Slashdot Mirror
New Bill Threatens to Plug "Analog Hole"
ThinSkin writes "In an effort to encourage consumers to embrace digital content, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting a bill that would restrict owners of analog devices from recording analog content. For instance, if a fan wishes to tape a Baseball game on his VCR, the VCR would re-encode the content of that game and convert it into a digital form, which would then be filled with right restrictions and so forth. The process would be driven by VRAM (Veil Rights Assertion Mark), a technology that stamps analog content with DRM schemes."
So this crazy DRM stuff really will have some effect on illegal downloaders: It will increase the number of people who do the same thing, increasing the quality and quantity of the files available, while making it less likely for each given individual that she'll get in trouble. If there is going to be a realistic move to reduce piracy, it will have to involve making it convenient to stay legal and play by the rules. These DRM roadblocks do just the opposite. The more of these stunts I see, the less wrong piracy starts to seem. It's like they try to punish the people that play by the rules. Yeah, what an incentive!
A rational and consistent intelectual property law would one be that prevented copyrighted content from using copy prevention technology at all. After all it has the protection of law, then why should people be prevented from making fair use of the content?
I see copy prevention technology as being no different conceptually from a trade secret. If you decide to hide a technology as a trade secret rather than sharing a technology through a patent then your technology can be reverse engineered legally and you get no protection under law. The trade off is that society gets access to your new technology and you get legal monopoly for a number of years. If you don't share the technology via a descriptive patent, then you don't get a legal monopoly. So, similarly if you decide to prevent copying using technology rather than by using copyright law, then you should get no benefit under the law because you are ultimately depriving society of the content if it is never released in a copyable form.
Another attempt to squelch innovation that will just redirect homebrew efforts in the direction of circumvention. Call me when they shut down eMule/aMule/xMule, Kademlia, or BitTorrent (or BitSpirit (BT/Kad-like subsystem), for that matter).
... [peer-to-peer networking] is either going to be legal, or it isn't going to exist."
I'm bored of this stupid timeline... you know:
P2P services arise
RIAA/MPAA kills one
P2P piracy increases due to consumers being pissed off that the RIAA/MPAA has no respect for their rights (or their tastes... this summer had nothing good in the theatres aside from the Guide, you know)
RIAA/MPAA freaks and claims P2P services are to blame, inviting legislation/technology that fucks fair use while not doing any real good
P2P piracy increses, for much the same reasons as before, while homebrew programmers work around the new legislation/technology
RIAA/MPAA freaks
P2P piracy increses
A quote from a relevant link of the article:
"We have a bright young public who sees nothing wrong with downloading...it's going to destroy the copyright industry, it seems to me
- Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
You're right, Dianne. But you haven't quite gotten the point.
Unregulated, P2P users were still buying good CDs. But every time new anti-p2p legislation is enacted, new anti-circumvention technology added, and for each p2p site shut down, it alienates the Industries from their customers. Each time, the animosity that was once limited to the tech-savvy grows ever outward into people who'd never have thought bad of their content providers.
There are easy ways to fix this; one is to stop with the lawsuits. Worst. Press. Ever. Another is to start producing quality. People won't want to steal that which is actually worth paying for. The real item is to fix copyright law. 95 years past the original author's death is rediculous. How about 15 years past initial release? If I knew I could, for example, download episodes of the original Battlestar Galactia without legal repercussions, I might reconsider downloding Sci Fi's Season 2 DV cap that's floating on Bittorrent.
This law doesn't matter to anyone with a brain. A TV card with an offending chip can be "repaired" by anyone determined enough. You'd have to integrate your crap into the DAC and MPEG-4 encoders of every device, then hope someone doesn't hack the controls out of the software, or that someone doesn't make an open source version, fully functional (and easily modified), on the premise of interoperability.
Yeah, release the drivers for linux in closed source code. Someone will build ones for their amiga system and claim interoperability. Release for amiga, and you'll have the BeOS people doing it. Do BeOS, and there's a few flavors of BSD that would be clean. BeOS covered? How about Minix? You're not going to win here without spending a few billion in development, and then you'll still lose to those who don't cower under a legal premise and have names like "Thundulator". The term is "Unenforcable", or, in colloquial terms, "Useless fuck of a law".
Meanwhile, the cycle's going to go on until either the MPAA/RIAA have run out of money to throw at the problem, due to the combination of lack of consumers willing to pay to be fucked in the ass, or until they basically cow under - and eat what crumbs consumers will give them AFTER the content creators have been paid - like the good little middle-management fucktards they are.
In conclusion, Dianne is partially right. Their either will be legal AND free P2P, or there won't be an RIAA/MPAA. Actually, I'm kinda pushing for both.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
This is the problem with thinking of the so-called "intellectual property" as property.
The whole point of copyright is that it's the idea that matters*; and yet, once we can finally decouple the idea from the carrier medium by making it into a stream of bits that can be sent across the world within fractions of a second, we see that trying to reapply the previous metaphor of the physical object requires that we impose such drastic controls, since the most natural thing to do is to spread information, unlike when the idea depended on the replication of the media as well---you can't click and drag a second copy of a book from the first one.
I think that the selling of ideas by copy cannot be done anymore, unless you impose this unnatural and invasive system onto the flow of information, and that it's going to be a painful process to widely come to this realization. Everyone struggles to find a replacement system to compensate for the loss of by-copy sale (a ransom system? a patronage system?), but surely the search for more money does not trump the free exchange of ideas.
* Yeah, that's probably not exactly right, but IANAL, and I need sleep, so it's the best I can do.
Copyright and patent and trademark, ie Intellectual Property (sorry, RMS) is so screwed up now that I hope that take it to the extreme and paralyze the bloodsuckers by making them sue each other for infringement. Think of it ... from whom will they profit more, mere consumers who are only good for $5K per shakedown, with all the overhead that entails, or each other, good for several hundred million and the chance to run them into the ground? They are, after all, your competition.
Yes, pass this sucker. Make copyrights last forever. Make story plots patentable. Go ahead. See how much control you have over popular culture, you morons. Watch popular culture pass right on by, out of your control, beyond your puny stilted imagination. Paint yourselves into corners of your own making, spend all your energy fighting each other and hoarding and enhancing your little corner of the past, while the future bypasses you utterly and forever. While you think of a zillion ways to regurgitate your patented storyline, which is all you can do because your competitors have their own patented storylines which they are busy regurgitating, people will develop their own tools which they will share freely, and other people will swap these and improve these and make their own unpatented stories and their own uncopyrighted and locked down culture.
You morons will be left holding ancient patented and copyrighted dreck which has been projectile vomited to a fare-thee-well because you have a 300 year patent on it, or a 500 year copyright on it, and heaven knows Disney has to protect Micky from all those hordes who have only one goal in mind: how to appropriate Mickey for their own perverted uses. Yes, that's right, the truth is out now, I have seen the transcripts of the meetings. Sony wants nothing more than to lock up Mickey for themselves, they have wet drems at board meetings when they salivate at the prospect of hijacking Mickey if you don't keep thsoe patents and copyrights in force. They have entire teams of lawyers searching for loopholes to grab Mickey form your slippery paws because you slipped up and saved a few megabucks by not hiring that one brilliant lawyer before Sony did.
Morons, I say, morons.
Infuriate left and right