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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."
Dupe. But I do like the information-wants-to-be-encrypted dept.
Illegal? Samir, This is America.
Gee thanks. From the article "The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday."
So how about a news article discussing the first round of debates?
Here's a link to the bill.
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.
Sorry I gotta post AC as I modded before RTFA, but look at this paragraph:
However, devices sold before the date the proposed legislation would be enacted, such as today's televisions, would be grandfathered in, according to the terms of the legislation. In addition, devices that were designed "solely of displaying programs," and ones that could not be "readily modified" for redistributing content would also be exempt.
If all the old capture cards, VCR's, DVR's and the like are going to be 'Grandfathered' in, what's the goddamn point? I mean, anyone with enough technical knowledge to do this, is already going to have the equipment, and I sure as hell am not going to throw it away because a new bill passes.
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.
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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.
1. Prison is big business in America.
2. Most if not all polititions are lawers who game the system in their favor.
3. DRM will be another nail in the coffin to inforce the limit of free speech.
We know what kind of rules and regulations are being (or trying at least) to limit the freedom of speech in the blogisphere. Now the scumbags inside the DC beltway want to limit speech of the podcasters.
Yes... I'm paranoid. But given the trends lately, can you *really* blame me?
TRUST NO ONE!
Life is not for the lazy.
This brings to mind the latest iTunes compatible communication device from Motorola which doesn't have a headphone socket. Instead it is rumored to require a bluetooth device with which to experience the stereo audio feed.
If it ends up never having a stereo socket, and subsequent devices don't have an audio output either, we could be seeing the beginnings of a closed system which stops "pirates" in their tracks by sending audio directly to a device which lives inside your ears.
Although there are bluetooth products out there which have audio out, they may soon start becoming scarce if this is indeed how the industry intends to keep music in a closed loop.
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
if by convenient, you mean free, then I guess you're right.
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who just want free stuff. I end up being a pirate because I want to watch Battlestar Galactica, but I'm not willing to pay for cable and some sort of recording device in order to watch one show. So I download episodes and then buy the DVDs when they come out. Spare me any "you could just wait until it comes out on DVD!" comments, please. I can't be bothered to get upset about the idea of adding a six month delay to the time my $40 goes into the bank account of a multinational corporation.
If I could buy the episodes as they air for a reasonable price, I would totally do that. I would be open to a number of possibilities:
- The cost of a season's worth of episodes adds up to the cost of the DVD set plus $10 for being able to watch them early. When it's released, I pay for shipping and get the DVDs.
- Same as above, but the total is e.g. 50% of the cost of the set, and I pay shipping plus the remainder and the convenience fee.
- The episodes are super-cheap, e.g. fifty cents each, and I just buy the DVD set at the store.
Option three is the easiest, but options one and two let Sci-Fi or whoever take a bigger cut from the DVD set price by selling directly to me.
Of course, this will never happen, because for it to be as convenient as it already is for me, the downloaded episodes would have to be non-DRM'd, encoded using a quality codec, and free of commercials. I'm sure this would be a huge hit, but the marketing department would never let it happen.
Why do I say a huge hit? Look at something that cannot be reasonably DRM'd, like photographic (as opposed to video) porn. There are tons of porn siterips on p2p networks, but it's still a very profitable industry. They probably realize that the money lost from bootlegs is less than what it would cost to come up with a protection system combined with the cost due to lost customers who weren't willing to put up with the hassle.
It would probably do well even with DRM. I wouldn't be a customer, but there are plenty of other people out there who are happy to deal with iTunes (which I find crippled beyond what I'm willing to exchange money for).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
First they came for my TV. But I didn't care much cause I had TiVo, and a lot of the programming was crap anyway.
Then they came for my games... outrageous in-game commercial placements, interrupting game play to see the latest offers in entertainment. But I didn't care too much because after the first 15 versions of Civ, the gameplay tends to blend together anyway.
Then I tried to go to the movies, but they took that away too. In-movie commercials, and quarter-time commercial breaks while they "change the digital reels upstairs". But I didn't care cause I've seen enough cars blow up to last me a lifetime. Even the Simpsons parody of that got old already.
Next was my cell phone. Every two minutes, my phone calls were interrupted by a 15-second product slogan. My cell phone Pacman turned into the Pepsi sign overnight. But I didn't care cause I hate phones anyway.
When all the indoor entertainment was taken away and I hate to face the daylight, they came for that too. Huge billboards sprung up everywhere, they started painting the roads with Ford logos, the traffic lights were hung from McDonald's arches, and no building was left untouched without a product placement (Informed Consumer Act of 2015). I had nowhere to go to escape.
Finally, when they came to tattoo corporate logos on my family, I could do nothing. I couldn't even call for help, for I had already tossed my cell phone.
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty