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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."
In the article, the lack of a commercially available DVD Player for Linux is discussed. ...legal commercial DVD playback (via Cyberlink's PowerDVD player)...
Don't know if the interviewer or this Slashdot article is wrong, but in the latter it is mentioned that the new TurboLinux 10 F ships with
Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, that's wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can't fuss at people, because you're one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?
TT: About two million.
JV: Well, I can't believe there's not any -- there must be a reason for... Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question -- I don't know the answer to that... Well, you're telling me a lot of things I don't know.
TT: Okay. Well, how can we have this dialogue?
JV: Well, we're having it right now. I want to try to find out the point you make on why are there no Linux licensed players. There must be a reason -- there has to be a reason. I don't know.
It's hilarious to watch JV flounder, it doesn't even seem like he's considered the possibily that a free operating system with free software (free as in beer) could have two million users. He really expects the MPAA to be supported by people a small tax on DVD software, the problem is that there's no licensed DVD software sold for Linux.
My blog
Yes... here at work we refer to Perl code as "write-only".
Just need to add a line exec'ing mplayer :o)
that is all :)
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
You don't have to be nice. I'm not nice. Watch.
Fuck you shitbag.
I said that for no good reason, too. I'm not nice.
Just use the golden rule. Do unto others how you would have them do unto you. Stick to that, and temper it with a higher sense of fairness; don't just apply the golden rule to anarchy, try and empathize with people and imagine how you would like to be treated.
I'm not saying this to you, because you don't pirate. I'm saying this to the theives who run around talking about laws and fairness. Not to you or other honest folk.