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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."
I don't know how stable that site is, mod this down if it's redundant.
... But I try to make things simple and clear as I can, and I think that helps you persuade other people.
Real Dialogue: The Tech interviews Jack Valenti
By Keith J. Winstein
SENIOR EDITOR
Jack Valenti, the iconic 82-year-old who has headed the Motion Picture Association of America for the last 38 years, spoke at the MIT Communications Forum last Thursday. The MPAA offered The Tech a chance to ask Valenti questions after his talk, and -- as a former Tech news reporter interested in technology and copyright -- I got drafted.
Valenti is an incredibly polished advocate for the movie studios. He has numerous legislative and regulatory successes to his name, and his stated commitment to honest debate (he spoke passionately several times about his commitment to the "ideal of civic discourse" and his disgust at Washington, D.C.'s lack of it) is admirable.
But we don't have a real debate on copyright issues. We have rival camps that rarely understand each other. Virtually everybody I know and encounter on the Internet thinks Valenti's signal accomplishments are bad. He can claim credit for the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which make it illegal to build your own DVD player and well-nigh impossible to watch DVDs legally under the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as the Federal Communication Commission's Broadcast Flag, which will make it illegal or virtually impossible to build your own digital television receiver or, again, watch HDTV under Linux.
Everybody in Hollywood, and everybody in Congress, seems to love these things. There is little compromise, meeting of the minds, or mutual understanding, between these two sides.
Three years ago, I organized an MIT IAP class and invited Valenti to come. (He politely declined.) When the MPAA called to ask if I wanted to talk with him for ten minutes last week, I finally had my chance to take a shot at reaching some tiny mutual understanding.
I found Valenti woefully unfamiliar with the arguments of "our side" -- the same arguments that "we" wank about every day on Zephyr, on Slashdot, and in 6.805 (Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier), the class I TAed for Professor Hal Abelson.
A compromise, or at least a solution to these issues that doesn't involve outlawing all tinkering and all independent engineering, seems to be possible: we're just not getting through to each other. The dystopia of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" at www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html is not an inevitability. But if we can't manage to have a real conversation with "the other side" -- and a longer one than my ten minutes with Valenti -- that's where we might be headed.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
The Tech: You're described by various people as the best lobbyist ever. Do you have any tips for the other side, about how they can achieve better victories in the legislative area?
Jack Valenti: I hope that I'm a good persuader, that I'm able to make advocacy of a cause that people say, "You know, that makes sense." 'Lobbyist' has a connotation to me that gives me little shivers. But I like to believe that I try to make things simple to understand. And frankly, if I can understand it, then I figure everybody else can understand it, because I am not a technologist.
TT: Everybody I know thinks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Broadcast Flag are awful. And everybody in Congress disagrees. This does not lead to good debate and good public policy, when people can't even talk to each other. How can we have a good debate on these topics?
JV: I don't know. I go on forums, and panels, and Rich [Taylor, an MPAA spokesman] does the same. We're available to anybody. I never believe in hostile debates. That's not my style. I believe that we ought to talk objectively about it. I think for anything that I'm advocating, I'm willing to be in an open debate
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.