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Senator Pushes Bill To Limit Anti-Copying Schemes
Brushfireb writes "Republican Sen. Sam Brownback is pushing a bill that will limit the ability of record labels, movie studios and others to use anticopying technology on their products. Most notably, this is important because it states that people will be able to resell their used DVDs, along with putting a concrete limit on this behavior of DRM/anticopying schemes by the RIAA and MPAA."
RC1 is not released yet. None of the mirrors have had a chance sync up with ftp-master yet.
I think they rely on a lot of people doing upgrades and fresh installs to catch any major problems.
;-)
Ones that occur once the system is running tend to be found and fixed well before they start to release ISO images.
Alternatively they could just be impatient and wanting to get on with working on 5.2 so they can get RELENG_5 tagged and forgotten about, but I doubt it
Scott is trying a slightly different model for 5.1. You might have seen where we did two BETA releases earlier in May. These occupy the same places on the schedule that the first two RC snapshots did on some other releases. The idea is that the thing called 5.1-RC1 should be really really really close to what we'd ship for the release, with almost all of the bugs (that we're able to catch anyways) ironed out during 5.1-BETA1 and 5.1-BETA2. Also, 5.1-RC1 was/is released from the CVS branch to be used for the release.
Most of the process changes affect only committers (I think)...I'd expect that the only changes visible to most users would be the names of the snapshots.
For tradtitional reasons, it is still called the i386, even though by default it won't run on a real 80386. The source code is compatable, with either chip. (Except the SMP stuff, but that is off by default). Note that the option to compile for the 80386 is not compatable with the option to compile for the 80486 and latter chips. Those who wish to use a i386 have to go through some effort to make it work.
5.2 is due to have 3.3.something. 5.1 will still use 3.2.2.
Support for i386 was removed in order to reduce bloat of boot media and gain the advantage of a very useful instruction introduced in Intel's 486 chip. cmpchg or somesuch, feel free to search the mailing list archives if you're interested, the thread went on for a good month or more.
You can of course rebuild everything on your own and have it run on a 386, but personally I feel most anything prior to PentiumII is wasting more electricity than it's worth. Only places you'll find this is in embedded systems, and they're not directly supported by FreeBSD.
scott
Remember, only the instalation stuff is gogin to need shaking out in that time. Lots of people will have been upgrading to and running the new code from CVS before they actually make ISO images for people to test the instalation, setup and out-of-the-box behaviour.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
I'm running 5.1 on my Thinkpad T20 almost without any problems. Which Thinkpad Model do you use? Maybe you can find some info at http://gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/, which lists not only Thinkpad laptops.
I am still on 4.8-STABLE with an Athlon, so I cannot confirm. Maybe this will help: Re: Help :) Kernel compile fails.
Excerpt:
You need to add either SCHED_4BSD or SCHED_ULE to your kernel config. This is documented in the /usr/src/UPDATING file.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Let's see. There's the EFF, digitialconsumer.org, ..., anyone know any others ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Forget DRM, the most important thing in this bill : requiring a judge's authorization to use the DMCA to shut down a website.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Become an independent. Vote on the best person for the job as opposed to what the party (any) has already voted (primaries) for.
Amazing .. Sen Brownback actually introducing something rather than just tow the Republican party line with nary a comment.
.. though it has about a snowballs chance in a warm place of actually getting to the floor for a vote .. or even debated in committie (If I remember correctly, Brownback doesn't have any committie chairs or other bully pulpit to push this from)
Being one of his constituants, I welcome this type of legislation
RTA, though.
The bill, authored by Sen. Sam Brownback, would regulate digital rights management systems, granting consumers the right to resell copy-protected products and requiring digital media manufacturers to prominently disclose to consumers the presence of anticopying technology in their products.
The Kansas Republican's bill requires that a copyright holder obtain a judge's approval before receiving the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. That would amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which a federal court concluded enables a copyright holder to force the disclosure of a suspected pirate's identity without a judge's review. This law is at issue in the recording industry's recent pursuit of the identity of a Verizon Communications subscriber.
It would *ALSO* limit the ability for producers to restrict fair-use abilities of end-users. Pretty much, it's saying you're perfectly fine to sell your movies, music, books, etc., however you want, so long as you enable the end user to do whatever they want within legal reason with it.
If you want to sell it, turn your DVD into a Hi-8 tape instead, or have your eBook be read aloud to you by a reader, even though the company who produced the product did not want you to do any of these, looks like this bill would require them to allow you to do this.
I'd say that's a good bill and still allows the producers to sell their works however they wish, again, without restricting the end-user's ability to resell or change the medium.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
You got a +5 funny mod, but I'm not sure you weren't being serious. I can only think of three in either house who have come out in favor of this sort of thing: Lofgren (BALANCE act), Boucher (DMCRA), and now this guy.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
"The DMCA was a carefully crafted compromise and balance struck by Congress." -- RIAA Fool (quote from article)
I spit the yogurt i was eating all over my keyboard when I read that one. It's funny and sad at the same time. Yes, it was a compromise all right. Between the RIAA and MPAA.... very carefully crafted and balanced indeed.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
We don't need a fucking war. DRM makes massive global thermal nuclear war unnessicary to loose our ability to access media.
Let's say Shakespere was released on a format with DRM dispite it being public domain, and the company who produces this media burnt all other copies of this work. Let's say in some new great depression this company goes out of business. How do you get granted the right to read your e-book with DRM encoding?
Hypothetical? Try realistic. You can't get the right to view if there is no one left to give you that right.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Brownback's number one source of campaign cash for 2001-2002 was (drumroll) the Telecommunications Industry--i.e., BellSouth, SBC and a little firm on the East Coast by the name of Verizon (click on communications/electronics then "telephone utilities"). He only received $26k total for those two years, but he's up for reelection now and has likely been pulling down additional funds from his lead suppliers.
Interestingly, Verizon's lead counsel was quoted in a NY Times article as saying "in light of the court's decision, it is time for Congress to become involved and offer a legislative solution" when they agreed to name the names of their four filesharers.
IMHO, the only portion of Brownback's bill to pass will be the part concerning big telecom firms... we'll have to wait for Boucher or whoever to reform the DMCA, but I would have liked to have seen Fritz Hollings' face when his fellow committee member offered up this legislation.
The language is vague at this point, though. The bill hasn't actually been introduced yet.
You got a +5 funny mod, but I'm not sure you weren't being serious. I can only think of three in either house who have come out in favor of this sort of thing: Lofgren (BALANCE act), Boucher (DMCRA), and now this guy.
Ron Wyden (D-Oregon).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Negative on that. It was once true that a published work had to be registered with the copyright office, and that the registration process involved submitting a number of copies of the work, at least one of which would find their way into the Library of Congress.
However, the Berne Convention, which all but a handful of the world's nations implelement, banned copyright registration for foreign authors so that the author did not have to go through the separate registration processes of hundreds of nations to secure international copyright. Rather, if one had a copyright in one's own signatory nation, one had copyright for at least life+50 years in all the signatories.
Of course, the logical next step is that if foreign author's don't have to register, why should domestics? And this step has been taken. Now, in most Berne nations, copyright is inherent in the work, meaning that it exists automaticaly from the moment of the work's creation, and no action is required to copyright a work.
But even in the early days, registration was only necessary for published works. While published works required registration and had a limited-term copyright, unpublished works automatically had a perpetual copyright (mainly as a protection against unauthorized publication). In fact, the Sonny Bono act can be said to have done one good thing in actually limiting the copyright term on unpublished works.
And I'm a Democrat. It's mostly because of his work trying to improve human rights in North Korea. For a glimpse at this see yesterdays Senate hearing on "Life in North Korea" at this URL.: rtsp://video.webcastcenter.com/srs_g2/foreign06050 3.rm
Now if we can only get him to fight for the "breaking the information blockade by dropping radios" idea.
See
http://www.freenorthkorea.net
North Korea can be freed without war.. Lets do it!
Unless the owner is in the UK, and is taking a tax break on it. Basically, it is the "Conditionally Exempt Works of Art Scheme" which is:
Privately owned works of art and other objects which are broadly part of our national heritage, may get exemption from taxes on capital, including inheritance tax. In return for exemption, the owner must
- keep the exempt object in the United Kingdom,
- look after it, and
- allow the public reasonable access to it.
If the owner fails to do any of these things, the exemption is lost, and the owner then has to pay any tax due.
http://www.cewap.co.uk/cewap/rules.htm
Look up the british comedian Mark Thomas for more info. He tracked down a number of public figures abusing the scheme. He notes "In some cases the owners would rather cough up the tax rather than let anyone see their stuff, so by doing this we can be tax collectors of a sort!". Great stuff.
That doesn't mean you couldn't still buy a crippled product, it just means that you can't buy a product that prevents you from turning around and selling that same crippled product to someone else.
So, while you could buy a product that requires you to use a special player while standing on your head in your backyard, you couldn't buy one that self-destructs if it senses that you are thinking of letting it go.
The simple way of looking at it is:
You bought it, you can sell it.
This wouldn't mean that you could sell copies of it, just the original it.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH