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MIT Student Grills Valenti on Fair Use
kcsduke writes "Following a recent speech at MIT on Movies in the Digital Age (streaming audio available), MPAA front man Jack Valenti sat down for a revealing interview with The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. In this entertaining read, Keith J. Winstein grills Valenti on fair use and the right to play DVDs under GNU/Linux. My favorite part is when Winstein shows a dumbfounded Valenti a six-line DVD descrambler he's designed, to which Valenti responds with language inappropriate for the Slashdot homepage. Throughout the interview, Valenti demonstrates his ignorance and misunderstanding of fair use."
[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line "qrpff" DVD descrambler.]
The Tech: If you type that in, it'll let you watch movies.
Jack Valenti: You designed this?
The Tech: Yes.
Jack Valenti: Un-fucking-believable.
Cause it's spelled right?
Valenti is 82 years old. I have a hard time believing he said "un-fucking-believable." More likely he called Keith a "good for nothing whippersnapper" and then hurled his cane at him.
Valenti replies with ascii-art pr0n? Cool!
sulli
RTFJ.
thats truly amazing how Jack Valenti has no clue about the position he is taking.
none whatsoever.
scary.
maybe I should get into the MPAA. im pretty clueless most of the time also, i'd fit right in.
[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line "qrpff" DVD descrambler.]
The Tech: If you type that in, it'll let you watch movies.
Jack Valenti: You designed this?
The Tech: Yes.
Jack Valenti: Un-fucking-believable.
The Tech: And look at this thing called Freenet, it allows you to publish movies without fear of being caught.
Jack Valenti: Oh my fucking heart, stop! <dies>
Valenti: You designed this?
Interviewer: Yup.
Valenti: #!$p<>{};!?!!
You can see it might have been misinterpreted as being the transcriber censoring the interview. It's all just a misunderstanding.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There's langauage inappropriate for Slashdot? News for me.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
That's actually a very common reaction to seeing your first Perl code & being told that it is not only human readable but actually performs a useful function.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
There are people who've been writing perl code for years and still don't believe the language is "human readable".
I'd rather be lucky than good.
You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved.
I think the "multi-multi-millions" he's referring to are dollars, not people.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Second, whenever one of those trailers plays in a theater with several hundred college students inside, everyone's gut response is laughter. I think the first time I saw one of those interviews was right before Spiderman, and the whole theater was balling. (emphasis mine)
Errrr....I think you mean bawling, as balling is usually illegal in a theater, and it's unusual to see an entire theatre doing it at once...
A fellow programmer once called C++ a "write-only" language. I guees this could be extended to PERL.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
looks like there are just a lot of hard returns missing where, in any other context, any sane programmer would put them in.
No one claimed that Perl is sane.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Perl isn't sane??? No WONDER my scanner doesn't work!!
(I couldn't resist...)
The DMCA isn't all bad. In time, the parts that are unconstitutional will be repealed and the parts that are vague will be clarified.
Don't you mean: in time, the parts of The Constitution that conflict with the DMCA will be clarified.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.