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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.
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.
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's exaggerating a little, though: I certainly would find it un-fucking-believable if someone developed six lines of Perl that perform all the work involved in decrypting the DVD, decompressing the MPEG, and displaying the movie onscreen (with audio).
All qrpff does is remove the (relatively simple) CSS encryption. Saying "this'll let you watch movies" was a little disingenuous of Winstein.
This space intentionally left blank.
Look, Valenti is a fucker. No doubt about that.
But jumping on him because there's no licensed DVD player for Linux? How is that his fault?
Yes, it sucks that to play DVDs, you have to buy a license. But...so?
There are no licensed DVD players for Linux because no one wants to (or needs to, or would) pay for one. End of story.
Jesus. Someone finally gets a chance to grill Valenti and they blow it.
People like Valenti are paid to have certain beliefs, and they have no incentive to change those beliefs just because they happen to be wrong, moreover, expect Valenti to use every rhetorical technique in the book to obfuscate the real issues.
The value of this type of debate is to point out the inconsistencies in the MPAA position, but you can argue until hell freezes over, Valenti will never (publicly) agree with our position on fair use.
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.
I'm not sure what to make of Valenti's response; what does he mean by that? UFB that someone would write a decryptor, UFB that the author wrote the code himself, or UFB that six little lines of the code bypasses CSS?
So the gist of this interview is some nerd stickin it to Valenti about there being no legal way to watch DVDs on Linux.
Meanwhile, 6 or 7 articles before this one, was there not an article about Turbolinux shipping with a licensed DVD player, and WMP licenses?
Oh, there's not a "Free as in gimme gimme i deserve it" DVD player for linux.
Lies and horseshit won't help the 'cause'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Oh, I disagree. This is at least as funny:
"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
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.
I think the intent (from the MPAA) was to give the "hot head amateur" a chance to make a fool of himself. Valenti is a very polished, very smooth character that knows how to argue and can be quite persuasive.
The downside of this interview is that the kid fails to really achieve anything substantial, other than showing Valenti to be out-of-touch.
The "bypass copy protection" law is directly contradictory to copyright and fair use laws. Valenti doesn't acknowledge that, which is frustrating. I understand his point, but it doesn't make him any less wrong.
Jack Valenti keeps saying that he's not talking about morality. He's trying to sidestep the issue because he knows he can't win on it. In America, or the rest of the free world for that matter, people aren't going to buy into the argument that you shouldn't be allowed to do something with your own property. It would be the equivalent of GM trying to make it illegal for you to use a Fram oil filter on your car instead of an AC Delco.
Jack keeps arguing in circles. It is illegal to watch DVDs on an unlicensed player because it's illegal.
How can one seriously respect that line of thinking?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Valenti actually seemed to understand the issues pretty well, and he gave pretty cogent answers to the interviewers questions. The only thing that seemed to stump/baffle him, was the fact that there are currently no Linux DVD players on the market. Otherwise, every question was answered in a straightforward manner, pretty much always coming back to: "If you don't have permission to watch a copyrighted work, then it's not ok to make digital copies to circumvent the encryption and watch that work. You'll have to find a legal and authorized means to view the content." I don't agree with him, but it's hard to say that he didn't understand the issue.
Also, I'd imagine that next time he'll have done a little bit more research and have something of an answer for the Linux DVD player question.
Other than that, I think it's a little bit unfair to say that he doesn't understand the issues. Remember, disagreeing is not the same as not understanding.
--
RumorsDaily
It's been a while since my civics class, but isn't our entire country founded on the idea that people have certain inalienable rights, even in the face of a majority that wishes to take away those rights?
That's what Valenti said when the interviewer asked him why he can't (legally) play back a DVD on a computer running Linux. I think that captures the issue very well.
Valenti and those sharing his views on copyright believe that we (the consumers) should only be able to view works on devices that they approve, at a time and place allowed by them, and how ever many times they want us to.
However, fair use standards CLEARLY state that consumers are allowed to view copyrighted work however they please, as long as they have paid for it. There is no law or statute that allows copyright holders to force consumers to view their work only on certain devices. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provision has this effect, but it would be a blatant anti-trust violation to allow copyright holders to tell consumers they could only view their works on certain devices.
Another notable quote from Valenti is that he is a "great persuader". We need people advocating for consumer's rights who are just as smooth and soothing to technophobe politicians and Valenti is. We need a Good Old Boy to evangelize to the Good Old Boys. Even if Valenti found qrpff "un-fucking-believable", he still left the interview with the opinion that such tools should not be legal. A dialog is most successful when each side can identify with the other on a personal level.
I don't like the MPAA any more than anybody else does, but it was a good interview. I think he expressed his side of the argument pretty succinctly: allowing encryption circumvention, for any reason, opens a can of worms. Much easier to avoid any kind of a slippery slope by saying, "If you want to watch this, get a licensed watching mechanism."
So, really, what is being said is, when you buy a DVD, you are not buying a physical product. What you are buying the right to view some content in a prescribed manner on an authorized device.
That's really the crux of the argument. We are geeks. We like to take things apart and use them in ways the original designers did not intend. That screws with ideas of the establishment.
What WE are saying is, "I got this free Cue-Cat scanner, and it belongs to me, and if I want to take the pieces apart and grind them into confetti or build a moon laser or whatever, I can do that, because it belongs to me."
What THEY are saying is, "You do not actually own that physical Cue-Cat scanner, you have a license to use that device in the manner we have declared, in the same way that you cannot use your cable TV box to get channels you haven't paid for."
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
JV: Let's say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
Has ANYONE heard of your rights end where mine begin?
Taking away someone else's rights is NOT your right.
It sucks that pirates use stuff to copy their overpriced pieces of round plastic... but I have the right to play a DVD in linux, build an HDTV, etc. as long as I don't steal content. They shouldn't be able to take that away from me just because its a convenient and easy way for them to fight to protect RIAA/MPAA materials.
Get paid to code OSS
But still, no one takes them seriously.
If you've been to the theater recently you might have seen before these short interviews before the movie with a stuntman, camera operator, or some "behind the scenes" guy explaining what he or she does in every film, and how it's their work of art. And how if you trade a movie online, or "download it with a click," you're taking that art for granted and not appreciating its beauty, which should be paid for.
First, that person should never have called all movies art. He or she obviously never saw "Ecks vs. Sever."
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.
Also, as an interesting note, the original versions of those short interviews were with big-league directors and actors -- not the small guys on the set. For obvious reasons their pleas not to download movies and avoid paying for them weren't too effective on the test audience...
Also, one thing I noticed from the article:
JV: I don't want to get into the definition of morality.
So apprently, we can't get into the definition of morality, but nonetheless we're going to legislate it?
- sm
qrpff dvd_file | movie_player
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
Polished, smooth, persuasive. Check.
Knows how to argue. Negative.
Valenti: "I never believe in hostile debates. That's not my style. I believe that we ought to talk objectively about it."
Because, after all, Valenti is being objective, therefore anyone who opposes him must be irrational. Why would you pay attention to someone irrational?
Valenti: "But I try to make things simple and clear as I can,"
And the simplest position is to say "Well, this guy says he's being objective, and therefore he must be right."
Valenti: "But you can do everything you're doing right now -- you'll never know there's a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?"
Because everything you're doing is obviously the same as what Mr. Objective thinks "everyone" is doing. And why would anyone object to Mr. Objective?
Valenti: "But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way. "
No, he's not saying that public policy should be geared towards the 284,000,000 people instead of 100,000 movie industry employees. He's saying "fuck 100,000 engineers over instead"
Because even though a few thousand movie industry employees can somehow create value for 284,000,000 Americans... it wouldn't be objective to assume that a few thousand engineers might be able to do something similar.
You get the point. The gaps in Valenti's logic are big enough to drive a galactic supercluster through. He couldn't argue his way out of a paper bag.
But he is indeed very polished, very smooth, and can be quite persuasive to anyone who has no capacity for rational thought, but a great admiration for polishedness, smoothness, and persuasiveness: Your Congressman.
I loathe Valenti's vision of the world - but I have to give him credit. He's perfect for the job. And he's won.
Yes, but it's often one gets to that level by having substantial skills and experience at rising up through the levels.
This has nothing to do with any other sort of skill, experience or intelligence. Some otherwise rather dull and ignorant people are rather good at it.
In fact, I was just yesterday reading that observation about Idi Amin. A crude, unintelligent man, with obviously no skills at leadership, but with a certain animal cunning that allowed him to rise up through the ranks, and even remain a free, and in certain circles, even respected man, who died at an old age, in bed.
Simply having achieved some sort of lofty status says little to nothing about a man, and might simply say he's a right bastard.
KFG
This struck me as being at the heart of Valenti's misunderstanding of the issues important to us. The whole purpose of encryption is to guard the data whether or not it is in a hostile environment. The Nazis didn't go running around screaming "you can't do that, it's not your right" when British intelligence cracked Enigma. Instead, they responded with a stronger cypher.
If your encryption can be cracked, it's not a matter of rights or privileges. It's matter of technology. Your encryption is weak and you need to make it stronger. Then you don't need social laws to prevent people from cracking it. The laws of mathematics do that for you, and do a much better job.
Of course, I cannot speculate on how that would change the dynamics of the situation. It may improve because it might eliminate their motivation to push for bad laws to prop up their weak system. Solving technological problems with technology is better than solving them with legality.
Join Tor today!
Probably Valenti tells this same story to his buddies to illustrate how difficult it is to have a dialog with fair-use advocates.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Valenti asks "why would people object to it?"
TT: I'll tell you, because I'm an engineer, I'm an engineering student, and this year I built a high-definition television, from scratch. But because of the broadcast flag, if I wanted to do that again after July 2005, that would be illegal.
JV: How many people in the United States build their own sets?
TT: Well, I'm talking about engineers.
JV: Let's say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
Okay. The simple clear response for Congress -- and maybe even JV can understand -- is that those thousand engineers represent the technological future progress of the USA.
And you don't want to keep them from playing in their natural turf. Sure most people don't want to build their own sets. But you let those who do, do so; that is, unless you want a dumbed-down, incompetent populace... down to the very last potential engineer.
In that case, pretty soon, the un-fucking-believable innovations are going to come from other places, that favor freedom.
Get it, Jack?
More to the point, get it, Congress?
Okay, can somebody put this in politer, more persuasive language...?
I keep seeing people say this, but I don't get it. I read the interview, and it seems to me that he was neither clueless nor unreasonable. He was surprised to find out how simple the decryption code is, but he's not clueless about his position. His position was basically that it isn't immoral for you to watch DVDs on Linux, but it's wrong to circumvent an encryption without a license for the decryption software, since if you do it for benign reasons, anyone else can do it for copyright infringement. Now, you may disagree with him, but in what way is he clueless about his own position? The only cluelessness I saw was on the part of the interviewer who didn't know about the Linspire licensed DVD playback software.
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...
Every Computer I have bought with a dvd drive, and every dvd drive I have bought for myself to put in a computer includes software to play back encrypted dvds (windvd etc). Point is if you buy the drive and it has the software, then you should have the right to use the drive to play dvds. Just because you aren't using the software, doesn't mean that the oem didn't have to give their $.10 to the MPAA to bundle it with the drive/computer. This is a fact that is ignored way too much.
Not that it's not still a really nifty piece of code.
Why did the interviewer stop and only harp on the one question of viewing movies under Linux ?
What about:
What is the use of the Region Codes, especially on old DVDs, (and how can the MPAA create their own copyright laws like this - totally bypassing the current laws) ?
How did the movie industry become what it is today, especially knowing it was founded by people frustrated by the control of Thomas Edison and decided to create an organization to fight that control ?
How exactly does the MPAA view copyright, is your definition include total control of anything you create, not just redistribution ? What about fair use ? Or better yet what about unregulated uses, such as me watching a DVD I bought on a toaster if I wanted to ?
If you care about this issue enough to follow any of the links above, you should read Lessig's "Free Culture" -- hell, you don't even have to pay for it (available as a free download). It's an excellent read that clearly outlines both sides of the issue (including de-FUDding many of Valenti's statements).
First of all, grilling Valenti on why there are no licensed DVD players capable of running under Linux is disingenuous. That's something that's driven by the market, not politics. Linux is not inherently more capable than Windows of pirating a movie. In fact, I find converting a DVD to a DIVX file much easier to do in Windows. Valenti wouldn't have the answer to "why there are no licensed players for Linux." Sony, Pioneer, JVD, etc. would have the answer to that. If they wanted to support a DVD player on Linux, they're not barred from doing that.
Too many of you are so fanatically blinded by your ambitions that you don't see some fundamental points Valenti made. If a distributor wants to release content in a restricted manner, tough shit for you; it's their content, deal. It's wrong to try and end-run someone's encryption, no matter how easy it is to do. Ease does not make it right. It's easy to pick fruit from a neighbors tree if their yard has no fence; that doesn't make the fruit yours. If you spend money on content, know what you're getting. You don't get to dictate what the rules are to content owners; you have to play by them.
Stop trying to drive this politically...you're going to lose and cry yourself dry wondering why the world doesn't work the way you want it to.
Shut the fuck up and spend your money on content that ISN'T restricted. Dry up the RIAA's money. Convince your friends and neighbors to purchase only content that doesn't put money in the coffers of those distributors whose methods you don't approve.
I always point out one of two key facts to the people sitting near me when I see those little propagandlets:
A) The guy on screen was most likely paid up front for his work, he's not getting a percentage of the box office take, so "piracy" doesn't affect him. (unless you belive Hollywood is gonna pack up their toys and go home, *and* that nobody will step up to replace them)
2) The people being forced to sit through this shit are the ones that just *paid* to see the damn movie.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I think it's even a little more clear than the parent post states since this is a rights issue. The United States is a democratic republic whose objective is to rule by the majority while protecting the rights of minorities. Political Science 101. Since copyright is about rights it should be clear that this is a prime example of where the majority (The Corporate States of America) are trampling on the rights of a minority (apparently any intelligent people in the US who want to DIY)
In every instance of copyright vs technology, real innovation (innovation by individuals) is being hampered by corporations depserate to hang on to their profits. Congress should just come clean and pass a law stating that coporations in the US have a right to profits.
Worse than that, perhaps, is that Valenti gets the rights issue wrong! He talks about stealing something from someone. Copyright is just that, the right to copy. He and no one else *owns* the art (movie, picture, photo, etc). As a copyright holder you have the right to copy the presentation of the idea -- it does not mean you own the idea. Copyright is not a property right! It is a right to copy. Valenti just muddles the whole debate.
________________________________
At the risk of getting flamebait/troll all over my good karma, I think it was unfortunate that the interviewer chose to browbeat Valenti with technical questions and focus on a single side effect of the core issue that Valenti could not be expected to be an expert on (the DVD situation on Linux). Had he stuck to the more general issues, like the fact that the behavior of legally purchased hardware is not entirely under the owner's control, he might have obtained more coherent answers that reveal more about Valenti's position, rather than cheapen the anti-DMCA camp by appearing to indulge in personal attacks.
JV: Let's say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
Yeh, that's a good point. Here's another -- how many people are in wheelchairs out there? It's not *that* many. In fact I don't know anyone in a wheelchair. So why should we have public policy aimed specifically at those people when there are multi-multi-millions of us who aren't crippled? It's another case, just like Skippy Valenti said, where You can't do it that way. To hell with the ADA. Those folks in wheel chairs should go buy their own damn ramps if they want to get into buildings. And tell 'em Jack sent ya!
Owning, posessing, transmitting or thinking about those 6 lines of code is punishable by ten years in prison, by a law Jack wrote himself. He's saying "un-fucking-believable" because he realizes the kid he is talking to is a living circumvention device, and the only successful solution is to legalize killing such people.
FYI, this is the man that wrote the law that Apple is using to persecute PlayFair to the cheers of everyone at Slashdot. So stop making fun of him.
You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
So what he's saying is that it's OK to take away part of a constitutionally-guaranteed right (freedom of expression), because only a small fraction of the population actually uses it.
Un-fucking-believeable
What ever happened to the idea of "majority rule, minority rights" This entire interview brands users that aren't of the majority as invalid- and a law that restricts a morally unobjectionable use by a minority should have never been made.
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
It's the licensing part, not the writing part, that's causing the problem. It's an expensive process and you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
Whoa, whoa, hang on. Weinstein is entirely correct. When he tried to make an argument about the broadcast flag, Valenti argued that the law had to be crafted to reflect the majority and that small segments of the population who had legitimate gripes would always exist (which isn't entirely true...law must reflect the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority.)
Weinstein then made the point that Linux users were a not-insubstantial portion of the population. This much is true. In addition, he made the point that this rather large segment of the population could not legally view DVDs on their computer without buying a separate DVD player or another operating system. I don't view this as a terribly technical problem. If I buy a DVD drive, I expect to be able to watch DVDs, just like I would have expected to be able to listen to music CDs if I bought a CD drive.
Further proof that this is neither a small nor an especially technical problem is the fact that Valenti himself has addressed it before. He has banked on the promise of DVD software soon being available for Linux, but that has yet to materialize. However, it has not and, but for the DMCA, United States copyright law would have no qualms about me finding some way to watch the content that I own. That is what's wrong.
I'm sorry, sir, but you are not insightful. Unless you can explain to me what's so "I'm so damn smart, look at me" about asking somebody who writes laws why it should still be illegal for me to watch a DVD on my personal computer which happens to run Linux. 90% of that interview is about legality and morality, and the guy just wanted to have a rational talk about the needs of both sides. Valenti and this Rich Taylor person had exceptionally horrifying responses to everything the interviewer said.
Here are a couple of the best ones:
TT: I'll tell you, because I'm an engineer, I'm an engineering student, and this year I built a high-definition television, from scratch. But because of the broadcast flag, if I wanted to do that again after July 2005, that would be illegal.
JV: How many people in the United States build their own sets?
TT: Well, I'm talking about engineers.
JV: Let's say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
That seems to translate to "majority rules, right or wrong". Interesting thought experiment: Re-read the above after changing "engineer" to "civil rights user" or maybe "Linux-user" or herhaps "Mac user" or [flamebait]"minority ethnic or religious group member"[/flamebait]. According to Valenti's logic he would certainly give the exact same response as long as there was a correspondingly small number of people in whatever set you stick between the quotes, compared to the total number of people in the country.
And the best:
Will Linux users ever be able to view DVDs on their computers without breaking the law? "I'm sure that day is not far away," [Rich] Taylor said.
Right. Like it "wasn't far away" four years ago. These people are truly frightening. These are the kind of people who would wholeheartedly support the ideas of Thought Police and Pre-Crime style law enforcement.
And let me just make sure that all you DVD-watching Linux users truly understand the implications of what these guys are saying. THEY WANT TO PUT ALL OF YOU IN PRISON FOR WATCHING ANY ENCRYPTED DVD ON YOUR LINUX-BASED COMPUTER IF YOU DON'T DO IT WITH THE "LEGAL" SOFTWARE THAT DOESN'T EXIST. And if they could actually find you and put you in prison, they would, and they'd feel good about it. They want to put you away if you use your computer to view a DVD in a manner that they don't approve of.
It boggles the mind.