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The Argument for Crackable Media
rubberbando writes "Wired is running a story about how the US Copyright Office is looking for input about a law that will allow some media to be legally cracked. This is aimed at certain uses such as cracking an ebook so that a blind person can use reading software with it and older software that requires a hardware dongle that no longer works." From the article: "The DMCA forbids cracking of copy-protected or encrypted digital media, with certain exceptions. When the law was passed, Congress mandated the register of copyrights revisit the anti-circumvention section every three years to make sure consumers have proper access to materials they purchased -- even if content creators have them locked down. If the copyright office finds instances where copy protection prevents fair use of the work, then those copy protections can be legally circumvented." We reported on the other side of the coin yesterday.
so with all the failed attempts at bulletproof DRM and anticopying, is there actually any UNcrackable media?
there's a big difference. you are looking for a reason to copy the DVD before it gets trashed by ur rugrats. who's to control if it ever actually gets destroyed by them...or if it ends up at your friends house? the idea of the law is to allow media which can't be accessed anymore to be accessed. in your case...the law would allow you to glue the pieces of ur destroyed blu-ray disc back together, read the info off of it...and then create a new, proper disc with the original discs content.
How is the DMCA even constitutional? It should take more than a act of congress because this rips apart all common sense property rights on which all other rights are based on (oh wait, the Supreme Court just shit on that back in June). If you don't have property rights, like dominos, everything else falls.
Why shouldn't I be able to read or "bypass" what I own like the 1 and 0s on DVD/CDs/etc? Laws like the DMCA chill me because manufactures can put whatever in their variety of products and if someone tries to look into them they wave the DMCA and say "Ah, ah, don't go their bad boy!" How is the customer even supposed to protect themselves from bad products (faulty engineering, back_doors, worms, etc.) If feels Big_Brotherish. Or like Britain. (I think they had a restriction on reading frequencies not "meant" for you since WW2.)
If the secrets within products shouldn't be known (or bypassed), don't sell it.
[grand] parent might be jewish; the religion prohibts use of the word 'god', spoken or written.
interesting side-note, the reason the 'o' is omitted is that the original name of god could only be spoken by the high priest on yom kippur, so any written representation of god's true name was written without vowels (generally seen as 'YHWH', called 'the tetragrammaton', said 'yahweh' or 'jehova').
Given that most Sega video game systems are no longer manufactured (along with some early Nintendo systems, and IDK about the original PSX), YES it should be called so, and it should allow copy protection circumvention on Sega and PSX games.
There should also be a law giving companies a reason to help out emulator authors who want to emulate an obsolete system.
I just recieved a Las Vegas season 2 boxed set from overseas. (Original) Ep3 and Ep6 don't work, and Ep2 and Ep5 have skips (It's a double-sided disk, and there's obviously a load of bad sectors.) Sending it back is not really an option - two more lots of international postage will cost more than the boxed set did in the first place.
The point is, using a freely-available program I was able to extract all of side one to my hard drive and watch episode 3. Episode 6 is beyond saving, from the look of it, but I haven't given up yet.
I'm not copying disks to sell or pirating anything, all I'm doing is using a third party tool to watch something I paid for which is otherwise unwatchable.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Unfortunately, not so. The law prohibits manufacturing anti-circumvention devices also. So you can't write your own software either.
Sure they do. The device provisions are a direct violation of freedom of speech. They prevent utterance and publication of certain speech -- specifically, speech that can be used to instruct a computer how to bypass copy protection measures. Further, the DMCA, in the 2600 case, has been used successfully to prevent publication of speech which tells other people where to find such instructions. That's an even clearer violation, if you don't believe code is speech.
I think the entire problem lies in the word "consumer" which, to the "consumers", is just a word, but which, to the companies, is actually an idea.
We exist to consume what the companies make. If we don't do that we are not fulfilling our purpose in life and must be adjusted.
It shouldn't be "consumers", it should be "customers" and it shouldn't be passively "consuming" the products, but rather actively deciding what we want and, if it already exists, getting it. If it doesn't already exist then start your own company.
It seems that legislation is, for whatever reason (although I can think of a few, myself) more interested in (forcibly, by which I mean by force of law) adjusting the attitudes of "consumers" than in adjusting the attitudes of companies. Which is not a good thing, because although I think both companies and customers need some adjusting of attitudes, these laws aren't the right adjustments.
The right adjustments would be for the attitudes - and I must stress, of *both* companies *and* "consumers" - away from the "consumer" idea and towards the actual idea of the company providing a service the user actually *wants*. People shouldn't *be* buying flashy new movie X on DVD if it also has a pain in the butt 'region encoded, DRM scheme DVD encryption' on it which they don't want, simply because the company produced it that way.
And for the record, I am of course just as guilty in this regard as anyone else you can point a finger at.
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The source code to old games has potential value. You can port them to mobile 'phones, for example, and sell them. The binaries have less value. A stipulation that you have to run them on the original hardware would protect against this, but not make the people who want to play them on emulators happy. Perhaps this could be dealt with by a provision that they are legal on any platform except those where they have been re-released.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, since the detector vans are themselves using superhet receivers, they ought to be detectable. I can imagine a "TV detector van detector" comprising a TRF receiver tuned to the detector van's local oscillator frequency, with a relay to cut the power to the TV set as soon as a detector van comes into range.
A TRF TV receiver is another possibility. This could be a retrofit device: plug aerial into external receiver, dummy load into TV's aerial socket to absorb TV's LO signal, and external receiver into TV's SCART socket. Or even build TVs with a different IF, so the LO would be sufficiently out-of-band that it could safely be filtered out. {Broadcast radio uses an IF of 10.7MHz and so the LO is in-band from 88.0 to 97.3. Fortunately, the signal doesn't travel far enough to cause a problem: if someone else's radio was tuned 10.7MHz above yours, it would have to get close enough for you to hear their audio well before it was close enough for the LO to swamp your RF signal. In the UK, only a few TV channels [all UHF] are used from any transmitter, so I guess the LO interference may be in-band but in theory but fall out-of-catchment-area in practice.}