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Intel Stands Up For Consumers in Next-gen DVD War
Sanity writes "According to a Macworld story, Intel is standing up for the interests of consumers in the war between Blue-ray and HD-DVD, by making its support for either format contingent on support for 'mandatory managed copy', the ability to copy content to 'home servers' so that it can be accessed from around the home. While it is refreshing to see someone consider the (often ignored) interest of consumers in the world of DRM, it appears that 'mandatory managed copy' will still allow content producers to limit what consumers can do with the content and equipment they own well beyond the limitations imposed by copyright law. Thus the question over DRM remains: should we be policed by our own property?"
As with all DRM, if I can watch it once, I can record it without the DRM. I wish they'd understand that.
How can there be no such thing?!
I just bought 40 acres of Intellectual Property on ebay and got an incredible 1.9% finance rate!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
should we be policed by our own property
No, but the moment someone breaks fair use and delves into full-scale copyright violation, they lose their right to honestly answer in the negative. However, for those who do follow fair-use laws, we should not be limited by our technology by treating us as guilty until forced (by way of DRM) to be innocent.
Intel is big into the "digital home" market, with its VIIV platform and various peripherals designed to serve content over network links. Of course it wouldn't want this business compromised by controls in upcoming DVD formats. Hardly the champion of the little guy; Intel is championing its own business interests, nothing more.
Breakfast served all day!
They want to keep sales of PCs going by allowing you to transfer contents back and forth between your server.
Next you'll be telling me that they're standing up for my rights by including mandatory DRM management at the hardware level and putting a serial# on each chip to uniquely identify a PC.
Every time a restriction or limitation is imposed, a work-around will be developed. Necessity is the mother of invention, and you can't just disregard the will of the people.
End transmission.
This is completely psuedo-altruistic. Intel is standing up for themselves as it has the opportunity to create a market for these "home servers." Although this may be good for consumers, this is fully in Intel's best interest, plain and simple.
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"Thus the question over DRM remains: should we be policed by our own property?"
Well, since it's only your property if you choose to buy it, then YES. Not because it's right or fair, but because YOU ACCEPTED THE DEAL.
If you don't like it, don't buy it in the first place.
years of endless debate and millions in funding, and any product that is released will be hacked within the month
when you pit the well-funded r&d department of a major corporation against a million highly motivated, poor teenagers who want their media fix, the teenagers win, every single time
you can't control the consumer
listen again, very carefully, dear corporate megalomaniacs:
you can't control the consumer
make it too constrictive, and no one will buy
give them no other option than to buy you, and it will be hacked
that's really about it
so give it up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It already pisses me off that they won't let me skip the FBI warning or the movie studio splash screen. Can't fastfoward, can't skip, can't press "DVD Menu" - drives me nuts. This crap has gone far enough, they should have mandatory "Do whatever you want with it" clause instead. I guess they will try to say that skipping watching the studio splash screen is from now on illegal and protected by the DMCA.
Without managed copy, HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies are protected by AACS, and AACS is either cracked or it isn't.
But managed copy allows movies to be trans-DRMed into Windows Media DRM (and possibly others, like FairPlay), thus introducing an OR into the attack tree. To access the content, you only have to break AACS or WMDRM (or FairPlay or whatever). This makes the overall system much weaker (which is good or bad, depending on your viewpoint).
And BTW, why isn't Intel lobbying the DVD Forum/DVD CCA to allow managed copy for regular DVDs? It'll be a curious world where you're legally allowed to copy HD-DVDs but not "inferior" DVDs.
You sound like one of those right-wing gun nuts, opposed to the smart-gun technology which can save lives.
I think you'll find that most of us gun "nuts" are not at all opposed to technology, not even that technology. What we're opposed to is the mandatory use of the technology. In other words, I'd like to know that my wife, or a friend of mine, can pick up my gun and use it with needing to cut off my fingers first, or having the Magic Bracelet on. For that matter, I'd like to be able to pick up my own gun and use it with gloves on, or whether or not my Magic Bracelet's batteries work in sub-zero weather.
I can think of some occasions where I'd like to know that only I could use my gun. But more importantly, I can think of endless circumstances when I'd want the choice to not rely on such technology. Completely aside from the fact that such tech could be highly unreliable under rough circumstances, it's the principle of the thing. And we already have trigger locks, gun safes, parents, and brains to prevent misuse. You know, the same brains that parents use to talk their kids through not killing themselves by drinking drain cleaner or driving the family car off a cliff.
You'd think, for as much as the left wing talks about choice and freedom, and bitches about the Bush administration and the Patriot Act, that the left would be the very first group to stand up and keep the government from forcing loopy personal tech into use on a simple metal tool. The murders in my county this month have been by gang members with knives. I suppose the cure for that is Smart Knife Technology(tm)?
Mandatory Smart Gun tech isn't any more appropriate than Smart Lawn Mower tech would be in really saving lives. It will, though, be a shining monument to government control in place of personal accountability. Where were the high number of gun deaths back when you could mail-order a gun from Sears and have it shipped to your house? What's changed since then... then lethality of guns, or the culture? Fix the no-consequences culture, and leave the machetes, knives, baseball bats, guns, flammable liquids, garden fertilizer, and family cars out of the personal behavior regulation equation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What I'm sick of is this whole "sell a product with one hand and revoke rights with the other."
If they're going to sell a DVD, they should have to list any kinds of user limitations up front. Can't skip the FBI screen? List it. etc. If you don't agree, you don't buy.
I'm sure that the MPAA could develop a standard, so announcing this info would be as simple as a short acronym on the label or in the ad.
If they're going to revoke my rights to the unlimited use of a product, it needs to be spelled out before they sell the thing to me, NOT afterwards. None of this 'well, what did you expect?' nonesense. The burden is on them to be upfront. Shrinkwrap denial of rights should be illegal.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Some more expensive programs came with 'dongles' that were even worse. In order to run the software you had to reconfigure your parallel port with a hardware device. If you ran several of these high end programs such as Autocad you had all these dongles daisy chained - it was insane. Plus it caused problems with certain software / printers.
Despite the so called copy protection, people still defeated it, yet everyone suffered. I just don't think DRM works - its costs are way higher than its benefits. I've got 6 machines here at home, I can see DRM restricting me to one machine or only working under windows despite that I dual boot XP / Linux.
I love to read all the free marketeers here tell us that the free market will fix this - it won't. All the large studios who control the content are supporting this en block. The consumer doesn't stand a chance. Any concessions that are made might allow me the 'privledge' of copying only on a machine running on an Intel(c) Trusted Computer under Microsoft(c) Longhorn but thats it.
A clarification is needed.
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-538
As you can see from my coverage here, Intel isn't hinging support for Blu-ray on Managed Copy support. They're going to have to support it either way. Rather, Intel is trying to get the two parties together again to talk about unification, but they're stressing the importance of managed copy to the whole discussion.
There is no contract with the purchase of a DVD. All there is is copyright law restricting the rights of public exhibition, duplication and a few others. If I wanted to do something with the DVD beyond copyright law, only THEN would any license be necessary. However, in the typical case, there is no license necessary --- because legitimate use of the DVD like playing it in linux, backing it up, playing an import, is already legal. I own the DVD, I own the DVD player. I don't own the copyright, but none of the above requires posessing the copyright.
DRM attempts to enforces a superset of restrictiosn above and beyond copyright law: That I can't play a DVD in an 'unauthorized player', that my DVD player refuses to activate its high-quality digital outputs, that I cannot fast-forward past commercials. That my DVD player refuses to play dvd's purchased on vacation. And then the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass these controls.
Worse, there is no limit as to what other controls may be applied by DRM, controls far above and beyond what copyright law allows.