself. HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy? JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless. The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists? Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations. HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies? JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width. If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard. HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire? JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that. The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment. I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem. So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson. HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime? JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment. HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence because they have money? JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before. Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
I'm going to have to post only to bsd stories or something away from the front page.
From the article: "In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry."
"We have been befallen by the great flood of Kazaa, that one of the water of immorality which we hear when we are being told; it has come to us; it has taken us, the great flood of Kazaa..."
Okay, it's not really funny.
If Jack Valenti had his way back in 1982 (he almost did as the Sony BetaMax case went all the way to the Supreme Court) we wouldn't have VCRs today, Blockbuster wouldn't exist and 50% of Hollywoods income wouldn't exist.
The guy is a knob.
Dear Mr. Valenti,
Please choke on a bowl of cocks. And die.
Love,
The American Consumer
Hi:
I would like to respond to the article's citation
to the costs of producing a CD and a movie.
I believe it cited 250,000 dollars for a CD and
20 million for a movie.
I talked about this with a friend who is doing
a CD for a chorus. He said that the studio
rental and editing costs were about $20,000
to $30,000.
We did not get a chance to talk about the
manufacturing and distro costs, but I strongly
think that the total costs can be done at much
less than the number cited in the article.
Mark
Cleara
JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAhAHAHAHAHAHAH
JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
Yes, Lobbying turns Capitol hill into Capitalism... every dollar has a vote! YAY!
Who gave this guy a chairmans seat?
And I'm sure those 60 million people (plus university students) will all be watching LOTR huddled around their 17" monitors. Try again, Jack.
I am so reassured to know that the future advancements of our society are safely in the hands of visionaries such as Jack Valenti. I hope that he plays a major role in the formation of legistlation related to technological concepts, as he is surely one of the most forward-thinking members of this digital age.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.'
From that quote then we can also infer he wasn't opposed to the Boston Strangler. Maybe he is the "Prince of Darkness".
I wasn't opposed to the VCR.
So I guess he wasn't opposed to the Boston Strangler either?
Now here is a man that has mastered Double-think if I ever saw one.
I'm wondering if I should start hounding him to replace my DVD when it gets stepped on since it's 'timeless'
Where are we going, and why are we in this hand cart?
Anyone got Jack's home number? I'd like to get a free replacement, since digital copies "last forever" and never "wear out"
To compensate for all those people that made home videos? All those people that copied all those home videos? Are they getting compensated? Come-on Jack! I'm not paying YOU because I want to film my 3 year old!
[from the interview:]
Valenti: But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world.
Hey Valenti, what sites have you been visiting lately? Pete Townshend wants to know...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Tried to read the interview, but here's the first question and his answer:
You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies?
Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR.
oh wow. This guy really needs to do a tough interview with someone. This guy just let the stuff slide. This isn't so much an interview as valenti ansering a questionaire that HPR put together beforehand. Most interviews these days seem to be more like the interviewee just anserin a questionaire.
I suppose so... if you're a thoughtless moron. I'll never read another HPR interview again. Everything about this one stank. But after watching Colon Pole prevaricate in front of the UN today, what should I expect from men of this caliber ? Swine, all of them.
Me, I'm going into the designer body-bag biz.
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Nowhere in this article did I find any mention of turning "Bringing down a movie on the Internet" into a viable business model.
People download movies becasue it is easy, convenient, and fast.
Attach a cost.
Keep it easy.
Keep it convenient
Make it fast.
and it could become a viable business model for the future...
The music industry still hasn't gotten the clue, maybe the movie industry still has a chance before it eaten alive by Kazaa, IRC(for the moment), and other file sharing applications.
He doesn't have CD eating children running around his house like I do.
Dear Jack,
I work at the bank where your financial information is stored. We were considering backing up your jillions of dollars but decided after hearing your comments that the information is secure because it is digital.
Have a nice day,
A fan
the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti.
I was going to make a comment about slashdot, and professionalism, and editorial responsibility to present unbiased viewpoints..
but..
..fuck it. This guy is Satan on Earth, and I hope he goes the fuck out of business.
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless."
That all depends on whose posession that 'digital copy' is in.
If it is in MY posession, my dog might eat it. Or my computer/mp3 player/DVD drive might die. And I'll need the ability to make my own backup. When I want, how I want.
If it is in THEIR posession (streaming or whatever), then I'll assume they have multiple copies on various servers. BUT, then they can charge me again to watch it whenever they feel like.
Bullshit, Jack. It's right here: US Code: Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Some obvious things I noticed as evidence why this guy is totally out of touch with reality:
He says DVDs are timeless, they don't wear out. Uh, we just had some articles out about "DVD rot". He also asks who will produce the content ... and that an album costs hundreds of thousands to produce and a movie $80mil. Uh, I can name quite a number of excellent movies made for a lot less than $80mil as well as albums that could have been recorded at home for crying out loud. Maybe the industry needs to cut costs.
He wonders why a person doesn't see it wrong to walk into a video store and shoplift a DVD, but would dowload the same movie off the net. Here's a clue for you, because in shoplifting the physical media still exists. When you download something, yeah, it's wrong, but it's a copy. To compare physical theft to copying means you're missing a critical concept. People just don't see "copying" as bad as outright theft for this reason.
This guy is totally reactionary, instead of honestly trying to understand why the music biz is in the situation it's in and work with the consumers. Treating consumers like criminals just legitimizes bad behavior on our part, seriously.
I mean at least he's honest about what he wants and how he will seek to obtain it.
Bullshit like the CBDTPA and SSSCA which are pushed by Fritz Holling (D., Disney) are just a bunch of hooey.
---------
I sig, therefore I was.
My god the VHS tape is barely over 20 years old, but you'd think the way he talks people have been breaking VHS tapes and buying replacements for over 100 years.
Also I never knew it was illegal to copy VHS tapes that you already owned. All the FBI blurb at the begining of almost every U.S.-made movie says is that it is illegal to copy for distribution or showing in front of an audience. I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
DVD's won't wear out. They'll just get superceded by another format. I think agent K said it best in MIB when he said "Looks like I'll have to buy the White Album again."
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
He obviously has not read Title 17, United States Code, the statutes that specify copyright law in the United States. If he had, he would have seen section 107, which tells the judge what four factors to look at.
And one of the four factors is commercial exploitation. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. If a work is out of print or otherwise not being exploited, then it'd probably be possible for a defendant's counsel to argue that by taking the work out of print, the copyright owner has admitted that the work has negligible market value, that unauthorized copying could not possibly diminish the market value, and that the use of such material is more likely to be fair.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless."
I'd like him to play a DVD from Hollywood Video.
Of the last three I rented,
- one had pits and I had to skip a scene,
- one was delaminated, unplayable and I had to eject it before my DVD drive got munged,
-one was outright unplayable on my TiBook because according to the README.TXT "It doesn't play on a Macintosh."
I can MAKE a DVD on my TiBook with iMovie and a video camera but I can't play one of yours Jack.
Bwahahaha. Somebody buy this poor dumb [expletive deleted] a clue.
He probably believes M$ when they say that their systems are "secure now."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Do you ever print out copies of you taxes from the computer or do you just figure that since it's digital on the harddrive it's eternal...
Here are some random thoughts about movie
pirating.
I recently went to the theater to see a
move (Chicago). I paid $9.00.
For that money, I was given the privilege to
see about 8 commercials and 8 previews before
the show even started. The commercials were not
just those for the snack bar and the gift
certificate for the theater itself. These
were TV type commercials that I thought that
I paid my $9.00 to not to see.
I think that what I am trying to say is if the
movie-going experience is made a little more
pleasent, perhaps maybe the piracy might go
down?
How about this for a far fetched thought. Back
in the olden days (golden olden) you went to
the movies and you had a real experience. A
guy playing a pipe organ as part of the show.
A nice gilded theater. You entered a very special
palace for a very special experience. An
experience that cannot be easily pireted.
Now, I look forward to the experience we have
with Rocky Horror Picture Show. That is something
that you can't easily pirate.
Cleara
I agree with his opinion of money and politics:
I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
Pure politics are a necessary part of any civilized society. However, throw in large sums of cash and the politicans job becomes diluted. Wanna make it far? Gotta have the cash. Wanna have the cash? Gotta become a spokesperson for someone with that cash. (This step tyically involves setting aside your own beliefs for someone elses.) Nowadays, that "someone" is usually Disney, RIAA and Big Business in general.
Sucks, I know.
It has little to do with pirates, or poor product.
Its his really bizzare attitudes and desire to restrict 'his' consumers to the point of lunacy..
The man needs to go, while there is still time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Hey, what the hell are you doing??!"
"Don't worry, it lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless. Bye."
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless"
I think you misplaced it. It should have been an "It's funny, laugh" - story
"we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out."
Damn, I wish he banked with my company... I'd make sure we didn't make any backups of his bank account - since they're not needed and all that.
And then I'd schedule a disaster-recovery test involving fire, flooding, and lots of sledgehammer blows to the DASD where his data was stored.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
What's his point here?
"What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself."
So what if I've 'undermined the encryption'?
I do know what the DMCA says about it. But it's absurd and wrong that they can wrap a patent around something that copyright law won't let them accomplish.
Through their own legal battles against used sales and mom & pop rental places, they've made the point that I'm purchasing a liscense to the content. Where is the liscense (if there is a standard one)? Is there a term anywhere that says the liscense is tied to the medium and the encryption somehow?
Also I take issue to this quote:
"We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know."
This is bullshit. 'Young students' surely do know right from wrong. They know getting a movie (or video game or album) they haven't paid for is wrong. They also know it isn't theft, but a copyright infringement. I just hate his insinuation that we're not only criminals, but stupid.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
If you were prepping someone like JV for a interview like this (you know he had help coming up with answers), wouldn't you tell him not to lie blatantly?
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
And why are we supposed to care?
I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
United States copyright law, 17 USC 101 defines an audience as "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances".
Will I retire or break 10K?
"JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. "
It gets even better...
" What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself."
Breaking the encryption has nothing to do with fair use. The interview astutely follows up and then we get this gem:
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless. "
There you go folks, *we don't need backups*, it lasts *forever*
Straight from the mouth of Sauron itself. Can the debate of whether the MPAA is an ignorant, greedy monstrosity finally be put to rest with a resounding yes?
The more serious, non-copyright-infringing projects are cooking, the better defense we have against indefensible legislation.
Wanna talk to a REAL visionary? check out the MAPS project at http://www.kingdomcomeinstitute.com
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The article could be summed up as follows:
Interviewer: blah blah blah
Valenti: I am a back-pedalling, hypocritical, full-of-shit weasel.
blog |
Perhaps they meant hurtling? and not hurdling???
qz
$350,000 to produce a CD? $80,000,000 to produce a movie? $3.5 billion a year on analog videocassette piracy?
Does anyone know where he's getting these figures, or really, anything even close? (Other than pulling them out of random orifices, of course).
Yea, if your DVD was kept in a vacuum, and suspended by an anti-gravity device. But, alas, things are handled by humans, and we're usually pretty abusive to the things we use. There's not ONE company who would promise me a free replacement DVD if I broke/lost/scratched or otherwise made inoperable my copy of LOTR:2T... oops, did I say I had that?
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Idiot. The data may be in some rarified technical sense "timeless", but any physical media has certain inherent limitations that cannot be overcome. So a backup will always be a good idea, a matter of sheer prudence. Or is Mr. Valenti is claiming that not only are CDs and DVDs immune to all forms of physical harm, they somehow automatically return to you if lost or stolen? Like Lassie, just, well, smaller. And shiny.
Wow, I'm really dammed impressed by that kind of technology. Good thing Saddam Hussein hasn't caught on yet, or he'll be armoring his secret bunker with an impenetrable shield of AOL CDs. And that RIAA Hilary-class assault vehicle will really be terrifying with those remaindered copies of "Glitter" deflecting anything those vile pirates can throw at it.
What concerns me now are the privacy implications - if the discs are somehow immune to theft or loss, how do they know the identity and location of the legal owner? What aren't they telling us? Where are the chips imbedded? Bastards...
On the other hand, maybe Mr. Valenti is just a lying weasel who is saying whatever he thinks he needs to in order to cover up an indefensibly weak position. Nahh, those CDs are fricking magic!
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
This is great: "The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy]."
And of course, the MPAA are the "creators," because who else would ever make a movie? And he's also saying this implies that the MPAA own the right to copy movies period?!
This line, too:
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law."
May I point Mr. Valenti to the US Code Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use.
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
And he thinks no one should be allowed to copy anything, ever.
I don't see how anyone can take this guy seriously.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The width of a railroad track goes back to the width of horse-drawn vehicles that ran on standardized rutted roads, which in turn was based on slightly more than twice the width of a horse's rear end. Let Cecil Adams explain the rest.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Local Man Arrested For Violence At Bank
Police Tuesday arrested a local man at a Bank of America branch. Jack Valenti, 46, was charged with assault and attempted robbery for beating the bank president with a spindle of blank CDRs and attempting to take cash from the teller's drawer. According to the teller, Mr. Valenti became upset when he was informed that, due to a computer error, his account had been closed. Due to recent changes in the bank's policies, the IT staff ceased making backups of the bank's data. When asked about the policy change, the IT manager, who appeared to be choking back laughter, said, "We recently changed our backup policies in light of statements made by Mr. Valenti himself that digital information was timeless and, therefore, did not need backed up. The bank president read that interview and told us he could no longer justify the cost of daily tape backups."
Mr. Valenti is being held on $50,000 bond. His lawyer declined our request for an interview. In similar news, the RIAA has filed suit agains Bank of America for copyright violations. When asked what evidence prompted the suit, a spokesdemon replied, "They had CDRs, didn't they? What more evidence do you need?"
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
He used to argue that broadband adoption was slow because file sharing caused the movie industry to shy away from distributing content online.
But now broadband adoption is skyrocketing (in the US at least), despite no changes from the movie industry. Whoops - the chameleon needs a new argument.
We've long suspected as much, but now we know for sure. Is there anything in that article that he says that isn't an out-and-out lie? He was never against VCRs? That's doubtless why he claimed that VCRs would destroy the movie industry. Statistics I hear suggest that movie tickets are now selling better than they have at any time since Jack Valenti was still getting into movies at the "child" price.
Backups aren't necessary? I wonder if, when he was a kid, he ever dropped a record on his bedroom floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. He obviously really believes that if he scratches a CD, trips and falls and smashes a CD in half, has his cassette player or his VCR eat a tape, or anything like that, he (and we) should all just rush out to buy a new one. No way!
Where does his figure "$3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy" come from? How does he "measure" this loss, being as it's really difficult to measure negative quantities. Is he counting the total street value of large-scale bootleg videotapes, or some sort of hypothetical "if Joe Average hadn't taped Star Trek off the tv, he would have bought the box set" figure?
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. " Well, IANAL, but I quote
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That looks like there's something in law, all right. In Canada, the similar reservation is called "fair dealing," in case you're looking for it.
Oh, how he do go on. He claims to have been in Vietnam. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? That's the only other explanation I can think of...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
As can be heard here and read here, Valenti's worst enemy is his own lack of ignorance of the topics on which he debates. His retarded allusions and allegory are just the pretty doily on which his pile of bullshit rests.
Go hear/read it for yourself. He's a douche (not breaking news though, is it?). His "no need for back-ups" statement only further demonstrates this fact.
I, for one, wish to see the guy run out of town on a rail, but you can wish in one hand...
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
Here's a good cached article of Jack Valenti's disposition in court against 2600.
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:ni4GUUU00zIC: www.cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-jvd.htm+jack+valenti& hl=en&ie=UTF-8
As far as the response of 'wasn't opposed to the VCR.', Valenti goes on to say that instead he was in favor of a fee placed on blank cassette, which never passed.
Aso for the quote, 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession', he was talking about the ability to get your point of view across to a congress-person, and then goes on to talk about money corrupting the process.
You'd think slashdot editors wouldn't pick such biased posts, but timothy doesn't seem to mind the misrepresentations.
Vote for Pedro
In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
Signing up for broadband
- 15 minutes
Getting the latest Britney Spears MP3 from Kazaa
- 5 minutes;
Burn the MP3 to a cd-r
- Timeless
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I would recommend you do some research on the music production process as a whole, and not base your assumptions of it on a single, very limited case. Your example leaves out a few hundred factors that can affect the cost of production. Many, if not all of these, were discussed at length a few weeks ago on this very board.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Who gets the feeling that this guy has a VCR that's still flashing 12:00?
The summary up there is a little harsh. He would have approved of the VCR if they got a royalty for each tape. Okay. Fair due. Now I'll lay into him.
The fact that most of the "copying" that people do genuinely is for time shifiting does seem to have escaped him. Anyway, surely the money lost to piracy is more than made up for by the money gained by video sales. I really don't believe his figures. Losses of $3.5 billion!? This matches the sales of pre-recorded VHS tapes. Even if we use the MPAA calculations, this would mean that a pirate copy is sold for every legitimate copy.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Why did the interviewer ask all those questions concerning Valenti's anti-censorship stance and then not connect them to the MPAA's attempt to censor cryptography research? Did he think the link was too obvious to bear mentioning?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
After I stopped laughing:
1 23 6&mode=thread&tid=97
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/31/224
CBS is owned by Viacom Inc. ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company. Fox is owned by News Corporation. Money given to senators' political campaign funds is often used for television ads. So when Viacom, Disney, and News Corp donate money to a political campaign funds, they in effect give the senator some free airtime.
But by FCC regulation, owners of television networks are supposed to make airtime available under equal terms to all qualified candidates for an elected government position. So can campaign contributions be considered a violation of the equal time doctrine?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hi everyone, I have a couple of questions that I was hoping to get some answers/advice for.
I am a Canadian leaving for Japan in a couple of months, and I have well over 50 music CDs. Now due to wanting to travel light I am hopeing to acopy all my CDs to digital form for travel and stick them on a laptop. Now I was wondering if anyone might know of the legalities. I am pretty sure I can copy for personal use in Canada, but does that extend outside to Japan and some asian countries? And does anyone have a good free recording software that they would recommend? I've used the shared(limited) version of Musicmatch Jukebox for about 10 discs and it has managed to screw up on 2 songs out of that so far. I'm not looking for CD quality, just enough compression to stick them all on a 20 gig drive (I can live with 128k sampling)
Studio costs are just one part of production for a typical album. They also usually include a producer to guide the project (assuming you want to be a commercial success) and paying the band an amount to live off of during the process.
Choruses also usually spend less time in the studio than the typical band. The chorus is working from a precomposed score and can sing their parts right the first time. Overdubbing, multiple takes, mistakes, and experimentation all take time.
Manufacturing/distro is in the $2/cd neighborhood. Marketing can be huge.
We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard.
Last time I checked, the 55 MPH speed limit was acknowledged to be a bad idea and repealed, and if not, then Texas sure doesn't seem to care...
and if that's standardization then I have the ass of a boar. Yet again, last time I checked, the vast majority of cars in the United States are capable of driving both above and below 55 MPH, and do not actually require roads to operate (though it is recommended)
And to further debunk the arguement, the 55 MPH was not a 'standard' in that it was a 'regulation', and that anybody could break it without risk of more than a traffic ticket, there were no technological barriers. Then there's always the fact that a state could legally have a higher speed limit in those days, they simply wouldn't get federal transit maintenance money if they didn't.
Please move your hole-filled arguements over to the sink now, jack...i have some pasta to drain.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I want to buy a few hundred, and then return them all opened noting that they were all defective...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... Bill O'Reilly!!!!
[begin excerpt]
BR: You have gone on record saying that the VCR and VHS tapes will kill the movie industry.
JV: No, I didn't say that.
BR (raising voice): You *once* remarked "The VCR is to the movie industry as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." (slightly excited) Now, tell me how I'm supposed to interpret that.
JV (defensive): I wasn't really opposed to the VCR, I was merely...
BR (cutting him off, pressing): You go so far to compare your industry to a potential sexual assualt victim. You, sir, have lost your touch of reality if you go so far to describe your situation with such a metaphor...
JV (defensive): Bill, I... (cut off again)
[end excerpt]
Dammit, we need someone like this to at least give these guys some kind of rattling to get some answers!
After all, it was Linus himself who said, "If you want to back something up, put it on an FTP server and let the world mirror it."
Perhaps Valenti is onto something here.
This brain surgeon doesn't have any small children to take care of. Let's see how well that DVD holds up when the little ones get their paws on it...not to mention the player itself. Don't need backups--what a lie.
Maybe the MPAA should take a look at what the pron industry is doing in terms of downloadable movies. On gamelink.com you can download tons of movies in DivX format and also the choice of watching it once or for a month. It's also cheaper than going to the movies.
The MPAA would do well to inform Jack-off on how shit works so he doesn't spout off about things he has no idea on. In this day and age of P.R. you would think they would at least try to come off as being knowledgable on the technologies invloved.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before. This is the greatest crock I've ever heard. Lobbying is about bribing who you have to to get what you want. ;beer;
It's just like the guy in high school who is always collecting 'favors' from one group or another, just so he can get isht for free...
Please Jack, if you're gonna speak, at least pull your head out of your @ss so you get get the isht out of your mouth. I'm tired of listening to this crap. Last time I checked, this was a FREE country, with rules set to prevent ANARCHY! Just becuase you rip a DVD, or copy a VHS cassette or what ever, that doesn't mean that you're contributing to anarchy... It means you don't want to pay the outrageous friggin' prices that they charge at BB and the theatres.... To sum it up, Jack, you're full of isht!
Maybe Jack is one of those asses who actually drive 55 in a 70 zone. Or maybe he was one of the few, thw proud who put the "It's A Law We Can Live With" stickers on his car (1980 vintage Dodge Diplomat, maybe?) while everyone else cursed him and passed him on the right and lobbied for that law's repeal. Hilarious.
sulli
RTFJ.
No, wait...I think that logic makes sense if I look at it with one eye closed, standing on my head.
That means that he's claiming about $20 worth of losses for EACH blank videotape.
So I guess they're assuming that every single blank videotape sold is used to pirate movies. Nice.
Wait, just kidding. I just totally made up those numbers. Shit, I should be a lobbyist and live with honor.
Why would an entire industry, an important industry, have such a backwards person as a highly visible spokesperson? It's like the ACM having a chief who scorns anything that came after punched cards, or a automotive industry figurehead who still lives in the days of carburators, leaded gas, stick shifts and no seatbelts. I know he's looking out for industry property rights, but he's sure mucking it up with these "I'm out of it" remarks. Certainly they can find someone who advocates property rights who at least has a clue about digital media and it's positive potentials.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
So this is the voice of the Status Quo. That's how money is made to him. He doesn't know how the New System will make money, and he doesn't have to think about it. It's easier to fight for the Status Quo. Why? Because he is scared and it fuels his energy.
Who wouldn't sympathize with this creature? The world it has grew up inside of, loved and excelled at, is eroding away. Mentally, this person terrified of a world where information is moved without oversight; copied without permissions.
We all know there is no way to prevent the erosion. When you get to brass tacks, there are mathematical theories about how information cannot ever be entirely "secure". His battle is to do two things:
- Increase the effort to bypass licensing schemes. Make the appearance of an unlicensed copy an obvious flag of misuse and globally "illegal" activity.
- Increase the punishments for conviction of misuse and license bypass. Make them so horrifically outrageous a small percentage of ne'er-do-wells avoid trying to bypass the license.
So, we have the DMCA and all the legal details. Trial lawyers salivating at the chance to walk these through the courts, since they are headlines and precedent-makers. On the side of the status quo, they are also money makers.
But, in the end, digital information, if able to be delivered to the senses, can be recaptured in ever-increasing quality. Reprocessing of this kind skirts most license protection. For others, only a gentle spin cycle takes care of the rest.
This is the crux of his fear. Movies begin to appear on swapped discs the weekend before release, copied from stolen or illegal screenings. On a P2P network, with ever-increasing sizes and trusted agents, the information flows faster and faster. 1.5MB/sec later, I am popping my own popcorn and bypassing the Status Quo.
Oh woe is the Status Quo! The RIAA is first in the lineup for bat, but the issues are the same. Artists MUST eventually build the New Way to directly reach consumers. If they would only band together, they'd have enough strength to do it. Right now, they are too timid. Newbies in the industry still clamor to jump into the status quo. They are so mistaken. But that's all they know, like Jack. He will die an unhappy man, unable to put the genie back in the bottle.
mug
...makes Jack a dull boy.
Laugh, it's funny.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Well, then, Jack, by your own words you might as well just give up already.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
According to this ass, the film industry, which is rolling in more money because the VCR exists than they would without it, is still grousing because the SCOTUS decided to allow me to videotape my niece's birthday party without forking money over to his fat-cat cartel.
When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?
Independents.
It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD.
Nope, it doesn't.
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Because maybe it isn't. Nice phrase: "Bringing down a movie" Does he mean downloading or does he mean when people download a movie off the net, find it sux, and then don't waste their money by going to a theater to see it?
What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
There's nothing in law about my right to breathe air. The law is designed to prevent unwanted behaviors. The law is not meant to be a list of what is allowed, it is meant to be a list of what isn't allowed. Just because my right to fair use doesn't exist on paper doesn't mean that that right doesn't exist. Perhaps lawmakers believe it to be self-evident.
But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out.
He obviously doesnt buy his own products.
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations.
Videocassettes haven't been around for 'generations'.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
...I shall go watch my downloaded version of The Two Towers.
Every censorship is bad except for in a war, or except against a teenage Norwegian? Movie industry is dying so they need to control everything to get more money? Lobbying is an honest profession?
Go fuck yourself you overpaid scum.
The paper of an elite uni, which requires registration for viewing even the tiniest bit of information and blatantly states that information about the viewer will be collected at various places throughout the site and stored for further processing, conducts an interview with the CEO of Horned and Winged Inc(orporated|arnate) [tm].
Looks like that "interview" - powered by Questionnaire - was given with a clearly defined target audience in mind, and it ain't the intellectual elite.
The difference between ignorance and apathy? I sure don't know, and I don't care either.
Does this knob [Jack Valenti] have a clue or is he just so far stuck up the movie industry's behind that he lost touch with reality?
Some of you have brought up some good points regarding the "It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't' need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless", BS he's spouting (see full quote below).
Additional issues that address this are:
1. What about when the DVD gets scratched or in terms of VHS, when the tape stretches*?
2. What about how some of their flimsy production materials cause the product to break from time to time**
By his comments he has proven himself one of those "tards" who, while smiling, will tell you how right you are while bending you over and unzipping his fly.
-D.
*Generally cause by slow motion/rewind/slow motion associated with Jennifer Love Hewitt movies (at least in my house).
**Conspiracy theorists please don't assume they are researching ways to break their product after an unspecified amount of time so as to require you to repurchase the product.
-----Begin Quote-----
Harvard Political Review: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy?
Jack Valenti: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists?
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations.
----End Quote----
What I take away from this whole conversation is that if the US government was a Libertarian government, there would be no more bogus "rights" created by lawmakers who are only trying to look busy and make a buck.
The only way to prevent them from abusing the power is to not let them have that power in the first place.
Jeez.
He's been spending way too much time in the back of a limousine....
"We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit."
Burning the cd-r and commiting yourself
- 10 minutes and some gasoline
lol
www.samuraidreams.com - My Blog
www.samuraifiles.com - Get Some Videos Here
A shield of AOL CDs? Now THAT would be a reason to go to war and bomb the crap out of Iraq. ::shakes head::
AOL CDs: The only true weapon of mass destruction.
OK, my brain just exploded.
HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR.
*BOOM* There went my cranium.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
A lot of people don't seem to realize who Jack Valenti is, or the power he had even before his position with the MPAA.
Valenti was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated -- and was the first person to be given a new job under Johnson (before AF1 even left Dallas!) He had a part in writing most of Johnson's speeches, and was stronly in favor of the war in Vietnam.
The man is over 80 years old.
One thing I definitely have observed is that people over 80 make short-term decisions. (Little old ladies selling farms to be paved over, old politicians milking the last bit of pork from the barrel).
I thought our society was supposed to strongly encourage retirement at age 65? For Valenti, that would have been during the Reagan administration.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If newspapers cost $20, maybe people would use Xerox machines to make pirated copies. If you had the right stream a movie instantly (and cache it and watch it over and over for say, 72 hours) for $3, why even bother with Kazaa?
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Is it just me, or did anybody else misread his last response to be "Lobbying means lying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view".
Must have had my "Universal Translator" turned on...
http://metapundit.net
"It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD" - Jack Valenti
And, frankly, I suspect that's not even a coincidence. What would the industry like more than being able to sell you the same content every few years, like they have for the entire last century? In the past, the media did wear out, or they could be obsoleted. Today, they have to rot in order to accomplish the same goal.
In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
Those pits in the CD (or DVD or magnetic field in HDD or tape or whatever), are those digital or analog? Do they have length, width, depth, reflectivity? There exists no timeless digital media. There only exists normal decaying analog media that we interpret as digital 0s and 1s. The only timelessness we have over analog media is that the digital media can be perfectly reproduced. (and repaired as long as he we have sufficent data to reconstruct it, but that data is also decaying and will not last forever either). Of course I'm preaching to the choir here on slashdot, but I think everyone that has had a scratched CD will know that this is simply not true, and that is pretty much everybody these days.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
[Thanks Markus]
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates built the US Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built
the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did "they" use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because
that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of
wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war
chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it
that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may be
exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Umm, hello? People were saying the same thing about mp3s. "Whats this you say??? People listening to mp3s exclusively? But all they have is Pentiums with dinky speakers! Surely you jest". Yet, today, we have dozens of devices that are able to play mp3s conveniently and with excellent sound quality and they're very user friendly to boot. The situation is much the same with movies. Firstly, you CAN easily burn many of these pirated movies to VCDs and play them in many modern DVD players. Secondly, we have DVD-Rs coming outs and they are capable of creating high quality movies in a format which most DVD players can read and with high quality to boot. I actually have one in my new PCs and I can actually do this. It may be slightly beyond the price range and technical abilities of most people today, but in a short year or two, this will be very common. Thirdly, broadband is growing. When people can download these movies faster and easier and have more people to download them from, then it will be even easier for more people to obtain these movies. Do the math.
Jack Valenti is a war hero, is known as smart guy, and has been fighting for the good of the world ever since he joined the MPAA.
HPR: Wanna put an end to the embarrasing 'Boston strangler' anecdote everyone keep bringing up?
JV: Sure. I didn't say that, or it came out wrong, and I were right anyway. And digital is to analog as canned pickles is to a carton of milk or something. Left in the sun.
Anyway.. Here's a five-minute monologue of why piracy will lead to the End of Civilization As We Know It.
HPR: Great. Now, tell us why "fair use" is just whining.
JV: My pleasure. DVDs last forever, and some professor in a school can PLAY the DVD in front of the students, right? For now. That's fair, right?
HPR: Well, that should make things clear, and I can't think of a single question that would make this an interview. Wanna add anything about the war since we still have time left?
JV: Yeah, Vietnam is the only war we lost, because there were no censorship then. Lack of censorship led to lack of support from the American people, and that's why I think censorship in wartime is just neat!
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I always hate suggesting the addition of yet another law to our books, but I wonder if his position would change in the face of a law establishing fair use rights. What would his argument (and purpose, for that matter) be then?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is really laughable, and an idiot like this should not even be ALLOWED to lobby. Sorry Jack, but you don't know Jack. Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the United States Code provides a four value metric for determining whether or not something falls under the fair use doctrine. A very good fair use explanation can be found here.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. -and how much do these guys make??? and how much do the artists get?
...including torch his audio and video collection, read to him from the US/Canadian/your-jurisdiction-here copyright statutes, submit him to a thorough psychiatric evaluation (and/or a drug test), and, failing involuntary committal, have someone assassinate him, but the paperwork would be a stone bitch.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
"JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard"
No Jack, it's called a stupid greedy old man trying to abuse the legal system by dictating to millions of people what the "ground rules" are. We, collectively, set the ground rules not you, unilaterally.
Your arrogance and dim witted opinions offend me on so many levels that it is hard to coalesce my thoughts into a few concise well though out sentences. I must therefore yield to my more base side by pointing out that you are an old man. You haven't many years left and before I die, I intend to find your grave so that I can piss on it!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
... Mr. Valenti is right.
(IANAL!!!!!)
Calling fair use a right is wrong.
Notice that what the section of the law you quoted is saying is that copyright holders are forbiden from prosecuting you if you make a copy of their work that falls into one of the listed cases.
But (and this is the tricky part) it does not say that copyright holders have to make it easy (or even possible) for you to make said copy.
"I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
"
Much like child molseting, er Jack? The few trying to usurp the power of the many for greedy purposes. Is that honest? You must read different ethics books that I do. Probably a good Christian man too.
sounds like that of a bad guy out of Max Payne?
>JV: What is fair use?
... Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
Never has the Hollywood lobby's intention been stated more clearly. This astounding display of candor should be read by every librarian, teacher, student, reader, listener, and movie-watcher in the country.
>JV:
Wrong both in fact and in inference. Railroad gauges in this country have historically varied from 2 ft. to 6 ft. or more, and the prevalance of one standard gauge today is not because of a federal mandate, but because most of them VOLUNTARILY adopted the same gauge. Why? Because efficient transportation demanded interoperability between different proprietary systems (i.e., load up a boxcar in California and, if most railroads use the same gauge, you can roll it all the way to Maine without having to stop and reload the freight). A few railroads deliberately tried to confine their rolling stock and customers to their own lines through embargoes or by using an odd gauge. They either changed their minds or went broke as the more efficient, interconnected standard gauge lines built around them.
Does this concept sound familiar? It has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, and everything to do with open, non-proprietary industry standards.
There has never been a US law mandating a common gauge, and to this day, a number of tourist, passenger, and self-contained industrial lines use oddball gauges, ranging from historical tourist lines like the Durango & Silverton *NARROW GAUGE* Railroad (which was built that way because smaller tracks and trains were cheaper and better able to wind through mountain canyons) to San Francisco's BART transit system (which decided that the smoother ride of a wide gauge was more important than interoperability). Nothing illegal about any of them; they just can't ship freight via connecting lines very efficiently.
Of course, the railroad industry's business model eventually ran into difficulties due to improved alternate methods of distribution. Another parallel suggests itself, hmmmm?
Don't whine here - a much more effective way to publicize your thoughts on what drivel Valenti spews and how it is reprinted without comment by the HPR is to create a "user name" on the HPR site and send a "Letter to the Editor" and tell them what you think of the interview.
I was amazed at how easily I was able to create an ID for "Elroy Jetson" and send the following letter to the editor:
""
Maybe after reading through 10,000 letters, HPR will be less likely to send softballs to political lobbyists with no thought to the future (or even reality).
AC
>l chest
It appears to be a very large, gem encrusted chest.
>open chest
It appears to be locked.
>pick chest
You skillfully pick the lock of a gem encrusted chest!
>open chest
You open the chest.
>l in chest
You look in the chest and discover the Ultimate Shield of Protection made from discarded scales of AOLCD's!
>cast id shield
The Ultimate shield of Protection is a magical item.
It weighs almost nothing! (1 Stone)
It is -10 to your armour class.
It adds one point to your attack damage from its blinding glare.
Must be hard for Jack to find parts for his steam-powered car...
As in run and jump? Or maybe they meant hurtling.
qz
There is almost no legal, high quality content available on the internet. -Sen. Ernest Hollings D-S.C.
From his comments about not actually wanting to ban VCR's, despite every indication to the contrary:
"Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy].
"I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy."
Well how nice, he never wanted to destroy the money-making prerecorded video cassette industry that he so astutely predicted, he only wanted to charge us for time-shifting TV shows and making our own home movies.
This guy really takes the cake. He isn't happy with all the money that selling videocassettes made his association. He just whines about the 3.5 billion extra he thinks he should have been able to extract from people.
The prerecorded videocassette industry came after VCR's were introduced (of course). VCR's were invented to record, not just play. At about the time VCR's became popular, prerecorded movies where available on higher quality play-only media like laser disks; but people weren't buying Laser Disk players, people bought VCR's instead because they could also record with them. After a while, when a large-enough number of movies were available on tape, and the studios started charging a reasonable price for them, the market for videocassettes took off, despite some piracy.
I think that not only did the availability of VCR's create a huge market for videocassettes; it also made the sale of DVD's possible. When DVD players first came out, the pundits predicted that people wouldn't buy them because they couldn't record. Yet people did buy them because of the market for prerecorded copies of movies created by the existence of VCR's.
Is this guy really so stupid that he objects to devices that have made his association untold billions of dollars because some people are not paying? If VCR's couldn't record, not many people would have bought them, and the studios wouldn't have made any money at all.
People buy hardware because of the capabilities of the devices. Once enough hardware is out there, then there is a market for software. Software availability drives hardware sales too, of course. These markets are feedback loops that are sensitive to the characteristics of the hardware and quality and availability of the software. If you change the capabilities of the hardware, you are going to affect how many people buy the hardware, and therefore the market for software.
Record companies are going to be disappointed if they monkey with copy protecting CD's (without lowering the price). Movie companies are going to be disappointed if they force us into their preferred rental model where you pay for each viewing. Computer software companies are going to be sorry if they monkey with the computer hardware to prevent unauthorized execution of their software. All of these companies have an overinflated opinion of the value of their software, and are underestimating the backlash that will occur when they try to shove crippled hardware down our throats. They can only play us for suckers for so long. The huge price discrepancy between the cost of making an illegal copy and buying a legal one creates a vacuum that technology will fill. If the copies are more convenient than the originals, that will only add to the pressure. I wish the companies luck in cutting their own throats.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
...are on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks. Ventura and Firmament, if memory serves me right. If a whole bunch of geeks with defective, rotting, scratched DVDs dropped by and made a stink, (after first notifying The Media) I wonder what would transpire in such a case? ;-)
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
So, Jack, my Matrix DVD will still work after its been through the digestive tracts of a dog? Amazing!
I'd like Jack to show me how.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
1. First of all where does the movie industry get off trying to mandate the standards in any industry outside the movie industry, they didn't create the TV, CD, DVD or any media to my knowledge. They should suddenly set the standards for hardware that is capable or delivery their content. Then do stop all piracy maybe the MPAA will decide the internet protocols that allow so many downloads, the routers that pass the traffic, the CD/DVD/TV/radio/floppy/hard drive/anything makers that in any possible way could delivery movies.
a. Why should I have to pay a royalty to some "media" guy for buying a blank piece of media that may or may not have something people like him publish.
2. The MPAA is more like a censorship board then a purely rating board, just listen to the commentary on some of you dvds like Gladiator or Scream, they don't rate content, they decide what content is allowed, what happened to the right of the artists.
3. "What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law." I don't remember any copyright law that somebody didn't pay to put it.
4. How would have censorship made the Vietnam War anymore winnable. The government is supposed to win are support for a war without giving truthful information.
Lastly. What happened to the free market, where does it say it is the government's job to protect an industry or business model from itself. It's not the governments job to keep you afloat even if you are sinking, movies are a utility. They don't want change so they pay big money for bill's to stop any.
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
The "railroad standard" evolved without a gov't mandate (unless of course were talking about Rome)...search google for "space shuttle chariot railroad". Any number of links to the following text:
While the RIAA should be worried about piracy, I don't see why the MPAA/Valenti is so concerned. Here's why.
I often download divx rips of movies. I then watch the movie. If I like the movie I buy the DVD, which offers superior quality of video and audio and usually a plethora of special features, like director commentaries or deleted scenes. The movie probably cost between $75 - $150 million dollars to produce. I feel that $15 is not too much for me to pay for the quality of the movie and the extra features.
On the other hand, I download an album of VBR mp3's. I listen to it, and I usually like three or four songs, assuming I'm downloading an album because I've been exposed to the artist. (Otherwise, I might like one song.) I look at the CD, which (liberally) might have cost $350,000 to produce. The CD will cost me at least $15, and I will get a very minimal increase in quality with no added features. That is simply not worth it to me. By purchasing the CD, I get nothing, and I am sending the message that I like the music on the album. Of course, I have bought around 10 cd's in the last month, but they were albums on which I enjoyed a majority of songs.
The RIAA needs to adapt. Their options, as I see it, are to start producing better music or dramatically drop the price. Wasting efforts on DRM systems and lobbying for stricter laws is myopic and futile.
Sure, copying entire DVD's is possible now, but it is beyond the capability of most people. Spending my time finding and downloading an entire DVD image is not worth the cost, to me.
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation +3
30% Flamebait
30% Insightful
30% Informative
Extra 'Flamebait' Modifier 0 (edit)
Total score 4
In my book, 1 + (-1 + 1 + 1) = 2
I guess 'Flamebait' = +1 !
I was surprised to discover that Valenti is also concerned about the music industry:
"The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?"
I think I can answer his question. I suspect that the same producers will still be available if the music industry dies; I doubt that all the producers will be killed.
I think the question he really wanted to ask was "who's going to PAY to produce it?" The answer right now is that the musicians themselves pay to produce; the record companies just front them the money. If the musicians become about as popular as Britney Spears, they can earn enough to pay back the production costs out of their royalties.
So the question really is, who is going to front the musicians production money when record companies can no longer make obscene profits from their control of music distribution?
There are some possible answers to that, which I'll illustrate from experiments done by one of my favorite groups, King Crimson. The band owns its own record label, and they make 10 times as much money per copy on the CD's on their own label, compared to the CD's that they license the Record companies to distribute. Even if the current music distribution system collapses along with Valenti's predicted collapse of record companies, then independent record companies can still use their distribution methods.
Although King Crimson is a popular enough band to be able to provide their own production money, only their new releases are sure to make back the money. They also have a scheme for paying the cost of producing CD's from old concert recordings. They ask their fans to front them the money by contributing to an account, from which they buy for the CD's that they want from the ones that are produced.
Musicians and producers will survive the death of the current music industry. More and more musicians are bypassing the current record companies because of how badly they are being ripped off. I am confident that music will still be produced because either the artists or their fans will be able to front the production costs. If the big multi-national record companies no longer monopolize the distribution and promotion systems, I think you will find that the artists themselves will be able to take over. After all, the current system is really only helping the small number of hugely popular acts that dominate MTV. All other acts are simply getting screwed by the current system, which charges them for all the costs, but gives them only a tiny percentage of the earnings.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The problem is that he only sees a world full of spread butt cheeks and green. The only cock he can find is his own, preferably planted in one of the formentioned.
How does the law affect DJs? When your art consists of playing someone else's material for an audience (yes, I know you put creativity into spinning and mixing and all, but your instrument is not a thing that produces raw notes -- it is something that plays someone else's copyrighted material), does this not run up against some sort of legal issues?
Should DJs pay the same price as the rest of us? All I want to do is listen to a CD in my car, not play it for a club full of paying customers.
Or does this law only refer to movies, and not music? Still, any audiovisual store or department within a larger store is constantly showing things like this to display its equipment. Do Tweeter, Best Buy, Circuit City, The Sharper Image, etc. have the right?
A simple search on Google for "dvd rot" yields 38,000 hits. Something is definitely wrong here. Does he not know about it or is he just the greedy bastard I believe him to be?
"Don't worry, it lasts forever. It never wears out."
Jack, old boy, there's a special place in hell reserved just for you. Do hurry please.
"What a moroon."
The belief that movies, music, or books are somehow licensed to you is incorrect. It's a popular misconception, presumably because the copyright industry wants people to believe it. Don't fall for it, the debate over copyright is messy enough without people bring incorrect beliefs into the mix.
If you purchase a DVD, a CD, or a book, you have a right to that particular DVD, CD, or book. In general you have every right to that DVD as you do to a chair you purchase. You can sell it, loan it out, modify it, give it away, use it, and let your friends use it. The only restriction of note on your behavior if copyright law. Copyright law says you can't distribute copies, that right is reserved for the copyright holder.
The copyright industry is spending alot of effort to manipulate the language of the debate. Their goal is to make the debate impossible by removing or invalidating the language of the other side. Don't let them!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Did anyone read the interview? WHether DVDs are immortal or not is actually beside the point; that's not his main argument.
Valenti's point is that even if something does happen to your DVD, you should have to replace it. You aren't allowed to have a backup copy:
Valenti: "No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations."
I suppose his point would be that I don't get to carry off a new set of tires for free when my current set wears out.
Of course, I can also use or sell the tires in any way I want since I *own* them; I don't have a "license" to them.
When I lease a car, though, although I can't sell it or make a sculpture out of it, they *do* replace it if it breaks during the lease term -- I'm paying for the use of a car, not title to a particular pile of metal.
Valenti wants the best of both worlds.
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Not really. If your rails are 3.5 inches thick, then it's 5 feet center-to-center.
Personally I still wish Isambard Kingdom Brunel's seven foot guage had won out, but oh well...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'm sure all you slashdotters read the article a few days ago noting the decay of the DVD media. I think Jack Valenti needs to keep up with the times and realise that backups are important.
This guy seems like he's very technically illiterate, and is making stuff up as he goes (in his favor!).
// Ziekke
Beautiful extension (get it?) of the metaphor! Bravo! (wipes tear from eye)
Have a look here...
m
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.ht
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Fighting piracy is good. It's illegal, it's theft, we all know it, and encouraging people to obey the laws is a noble cause.
Lying about history in order to justify an attempt to write your business model into law is slimey.
Encouraging hardware manufacturers to create content playback devices that prevent the customer from copying media into other formats is crap. I am NOT going to buy a CD and THEN buy an MP3 version, nor will I buy 2 CD's if I want one for my car and one for my stereo.
They had a chance to take the Internet and craft from it a cash cow of digital content distribution. They fucked it up and now they're trying really hard to never have to change any part of their business.
Fuckers.
Microsoft is lowering their prices to compete with free, software? I get the idea Microsoft has no idea that "free!=price". Price has very little to do with it. I have no problem at all with Microsoft's current pricing structure. Its the open-ness I am having conniptions with.
Dumbfuck.
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation +3
30% Flamebait -3 (rounded to nearest 10%)
30% Insightful +3
30% Informative +3
Total score 4
In my book, 1 + (-3 +3 +3) = 4
I guess 'You' = Dumbshit!
way the DMCA is a huge pork filled POS that goes way above and beyond its original intent.
I, as a tax payer, have to foot the bill for the enforcement of something I dont agree with...so this guy can make even more money.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We need 2 laws passed:
1) all riders and adendums[sp.] attached to a bill have to actually pertain to what the bill is about (spirit of the bill)
2) Soft money contributions are strictly regulated, monitored, and possibily made illegal altogether.
Of course the likelihood of that happening is just about the same as G(duhhhhhhhhhh)W choosing the environment over supporting big oil, creating a SANE budget proposal, or giving a shit what REAL middle class America is going through.
And to think of all the veterans that suffered and soilders that have died (and will die) so those Americans who liked their sister a little too much could vote their voice in office.
It's spirit crushing/optimism killing, and makes me truely sad.
-- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."- Albert E.
How does the law affect DJs?
DJs license public performance rights from companies such as BMI.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You know, I never really had read the fulltext of the Fair Use laws. And something jumps out at me and waves flags in my face.
-Criticism-.
The way the law is phrased, it sounds like if you form critical opinions regarding a pirated copy of a copyrighted work and pass those opinions on to others (potentially encouraging them to purchase said work), you are not in violation.
You are not damaging the market value of the work, because you are giving the company free advertising. You'd be more likely to get away with it if you don't charge anyone for your opinion, since that would be for nonprofit (purpose and character) uses.
Obviously, you can't critique something unless you have full access to the item in question in its entirity (amount and substantiality).
The only thing left is the nature of the copyrighted work, which I'm curious as to how such is considered.
So, all you kazaa users, come up with about a sentence per song, a paragraph per TV episode, and about 150 words per movie. You should be able to get away with it.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
It occurs to me that many people here claim that DVDs aren't licensed, but rather you buy the physical media. So if the DVD isn't licensed, what right do you have to download a copy of a movie if you accidently damage the DVD?
If you buy a car, for example, and you break it. Can you steal another car to replace it? Yes, I know, there is a fundamental difference between physical and intellectual property, so it's a poor analogy, but it's the best I can think of on short notice.
Personally I don't care. fucksl4shd0t can download all the fsck'ing movies he wants as far as I'm concerned, but I'm curious how he rationalizes the difference.
And yet they still participate. According to Opensecrets.org the movie industry donated $20,172,249 to Democrats in 2002 and $713,874 to Republicans in 2002. Most of that money came in the form of soft contributions, the primary targets of the Mcain Feingold bill. See here for details. The Star player in the industry Disney came in at #66 in the all-time top donors list at opensecrets. See here for the list and here for their profile. They too favor a lot of soft money. Jack's own opensecrets link is here.
And yet he favors censoring technologies and code when his clients' profits are at stake. It's obvious that he doesn't consider code or engineering to be speech but still it seems odd to take this kind of firm line on one area of human endeavor and yet to be so closed off in another. Perhaps his speech is more important than other peoples' speech.
However:
In Jack's world of course we would all be happy to pay for new copies whenever this occurs. Here on earth however my wallet and I object to re-purchasing the same thing.
The same way that we always have with books, cd's and movies, by relying on sensible laws. And accepting the fact that the profit models just have to take a hit now and again.
Not completely true. It is illegal for me to copy the Spider man videotape and to share it with a million friends. It is not illegal for me to copy excerpts from it for activities covered under fair use restrictions. I agree with Jack that you cannot legally make backup copied of your tapes (unlike cassette tapes) but I would argue that this is wronmg and that this restriction, in light of the fair-use provisions, exists soley to guarantee a stream of new customers as tapes wear out and to permit hollywood to adopt a two-tier model of pricing whereby video stores pay more than the rest of us for each copy.
Just how old does he think video tapes are?
Seriously, Would I find one if I looked through my grandparent's house?
Other people have pointed this out already but just to rub his face in it the law is here. Since we haven't been using the Internet for generations he may not be used to it. In his testemony before Congress on the VCR he stated "I am suggesting that the copyright royalty fee lives under the canopy of fair use."
Actually he was opposed to the VCR and what he felt that it would do. The presentation before congress is a beautiful read in which he quotes excerpts from peoples' diaries as evidence not unlike the recording industry's current work with phone surveys. He also decries the first sale doctrine as a route to an unstable marketplace, spends time discussing the greed of Japenese companies and his desire to help the American Consumer. He even admits to infringing himself and asserts that the only purpose of VCR's is to "is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people".
He predicted:
Where the hell can you download >700mb in a matter of minutes?
Although this isn't in his article but in the testimony above I feel it should be commented on too:
If that is the case, then he has a lot of explaining to do about the DVD Reigon Encoding system.
Final quotes from Jack:
Jack Valenti notes:
It may interest him to know that Australia actually has three railway track gauges: broad gauge (5'3"), standard gauge (4'8.5") and narrow gauge (3'6"). This is for historical reasons, mostly. Most major interstate rail routes now use standard gauge. However, since metropolitan rail systems do not need to inter-operate (i.e. a Perth suburban train does not need to run on Melbourne suburban rails), we get by on three standards.
It's somewhat similar to how the US digital phone network used to be. One big problem is that JV wants to make the world into the way the US digital phone network works now: One specification for North America (CDMA), another for everywhere else (GSM). (Yeah, yeah, dual GSM/CDMA phones are just becoming available. You know what I mean.)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
Have you seen the price of movies on VHS these days? On those sums, he's assuming that every blank videotape sold is used to pirate about four movies.
Your figures are at least as good as his. See also Darrel Huff's magnificent book, How To Lie With Statistics. It will help you in your career as a lobbyist, at any rate.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Sheesh, it's one thing to be an ignorant moron once but I'm pretty sure that repeat offenders take the short bus to hell. (Just a joke, Jack! Keep those lawyers caged!)
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
He is lying his speech before congress against the VCR is on the net if you know where to look for it..
I assume you still can look it up in the normal place for speeches given before congress..:)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
This is modded as +5, Funny. Why, exactly, is this funny? We are dealing with someone driven not only by the desire to make a profit, but to make the MAXIMUM profit possible, under monopoly conditions, and at any cost to society.
Economic principles show clearly that in a monopoly, the cost for goods is higher than in a non-monopoly. The monopolist can charge whatever they want, and since there is a point at which people will no longer pay for something (determined by their price elasticity of demand), the monopolist optimzes such that they can charge the largest number of people the most possible.
I'd say that Valanti and the MPAA are doing a pretty good job of optimizing that curve...
Perhaps the music industry should contract choruses instead of bands it would save them a lot of money, wait, they recoup that money on the artists so never mind.
But unfortunately, it would be the death of music. I buy a license. (Call it a "LP") Now a better version comes out "cassette". Since I already have the license, I can mail in my Proof-of-Purchase and get a new one. Now a new one comes out "CD". I take my "cassette" proof of purchase. My "CD" rots. I send them a POP and get a new one.
Anyone dumb enough to think that would happen if they "licensed" music?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
"The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?"
everyone who enjoys making music!! we all know what kind of music is encouraged by the industry: mainstream rap and watered down whatever. {sarcasm} won't it be a shame when the music we trade isn't that shit that some lazy ass artist freestyled to a loop to meet his contract and is instead something made by someone who doesn't even expect to make money or apeal to a huge audience... damn that sucks for us {/sarcasm}
The reason that students are able to pirate videos and music without guilt is that they have transcended the idea that legality and morality are equivalent. Most moral people believe that it is right to pay into the systems from which they partake, but they also believe they're payment should be reasonable. If Hollywood shells out millions of dollars, but profits grossly in the box office, those of us who go to movies in the theatre should have no moral obligation to pay for the movie again when it comes out in DVD format, especially if we're paying for the media ourselves. Morality is very subjective, but I feel that most people would agree this is fair. The MPAA doesn't die from piracy, they are simply less able to grope for more money.
We shouldn't let the issue of morality cloud our vision on the issue of copyright protection, however. The most important issue isn't whether or not piracy is costing record and motion picture companies money. The important issue is the far over reaching effects that technological copyright protection can have. Even if laws may be broken, that is not enough to justify censorship or infringement on our right to privacy in our own digital homes. It is quite impossible for a copyright violation to cause loss of life, except by some convoluted set of circumstances, and the laws made to protect copyright should be just as trivial.
There are those of us who believe that copyright laws shouldn't exist at all, but if they must exist, the limits we place should not be on the consumers of information, but those who sell it. The holders should have only a tenuous grasp on the right to reproduce that can be revoked if they abuse their privilage. That kind of justice will only ever become reality if we the people stop allowing our votes to be purchased.
My Blog
The MPAA and their leaders are as uninformed now as they where when the VCR came out. Instead of embracing new technology, they try to cripple or stop it. Ironicly now VHS and DVD movies make up the bulk of their income.
You're an honest soul. "Can" is the operative word. Most bands see no marketing beyond shipping boxes of promo disks to radio stations. We throw them out by the bin. Mid and top act bands are promoted out the woz in a frantic effort to ride the wave just a bit longer. For this bands sell their works and, for all but one in ten thousand, their futures.
Go Jack go, bastion of artist.
But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes...
A movie in minutes?
Lets say a nice DivX/Xvid rip, two CD's worth, 1300 MB.
Lets give him the benefit of the doubt and say 30 minutes
= approx. 43 MB/s
= approx. 346 Mb/s
Comapre standard ADSL, downstream 0.5 Mb/s
I think it'll be a while before that kind of bandwidth reaches the consumer level. Just to reiterate the blatantly redundant point, this guy is a moron
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Go Fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
Every CD buyer for the last 10 years.
Referred to as "the chief spokesman and moral arbiter of the motion picture industry in the United States" by Current Biography, Valenti started his career as an office boy at Humble Oil while working his way through the University of Houston. After serving as a bomber pilot in World War II, he opened Weekley & Valenti Advertising in 1952 and later became a top aide to fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1966, President Johnson appointed Valenti as the third president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association, a post he has held ever since.
Valenti subsequently became a leading film industry spokesperson, Washington lobbyist and tireless defender of the major Hollywood studios' copyright protection and self-censorship. Under his tenure, the MPAA member companies instituted a new voluntary rating system in 1968, identifying films with the designations "G", "M", "R" and "X". In 1970 the "M" rating was changed to "GP" (later changed to "PG"), in 1984 a new "PG-13" rating was introduced and in 1990 the "X" rating was changed to "NC-17" to eliminate the pornographic connotation associated with the former. Valenti has championed the film industry's unified self-censorship against local and religious censoring groups over the years while simultaneously heading the Motion Picture Export Association, which assertively protects the interests of the American studios abroad, fighting local production quotas, taxation and other restrictions on trade.
Oh dear god. I just visualized a piece of chain mail armor made out of cd's, AOL or otherwise. The mental image was actually pretty cool; anyone ever actually gone and made one?
Dyolf Knip
Can we at slashdot contact Jack Valenti like we did with AMI and try to get an interview with him where we ask him OUR questions? THAT would be in interview I'd wanna read!
Just a quick suggestion
Let me reply in reverse order...
Windows 2000 (and most other commercial software is licensed. Or at least tries to be licensed. That would be the screen full of legalese that no reads before they click "I Agree." Or the shrinkwrap license (although those seem to have mostly died).
Yes. But.
I'm perfectly in favor of licensing content. However, if you want to license something to me, do it the same way that other licenses are executed: in ink on paper with my signature next to it. People respect ink on paper contracts and licenses. They seriously consider the ramifications of signing their name. (Well, not everyone, but certainly more than consider click-wrap licenses.) There is certainly precident, most contracted software development and large corporate purchases still work this way. Nice legal contracts, both sides review it, changes might get made, then signatures are attached.
Click-wrap is just a cruel joke. I go to Best Buy and purchase a new computer game, a new movie, and some new music. I take them home. Clearly I own all three. I play the movie in my DVD player and nothing has changed. I play the CD in my CD player and nothing has changed. I play the game and suddenly everything changes? My purchase of a product becomes a purchase of a license? If I don't agree to the license I'm free to collect everything up, take my time and gas money to drive back to the store, and return it (well, try to return it, but they'll laugh at me and refuse)? And while with most licenses both sides keep signed copies, with software neither side has any evidence that an agreement was reached. The best they can claim is that someone used my computer to click an Agree button. Hardly the evidence that my signature on paper is. The court judgements supporting click-wrap agreements remain shaky and relatively untested. No national judgement has been made. For the majority of states there are no laws suggesting that this is a valid way to form an agreement. The system is clearly a farce and I can only hope it will come tumbling down. Once it does software will get the same protection most copyright materials do (Actually more, software is pretty much the only thing that can be both protected by copyright and patent.). That will be a happy day, and I say that as someone who works professionally as a software engineer. Pretending that we're somehow special and worthy of extra protections is childish.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Hopefully people who love music more than they love money and fluffers.
-oZ
Mr. Valenti, you've already said that piracy will eventually destroy the movie business- but are there disadvantages to it as well?
And the fuel tank for a space shuttle was designed to be transported by rail, so it's width was also defined by those two horses arses...
Something I have always wondered about the royalty one must pay on DATs, and if this dillweed had had his way, VCR tapes, is how something like this could happen. In the case of DATs, did congress pass a law or did the manufactures just decide to sign a contract with the RIAA?
Something that I would enjoy doing (if I had the resources) is start manufacturing DATs and selling them (even if I didn't make any money), and not pay the RIAA squat.
The way I see it, I would run into trouble if congress passed a law on this, but I have a VERY hard time thinking that that kind of tax would be legal (taxation without representation and it's a tax whose sole aim is to benefit a corporation?) However, if the manufactures where forced into a contract to get the physical specs of the cassette, I would be completely within my rights to buy a DAT player and reverse engineer it to make a compatible product. I just couldn't use the official logo for a DAT.
Can someone inlighten me on this?
Also, here is my favorite analogy on the subject:
Paying the 'RIAA tax' would be like being forced to spend a year in jail before you could buy a gun because you might use it to commit a murder. Nevermind the fact that the gun has many legitimate uses such as defending your self, a movie prop, hunting, target shooting, etc.
If they can forbid you from backing up, then they can erase records and replace them with different ones and the result is dictating your... Intellectual diet, history, and minipulating society by coming out with different standards for different periods of time. The psychology of yesterday was every person was responsible for their own thoughts, feelings, and actions.. today, it appears we are headed to a psychology that says you are responsible for the the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.
There's a better link from ruts to rails - mine shafts. Rails were laid into the cart ruts.
They make you have "enable java script to read cookies on", which allows them to read all your cookies! They are an information gathering Whore!
They could have coded their site like other do, which doesn't use java script to read cookies, but of coarse that wouldn't let them read all of your cookies
HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire?
JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that. The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment. I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem. So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson.
How are you going to gain support for this "war on terrorism", but through censorship and propaganda?
HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime?
JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment.
So Jack is for censorship and propaganda in order to gain control of the thoughts and hearts of the American people when it comes to protecting his way of life and this "war on terrorism", but when it comes to your profit and saying what can be in your movies and what can't, you say no way? What a two faced, doubleminded hypocrite!
1. Create a conflict.
2. Wait for the public to scream for the government to come up with a solution.
3. Provide the solution you wouldn't have been able to jam down their throats without the original conflict.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is really happening in the Digital Rights Arena. When they get us all pissed off and up in arms, they are going to propose some sort of "compromise" solution that they think we will accept. What it will really do, however, is give them the power and control they really wanted in the first place while making us think they compromised.
This is the game the corporate world plays every single day, only people who aren't watching for that never see it. This is how we have managed to lose our freedoms over the years. This is how they've managed to reap such huge profits off of the public. They create both sides of the problem, then wait for us to ask for a solution, which they promptly provide... advantageous to the money men, of course.
Think about it. Don't compromise your freedom.
So far left, I'm right.
is the fact that the interviewer didn't
challenge him AT ALL!
Considered harmful.
That's not what stepwise refinement means. The term has a specific sense that was introduced to software development by Niklaus Wirth's paper in the Communications of the ACM, 14(4):221--227, April 1971, "Program development by stepwise refinement".
Stepwise refinement is a procedure for refining a design, from a high level design that closely resembles the requirements, progressively down to a low level design that resembles code. It is not related to refining a code base by rewriting parts of it. You will have to find a different word for your maintenence programming style.
penelope expresses nightly immense satisfaction
Of course, then you'd have to ask him "Well, how about if I just lie down in the street and die?"
"Yes, that would be acceptable."
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
The Harvard Political Review - Interviews
Issue: 01/25/03
Valenti's Views
By Derek Slater
Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries.
In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media.
But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies.
After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics.
HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies?
Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy].
I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true.
Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money. But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world.
The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?
It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes...
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself.
HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy?
JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists?
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations.
HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies?
JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard.
HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire?
JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that.
The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment.
I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem.
So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson. HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime?
JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment.
HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence because they have money?
JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
Claim: The United States standard railroad gauge derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Status: False.
possibly even nora imbibes satisfaction
perhaps even nelly inspires succulence