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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.
TFA states that during Prohibition alcohol consumption fell initially, then rose to heights never before seen. P2P sharing was huge a few years ago. I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that it's taken a pretty big fall. Is there going to be a rise similar to alcohol consumption during Prohibition? On the other hand, I can hardly wait to see Homer the mp3 Baron...
I was at blockbuster the other day and rented the Longest Yard, then took it home. Much to my suprise, the DVD blocked the watching of the movie on my computer. I took the DVD to blockbuster, and told them that I was cancelling my blockbuster pass because I was unable to watch movies on my computer (I have no normal TV as everything is ran through the computer using beyond TV). I figured that should put the most pressure on the MPAA. If blockbuster lobbies against MPAA because their revenue basis is dried up, it should make a good battle where only consumers win... i hope.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
It is misleading to say "our brilliant government" passed Prohabition. It would be more accurate to say "our brilliant GOVERNMENTS" passed Prohibition, as it required a 2/3rds majority of votes in both the House and Senate, as well as being ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Grave mistake though it was, Prohabition was still an issue whose passage was sufficiently popular to overcome the step hurdles against amending the constitution.
The DMCA, by contrast, has shown no such popular support, and did not go through nearly as rigerous a process or well-debated to be enacted into law. That's a rather fundamental difference, and one that renders his anaology to inexact to be meaningful, if not his overriding point.
Crow T. Trollbot
I'm curious what absolute value advantage is attempting to be enforced by the DMCA. Prohibition was an attempt to legislate morality, to remove a cause of crime, and failed to do so. I suppose I can see a similar case in the DMCA, but copyright is not morality, it is purely a legal right granted to content creators. Additionally, how does the DMCA prohibit mutually beneficial exchanges? It prevents you from breaking encryption in order to get at the underlying data in it's raw format. However, those people willing to pay and be approved for licensing of the decryption methods make the products that allow us to use this content. The only thing you are, in theory, denied is the raw data that is used to compile the movie. You are not denied access to view the movie, given an appropriate device to decode and display it, nor are you denied from purchasing the encrypted disk.
The latter quote makes me laugh, though. How many murder cases would it take for judges to see that laws against murder are unfair? The law generally dictates the range of penalties allowed to the courts to decide, and few courts seem willing to judge the validity or constitutionality of laws when dealing with a case. However, I doubt very seriously that the simple number of cases will really influence the penalties handed out.
There is a lot of talk in this article, and a lot of references to Prohibition as a mirror for the current situation. My view on copyright withstanding, this article makes a very poor case of proving why these kinds of laws are doomed to fail.
...and it might make sense for them to create a "legal alternative" that makes it unnecessary for programs like VLC to contain CSS decoders.
Yeah, well, that's not good enough. Chances are any "legal alternative" they come up with would be your standard bloated skinned media player that doesn't follow any UI standards and eats up a ton of resources. Probably binary-only and would only run under certain conditions (i.e. exactly the right library versions & machine architecture).
I use mplayer because:
A) It doesn't have a GUI (I disable it during the compile), and doesn't require a mouse. It has consistent keyboard shortcuts that do everything I need. The keyboard shortcuts work over stdin, so I can launch it from a remote ssh session and have full capabilities.
B) It can be easily remote controlled from either another computer or any other device I set up.
C) It's small and fast
D) It runs on my preferred platform (FreeBSD)
E) By default it just plays the main DVD title and not any annoying menus / trailers / FBI warnings. It ignores the DVD's desire to disable my navigation functions. I highly doubt anything DVD-CCA approved would have this capability.
As far as I'm concerned, I acquired a legal right to use the content however I wish when I purchased the media. If the law disagrees, the law is wrong and needs to be changed. Until then, the media companies can suck it.