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RIAA vs Linux and DVDs
PlayfullyClever writes "The entertainment industry has put itself on the fast-track to destruction, using well-proven tactics as explained in Preventing DVD Playback on Linux Like Prohibition in the 1920's. Are their heavy-handed tactics to lock up and control everything we touch signs of plain old human stubborness?" Or more likely- greed.
I did read the friendly article but couldn't quite connect RIAA with Linux and DVDs.
There's no mention of RIAA/music/movie in the article, and hardly any mention of Linux.
So what's happening now? Is it some kind of bullets, leathers and baked beans? Someone please enlighten me.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The executives making the decisions don't understand the technology and have fortunes built upon the success of Brittney Spears. They are trapped by their own business models and the only way out is something not only new and unproven but something that they can't wrap their brains around. Net result: fear. Fear of failure, destitution, and the loss of everything they have gained on the work of others. Fear.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The core issues we are up against are with the concepts of copyright and patent. Corporations want ownership of materials; Private individuals want free access those materials. Therein lies the battle. This is as perpetual as bipartisanship.
No, They're trying to compare the same idea of a minority group trying to assert their will about what your rights are against the people who clearly have another idea entirely. No matter how many warehouses they raid and how mach DRM they place on their products the people are going to continue to play and view media how they choose.
The article uses Prohibition as a comparison...but Prohibition was not a product of corporate greed. It isn't like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. got together and said "Let's find a way to prohibit alcoholic beverages so that we can control what America REALLY ought to drink --our product!"
Starting with a flawed analogy usually leads to a flawed article --as it did in this case.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
Sounds like it would be more the MPAA to me, but I agree with the first post, there isn't much of a mention of any assosication targeting Linux as an opponent needing to be overcome.
I think the only thing that stands in the way of watching DVDs on Linux is the obvious difference in opinions on how Intelectual Property rights should be handled, which was briefly touched upon in the article.
If only end-users didn't copy so many DVDs, Movie studios wouldn't feel the need to encrypt their movies. Of course, I also feel that by purchasing the DVD, I should also be purchasing the rights to view the DVD, which would include decoders for whatever operating system I use, but that's from an end-user standpoint, not a developer/legal standpoint.
At the very least, DVDs should list system requirements if they are going to require more than just the hardware that reads data from the DVD in order to play them.
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
He's talking about the DMCA being as enforceable as Prohibition. The RIAA and MPAA and Linux and DVDs certainly are involved with the DMCA.
Infuriate left and right
The entertainment industry has put itself on the fast-track to destruction
Oh, please. Even the people who don't think they should have to pay for their expensively produced entertainment will have to realize that actual destruction of the entertainment industry will leave them without anyone really professional to rip off. I mean, you don't have to sleep with a copy of Atlas Shrugged to see the basic truth of it. The rubber has to meet the road someplace, and at some point the Peter Jacksons of the world will not be able to raise the cash for a Really Swell Giant Ape Movie.
And before someone says that artistic patronage, bar gigs, miming in the streets and wearing sandals was good enough 2500 years ago, and real artists shouldn't care about financing actors and makeup artists, blahditty blah... oh, never mind. There, I've said it for you. It's not about whether or not there should be a rational way to play your DVD on your Linux laptop. There should be. The problem is the shrill tone (and glee) in comments like the original post. That does not help matters.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, the DCMA, or any of the other alphabet-soup copyright clowns, but c'mon. The linked rant is a badly-written and cringe-inducing collection of cliches, pedantry, and glittering generalities. The guy doesn't even understand basic civics, much less macro-economics or copyright law.
There are a lot of good arguments against the DCMA out there. This isn't one of them.
Not a chance. They fought (and survived) through player pianos, sheet music, record players, radio stations, juke boxes and casette tapes. They'll still be around, greedily fighting the direct-neural-interface players 100 years hence.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
TFA seems a little disjointed and difficult to follow. Reads more like rambling than any sort of informative article or persuasive opinion piece.
Either I own my copy of a work, or I don't. If I own it (and not just a license of it), then I have the right to do anything I want to with it, other than selling or giving a copy to someone else (because only the copyright owner has the right to distribute copies).
But if I don't legally have the right to decrypt the information on the disk (because of the DMCA), then it doesn't matter what my ownership rights are, the "keeper of the decryption" owns my ability to do what I want with my copy, and I become subject to a whole slew of behavior-controlling devices such as pay per view, no "fair use", etc.
What this article highlights is that no country or law or organization is going to succeed for very long in creating laws to do the tying, even if they try to use the largest software company in the world (Microsoft). Why not? because tying is not economically viable in the Open Source era where the code itself is fundamentally free.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The problem with this argument is, the government doesn't do shit because it "makes sense" or because their punitive solutions "aren't working" any more. If they did things like the prohibition of marijuana would have been history 60 years ago. Instead its still goin' strong after 7 decades. DVD on Linux? Why do you want to kill our children?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I don't think the author's intent was to come up with anything but a bunch of buzzwords that would guarantee a front page setting on Slashdot and, thus, lots of ad-revenue generating site hits. In that respect, it's kind of surprising how few ads the article has, and how it isn't split into eleven pages. I mean, look at it: "RIAA" (Booo!) "DMCA!" (Booooooooooooo!) Linux! (YAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!) "It's like Prohibition man, Prohibition! That was also when The Man tried to keep the people down!" (WOOOOOOOOOO!)
Why's the MPAA not in there? Because it's not as big a BUZZWORD as RIAA. We ALL know that the RIAA is evil. I mean, this is practically a satire of a P2P pirate's stream-of-consciousness. The only thing that makes me stop short of thinking that's exactly what it is is the lack of the "word" "Rediculous".
What a load of crap. Bring back Jon Katz! At least his stuff made sense enough to disagree with.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, nobody pays for commercial databases, RHEL, crossover office, support contracts. They're just a bunch of freeloaders!!
I think you have 2 issues confused here. In Linux, you do NOT have to rip the dvd to watch it. However, before the DVD encryption scheme was cracked...you could not use your computer's dvd player to watch your perfectly legally purchased dvds. DVD Jon broke the encryption scheme...and now, dvd players on Linux boxes can do the exact same thing that someone using OSX or Win. can do with their purchased media.
The ease in ripping the dvd's was just a side effect from having the encryption broken. But, you can rip a DVD on any OS...not just Linux.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
a) Replace RIAA with MPAA throughout - unless you're talking about audio DVD-As or something.
b) Equal abilities to other operating systems is important, really. It's not that DVD playback on PCs is important as such. But if you try to tell a Windows user "Play a DVD? Sorry, Linux can't do that." then that's a turn-off.
c) Actually, giving away "carbon copies" was fairly much accepted for private non-commercial purposes as long as media degenerated, such as with tapes (or carbon copies!) because it was naturally self-limiting. Trouble is, with a CD the 1000th generation is still identical to the original.
d) What it boils down to is this. Who are the victims of all these fancy new "anti-piracy" rootkits, DRM and other crap? That's all the legitimate customers. It's to the point where they take out the proverbial rubber glove to check out your PC. After the funny little Sony fiasco, several of those I know who still buy CDs (which admittedly wasn't too many to begin with) stopped. Are they going to stop listening to music? No. Now bang two rocks together and figure out where this is going. I'm amazed that they dare treat their customers like shit. I don't care how badly they think they got their customers by the balls, the backlash will come and come bad. And the more they pull stunts like that, the faster.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
DVD encryption is about old bandwidth assumptions.
You can rip DVD's without breaking the encryption; the only thing ripping them does is rduce the overall payload size.
It's perfectly functional to image copy a DVD to another DVD (which is what the pirates do, when they are not simply shutting down the legal assembly line production at 6 PM, and running off another 20,000 copies between 8 PM and 12 AM from the legal masters).
It's also perfectly functional to make something that looks to the system like a DVD drive driver, but actually operates from a disk image instead of real DVD hardware, so you can take the image copies of a DVD and feed them into your completely legal commercial DVD player software.
The *ONLY* thing that DVD encryption does is:
(1) make it hard to decide which bits you need to move from machine A to machine B so you can watch the whole movie, and
(2) defeats compression of the cleartext DVD contents (which is minimal, since it's already a compressed format), and
(3) prevents transcoding to an alternate lossy format to reduce the transfer size (which is *supposedly* something the MPAA et. al. don't care about anyway, as they are apparently not concerned with digital-analog-digital copying, which the DVD encryption can't prevent in the first place)
In other words, it's about keeping the bandwidth required to move DVD content from point A to point B as high as possible to adjust the economics of digital copying to artifically inflate the costs relative to the benefits.
And guess what? These bandwidth assumptions are no longer valid.
If you are willing to take the approach of the pseudo-DVD device driver, you don't need DeCSS, and that converts everything from a DMCA violation to a simple copyright violation.
-- Terry
"So cut the crud. this is about whether or not people have the right to rip and secondly if they have the right to re-distribute."
Where did you get that from? I agree that the right to play DVDs on linux is a distraction, designed to make it easier to explain the argument to slow friends, politicians, and the general public.
But the actual issue it's concealing is the ability to play standard media formats [DVDs] on Free Software.
That's why a "WinWord-viewer"-style DVD player for linux wouldn't be accepted -- nothing to do with everyone being thieves or whatever you were trying to imply, but simply that Free Software is trustworthy and the DVD industry isn't.
In fact, mass media in general is just a side-issue - the important thing is that the owner of a computer should be able to control what it does. That's why people are so outraged at DVD drives that prevent fast-forwarding, or play unskippable adverts, or only allow you to change regions 5 times, or dial-up to the internet to download a license (and a list of new restrictions that your computer will impose on you)
Sorry to quote RMS again, but "trecharous computing" really is the phrase for this stuff.
And too many people are fooled by the "if you don't run Windows Media Player with DRM then you must be a copyright-infringer" argument that's so easy to trot-out when someone demands that they be in control of their own computers.