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EFF Creates Endangered Gizmos List
linuxwrangler writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation this week announced the creation of the Endangered Gizmos List. According to their press release, this project highlights 'the way misguided laws and lawsuits can pollute the environment for technological innovation.' The site categorizes technologies ranging from the Betamax to the Advanced eBook Processor as 'Saved', 'Endangered' or 'Extinct'."
For God's sake, don't feed them after midnight!
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
The one-button mouse is always at risk of being an endangered gizmo, but Apple keeps reintroducing the species into the wild, where they are promptly eaten by 2-buttons and scroll wheels.
When linking to a site like this, consider adding .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname; that creates a cached Coral link. This prevents slashdotting.
So here.
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FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo "God's machine," and its devotees have been known to declare, "You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?
That's the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are "allowed" to survive in the marketplace.
This is bad news for innovation and free competition, but it also threatens a wide range of activities the entertainment conglomerates have no use for -- everything from making educational "fair" use of TV or movie clips for a classroom presentation, to creating your own "Daily Show"-style video to make a political statement, to simply copying an MP3 file to a second device so you can take your music with you.
Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation.
DVD X-Copy
DVD X-Copy
Species: DVD X-Copy
Genus: DVD archiving program
Closest Surviving Relatives: DeCSS, libdvd, and more powerful CSS decryption utilities are liberally available online.
What it is: A DVD backup utility.
What it allowed you to do: Create backup copies of your DVDs, record fair-use excerpts of DVD movies.
Why it's extinct: Hollywood sued the company that made DVD X-Copy out of existence, successfully arguing that it violated the highly controversial "anti-circumvention" clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What you can do about it: It's too late to save DVD X-Copy, but you can use EFF's Action Center to tell Congress that you support the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA; HR 107) -- a bill that would amend the DMCA to restore your ability to circumvent copy protection to make legal, personal uses of your DVDs.
Replay TV 4000
Replay TV 4000 Series
Species: ReplayTV 4000
Genus: Personal Video Recorder (PVR)
Closest Surviving Relatives: TiVo's "Tivo-to-go" is heavily encumbered by DRM and its 30-second skip is hidden. Build-your-own PVRs like MythTV let you skip commercials and export files to your heart's content.
What it is: A personal video recorder with user-friendly features.
What it allowed you to do: Skip over commercials and send recorded TV programs to another ReplayTV device.
Why it's extinct: Former Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner called skipping commercials "theft" -- and evidently the major motion picture studios agree. They sued the manufacturers of ReplayTV out of existence, and the company that purchased it buckled under and removed the contested features.
What you can do about it: EFF intervened in the case to fight for ReplayTV users' right to make perfectly legal, non-infringing uses of their PVRs, but we couldn't stop the subsequent settlement and sell-out. That means it's too late to save the original ReplayTV -- but by joining EFF as a member, you can support our efforts to stop the adoption of international trade agreements that would make it against the law in many countries to include ReplayTV-like features in new devices.
Streambox VCR
Screenshot of Streambox VCR
Species: Streambox VCR
Genus: Recorder for "time-shifting" RealAudio streams
Closest Surviving Relatives: Gizmos like the TotalRecorder, which can capture audio streams later in the path by emulating the soundcard device.
What it is: A software program for recording and playing back RealAudi
Actual list is http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php.
Mirrored here, but the link is NSFW so I can't check to make sure I got it right.
Microsoft is planning on taking their increase in earnings in order to build a humongeous flashlight, designed to wipe out all of those non-DRM enhanced gizmos out there.
EFF Server endangered - ummh - make that extinct /.
Missing from their endangered species list is none other than: The Internet. The most important 'gizmo' in our lives today.
RIAA and MPAA attack every peer to peer network because of illegal filesharing. Peer to peer networks can be abused, this is true. However, so can social networks, radio networks, cable networks and etc. Yet, if these organizations had their way peer to peer networks would cease to exist. Shall I remind you that the Internet operates on protocols that essentially make it a peer to peer network?
From my viewpoint although a lot of these laws and mandates are a pain in the ass they do lead to people trying to find new and possibly better products/methodologies to get around them. Its the strengthen the product versus develop new/different products argument and sometimes new/different is definitely better. (Hell I bet if there was a law that was detrimental to Windows we might actually get a better product from them!)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Every item in every category on the list features an appeal to "join the EFF" so that the evil, toy-snatching corporations can be vanquished for good yadda yadda. If the EFF's legal team was half as as adept as their Marketing and Promotion departments, they might actually amount to something more than a 90's-era anachronism...
Hey, but I've still held onto my old orange cyber-rights clenched-fist-on-a-field-of-lightning-bolts T-Shirt after all these years, so I guess I should give props to their Creative Services Department as well...
Along similar lines, Tom Jennings has a database of obsolete formats and devices of various kinds, at deadmedia.org.
His site is more focussed on older (nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century) stuff than the EFF site, and of course, not everything dies of regulatory or copyright strangulation.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
This isn't about companies and artists being "stolen" from. It's about corporate entities finally having the kind of leverage to exert full control over content distribution from inception to consumption.
If a company can control the distribution of its "intellectual property" - e.g. a song - from the moment it's recorded until it hits your ears - then there's additional opportunities for a revenue stream at any point in that line. For instance, you can purchase a song from iTunes. Or you can pay XM $10 a month for the privilege of listening to that same song on their satellite service. Or you could go to the record store and purchase a disc you can put in your CD player and play.
But the act of copying said content, and giving it to a friend - that's completely outside the revenue stream, and the content companies seek to stop this type of action. Even if the creator of the content - the artist - would see benefit from this action. (An example: a friend recently made a copy of the Secret Machines album for me. I bought a copy for my brother, and then a copy for myself. How is this bad for the artist?)
Music, video, and other entertainment content is *not* intellectual property. Trade secrets, manufacturing methods, software - that's IP. But music in specific is undergoing a transformation. Content control is not natural in the broad scope - it's an artificial control mechanism put in place to generate revenue.
Interesting:
censorship bears the legacy of copyright. For example, the custom of printers and authors to have their name listed with their creations began as a law demanding this practice, not to ensure the originator due credit, but in order for the king to keep track of disobedient writers. Brendan Scott (2000)
falling costs is met with more computer capacity for a sustained price, and therefore that new computers never will reach the poor majority (Stallabrass, 1995)
"The justification for the patent system is that by slowing down diffusion of technological progress it ensures that there will be more progress to diffuse... Since it is rooted in a contradiction, there can be no such thing as an ideally beneficial patent system [...]" [60].
Yes I do lean towards marxism and no, this is not a anti-capitalism rant although this article [firstmonday.org] does point out the obvious (for some) that we have moved from feudalism to capitalism and are GRADUALLY moving towards something else.
I once read that the Teddy Ruckspin doll was supposed to play and "sing along" to all music cassettes. But the lawyers decided that they might get sued because it might be considered a "performance" which would require payments to the copyright holders. To play it safe, they stuck with proprietary tapes.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
it's endangered because of DMCA or people suing based on stupid reasons, not because people do not use them.
mp3 players, A/D - D/A chips, TIVOs and P2P software are on that list, and you can't say people don't use them.
What a I missing ?
--> reading the FA before posting an opinion maybe
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
MyBlog
EFF Defends the apple Ipod here and will defend ThinkSecret against Apple there
Funny world but it shows that EFF and their staff/volunteers are standing for principles and not products/behaviour
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Actually (and I say this as a non-Mac owner, admittedly), in my experience the shipping of the one-button mouse is a Good Thing.
Because not all users have a right mouse-button, it maintains the very sensible UI rule that you should be able to do everything without using it - all features you'd RMB for are available in the menu.
Windows is horribly inconsistent about what the RMB is actually for, and you don't know whether or not a feature actually exists until you try right-clicking on random objects to have a look.
Extra buttons and wheels are undoubtably useful things for shortcuts, but the design principle that everything should be available in a consistent manner without HAVING to use them is great for those of us that don't use them very often.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
So, after reading the article I came to think in something. This DMCA law, it is supposed to be for the US only isn't it? so, if I, make some software as the DVD-x-copy in another country, and distribute it, I am allowed to do that provided that the laws of my country allow it no?
Now, it would be then "Illegal" for the people who buys it inside united states, but I think nothing stops me for selling it from, say, somwhere in south america or europe...
Am I wrong?, maybe one of the "solutions" for all this would be simply to move the company to another place out of US.
Or maybe I am missing something here...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Just because people invest a lot of energy into something doesn't magically make it above ridicule and parody.
I didn't say the endangered species list was above ridicule or parody. But I did say that the parody listed was feeble and in poor taste.
Just because there exists a freedom to send-up anything and everything that others hold sacred, does not mean it is right to exercise. In a truly free society, the only way to counter rotten ideas is to speak up when they are foisted upon you. However, (as my -1, Troll rating may demonstrate already) "PC" doctrine discourages speaking up against any proffered ideas. Instead, silent tolerance is supposed to be the norm. But freedom of speech implies freedom of destructive and critical speech just as it implies freedom of constructive speech. (And there are no moral connotations attached to those adjectives)
I find this bad parody of a serious endeavor in poor taste, and just as there's nothing wrong with them coming up with such bad humour, there's absolutely nothing wrong in my saying it's garbage - the querulous minds of the anonymous moderators excepted, obviously.
Can't you design the interface to be usable with one button without bundling a mouse that will not be used by a large portion of your customers?
Yes, you can, but try getting every 3rd party software manufacturer to do the same.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Both Beta and VHS were limited by NTSC quality.
If you were in Europe, where they use PAL (a higher quality standard) then the difference between Beta and VHS became more apparent.
The bottom line: VHS was "high enough" quality for the US market, and it had features that Beta didn't have (wider licensing, longer recording times).
In many ways, it's a similar situation to CDs today - none of the attempts to replace CDs have been successful because CDs are "good enough" for 99% of the consumers.
Hmm.. And as I wrote this, I realized: Windows is "good enough" for 99% of the consumers too. I wonder if Windows is successful for just the same reason - it was widely licensed, and "good enough".
we are moving back towards feudalism, although the fedualist pushers don't call themselves "royal".
The new "technofeudalists" are the huge transnational corporations, who are increasingly controlling the "laws" in various nations, overtly (open lobbying, trade associations,pushing "free trade" instead of "fair trade", etc) or covertly (bribing and blackmailing their boys into power in the "legitimate" governments, copting journalists to push propoganda, etc, etc). And it's very hard to control them, because corporations act as a group of people as to profits, but the responsibilities that a normal human person might have are not conclusive or extensive enough, witness time after time corporation-x gets busted for this or that. Usually it results in a fine, said fine monies then being pushed off onto the ultimate customers to pay. The corps themselves are rarely if ever actually busted up entirely, no matter how many times their officers/managers whatever get caught in illegal acts. And to make it worse, even if that happens, they can just "go bankrupt" and most of the same people involved can just go start up another string of corporations under new corporate person names and controlling addresses.
Corporations are very similar to the old concept of "royal bloodlines" in that regard, they persist generation after generation, with the twist they can just morph away and reform, to go on and continue with unethical or illegal practices. You can't really kill them off or revolt against them,like you could with some royal feudalist gang of rank "bluebloods" in ye olden days, not in any practical sense anyway and stay inside technological civilisation.
Thats what worries me the most, is that if they do manage to get control of the raw silicon, then we are screwed.
We wont be even able to build our own hardware proejcts with out it being crippled, and having to license it ( at costs the average hobbiest cant afford ).. Regardless if it might 'infringe' something or not.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the issue is with unencumbered D/A and A/D. Currently you are free to convert freely between digital and analogue media, but eventually all DRM material could contain a watermark which would only allow it to pass through the conversion after a small degradation in quality, and then only if you had a license to do the conversion.
This has already happened in the world of picture scanning. Try putting a bill though a colour photocopier. The image of paper money is no longer able to pass through this conversion technology.
Perhaps there will be a lot of DRM-crippled A/D D/A converters in such applications but there will ALWAYS be non-crippled parts available to the industry.
In HD Beta looks even better.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Morpheus can go off and die for all I care. Their latest program release is a modified version of the GPLed file sharing tool Gnucleus, except they added spyware and ads to the program. They are a big scam to say the least.
A/D and D/A converters are essential components in todays digitized world.
It's not only that. It's hard for regular non-techies to understand what the concept of this issue really is, but try this analogy: what if book publishers wanted to installa microchip in every pen or pencil that was sold so that it would recognize if you were using it to copy a protected piece of literature, and would stop working? Not only is it insanely stupid, but now a 39 cent pen is going to cost you 10 dollars, and maybe more because the microchip it uses will be patented and only available for license through the industry association that lobbied the government for the rule in the first place. Yes, it's THAT bad.
D/A and A/D converters are something that electronics students build in a lab during one of their classes. Will we all be forced to be bonded like locksmiths in order to get a degree in electrical engineering now, because we have the knowledge to bootleg copyrighted material? Yes, it's THAT bad. It affects almost any modern electronic system that interacts with the real world.
I'll tell you, people NEED to put just as much effort into blocking this type of bad legislation as they do into the pro-gun lobby. This is even more fundamental than that. It's about the freedom to measure the physical world and store it in digital form. Unfortunately, people just don't understand the technology, especially politicians.
Seriously, I purchase A/D and D/A cards for industrial uses all the time. They're expensive enough. Now, do I have to pay extra just to stop someone from hooking up the headphones of their MP3 player to a resolver input on a conveyor and record the music through the control system? That's insane!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
...you must be a criminal by the MPAA and RIAA's definitions.
At this point, I've accepted that there are things I do that may someday be considered a crime. I don't plan to stop:
-Record TV shows from my DirecTV reciever that I pay a monthly subscription fee for into my computer using a Hauppauge PVR250 card for archival purposes (to show friends and family when they come over)
-Rip all CDs that I buy to the infinitely more convenient Ogg Vorbis format so that I can listen to my music anywhere
-Stream any audio or video from my house to wherever I happen to be using a VPN connection and broadbad. This means I can listen to my music collection, watch my DVDs or even DirecTV as long as I have an internet connection
-Build custom digital media devices that don't have the limitations that commercial products do
The way things are going, I'm sure these things will become illegal eventually. It's a wonder it's not illegal to use a hammer, nails, screwdriver, drywall, plaster and screws to build or modify your house any way you want to.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
How is it gun manufacturers can get away with manufacturing semi-autos that are a easily converted into full-autos, but a (say for example) HDTVtuner card manufacturer couldn't make the broadcast flag decoder dependant on one little easily removed jumper? Then somehow the knowledge of this jumper would work its way onto the internet and coincidentally their sales jump through the roof. Of course it's still illegal for you or I to remove this jumper, but that's not their fault that there are so many criminals in the world, is it? After all, PC cards don't violate copyright...people do.
Not sure what qualifications they got but whoever puts D/A converters on a endangered list has proven that they don't have much understanding of electronics
Exactly. But it's the RIAA and MPAA and the freaking IDIOTS in congress that put A/D and D/A converters on the endangered list. And as you say, they have absolutely NO CLUE about electronics or about technology in general. There has been lobbying and draft bills floating around Capitol Hill that would outlaw the manufacture of any new non-DRM-compliant A/D and D/A chips.
Which is why the EFF has it listed as endangered.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Because of geographical and political reasons, the United States of America has been the most important trade partner for these countries, so this agreement seems very important for the economic future of the region. Some people talk about the dangers of this treaty not being approbed, how many jobs will be lost and so forth. (Some of these concerns may be real, but some are FUD spread by the bussines which would get more benefits from this agreement)
Well, it just happens that this agreement has clauses that will require these countries to implement DMCA-like measures, like the outlaw of anti-circunvention devices for copyrighted materials.
Also, it will force the adoption of an US-like patent system, which will include software patents; and an extended protection time for pharma patents
It seems like to be eligible for the priviledge of "free trade" with the US, other countries will have to change their legislation to appeal more to the corporations that fund the U.S. goverment.