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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.
.... besides making no sense whatsoever, is depressingly difficult to masturbate to.
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?
(Someone had to say it.)
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...
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.
See subject.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
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.
The RIAA - Hollywood - DRM - Linux Suicide Pact
far...out
Shouldn't that be the MPAA, not the RIAA, which would have an issue with Linux circumventing the encryption of DVDs?
How can greed be the motivation when stifling distribution has provenly negative affect on sales. Greed is too convenient... threatened is more appropriate. Could mean suits will have to get real jobs.
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.
Some history about the Linux flap:g arfinkel.txt
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/archive/
Some other page I found by accident about file sharing:
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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
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.
TFA seems a little disjointed and difficult to follow. Reads more like rambling than any sort of informative article or persuasive opinion piece.
The reason why Linux can't play DVDs (legally) is because Linux users want source code so they can modify, fix bugs, etc. There wasn't and still isn't a big enough base of people willing to pay for playing DVDs especially when Windows and Mac users get to play them for free!
Using trusted computing (stay with me for a moment) you could write a very very tiny little program (probably kernel module) that would be distributed as a signed binary, but also available as source (recompiling it wouldn't help, but you could verify what it does) Since the new DVDs (at least blue ray) spits back single use decryption codes, using this software to get one out wouldn't be a big deal, its just that it would need to run under TCPA to get that code. Then that one time key can be used to read and decrypt the DVD. Works fine until you open the door, then the code is invalid and you need a new one.
This would work fine for playing the newer DVDs. Wouldn't keep Stallman and his true believers happy, but at least solves the real issue, which is the inability to play blue ray DVDs under Linux starting next year. There could be plenty of open source software to play DVDs, they'd just need this little binary module. Not ideal, but better than waiting to see if DVD Jon can crack it in a way that can't be fixed by the ability of newer DVDs to "update" the software in the players to invalidate compromised keys.
I just wish they'd hurry up and die from their mistakes so something better can come along.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
For the love of god, don't read that article. I just did and I swear it was so utterly terribly it actually made me dumber. I RTFA from the original post and went away thinking that it would probably be the worst piece of nonsense I encountered this month (I don't read blogs, or I'd encounter a lot more similarly craptacular "articles"), boy did this prove me wrong. I wish I could un-read it.
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...
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
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
What is the danager here ?; that dvd media etc cannot be played on non-open systems. If so what ?. There is an assumption here that playing movies (or mp3s) is important. It undoubtedly is to some. Let them pay. Meanwhile those committed to openness as a philosophy will continue to invest their time and efforts in intrinsically open media, e.g, wikipedia. The luxury of the times we live in is that there is a choice. Will there ever be 'open' movies ?; almost certainly not. So !?. The oss community will be reduced to reading and coding and listen. So much the better. I for one can live without "pkg_add -r mplayer" !
When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
yeah man, it's the corporations... they're like, taking over and stuff. if we could just like, get together, and show the corporations that we don't need their profit-mongering and extortion and capitalism, then that would show them!
Submitter, aka PlayfullyClever trying to use the /. crowd's love for linux+entertainment to bump up his google page rank on the site he just registered yesterday?
Why else would TFA have nothing to do with the submission?
Bealtes-Beatles in disguise, with diamonds?
FYI
Domain Name: PLAYFULLYCLEVER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Updated Date: 30-nov-2005
Creation Date: 30-nov-2005
Expiration Date: 30-nov-2006
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
The RIAA - Hollywood - DRM - Linux Suicide Pact
"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? Stupidity? Insanity? A bit of each? How else do you explain their inexplicable actions?"
Or it's just a coincidence.
we will end no whine before its time
MPAA DVD FAQ
[quote]
Some computer users say they only want to use DeCSS to view their DVDs on computers that use the Linux operating system. Windows- and Macintosh-based computers can play DVDs, so is it fair to deprive the Linux community?
The Linux argument is a false issue. It has always been in the interest of the Motion Picture industry that there be as many legitimately licensed DVD players as possible, including those using non-Windows operating systems. However the argument that DeCSS was written for Linux players is simply false. The De-CSS utility was written for Windows-based software, not Linux.
Also, the development of two, separate, licensed DVD players for Linux systems - which use the CSS system - were recently announced. Sigma Designs (www.sigmadesigns.com) and InterVideo Inc. (www.intervideo.com) both announced the roll-out of LICENSED, LEGAL Linux-based DVD players.
[quote]
SO they claim the purpose of DeCSS is for copying movies on windows, not for simply viewing them on Linux, intersting..
far...out
I personally think Sony/BMG's recent fiasco could've hurt things more, because as opposed to Linux, Windows is a much more common OS among music listeners. Sony managed to bring the concept of rootkits to the masses perhaps even better than SCO managed to scare off Linux users.
As for this article, it's interesting, but quite a bit "scattered" on different thoughts, covering a whole lot of ground on a mere two pages of text. But sure, MS is clearly facing new needs of adapting themselves to the industry they may not have faced since they started sketching on their business model. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to adapt to the new market, but at least according to their recently leaked internal memos, they realize the need of relying less on their traditional style of software development, marketing and pushing. It remains to be seen if they can put this insight into successful actions though. Part of the plans seemed to involve basing more revenues on online ads and becoming a Google, but unfortunately for them, well, there's this not too unsuccessful Google already there.
So I think there'll be some interesting times ahead, even moreso if the Linux community will one day manage to provide a distribution taking a leap in functionality, user friendliness and style, like for example OS X did in the days.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's a poorly written, poorly reasoned screed, similar in content and quality to a high school writting assignment about how the "evil RIAA/MPAA/Microsoft are doomed. I can't understand for the life of me why it was posted to the front page.
Obviously the submitter didn't RTFA, so here are some real links: Here Here and here
Sounds like you paid quite a bit for it to me. The MPAA got their cut already from Apple, if you could download OSX legally and without payment, it would not come with a DVD player.
I have to work hard to be that incoherent. Even if I'm already drunk.
As long as the decoder is just an external module (library) there is no GPL violation whatsoever. Having xine sources and altering those sources in any kind (including dvd decoding capability for example) and by this creating a derivative work from xine WOULD be GPL violation.
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.........
When they got into producing content, they slipped us a root kit on a CD.
Time and media shifting is becoming an issue because its becoming possible.
What the **AAs don't want is to give us ownership of the 1,440 minutes a day.
They fuck over the content originators, those artists who make the content, they make their money by screwing them with impossible contracts (its like an offer that the artist dare not refuse,) production costs and distribution costs which the artist has to pay for. They are the last 'Ugly Capitalists' who control the means of production.
Then they fuck us over by selling us the idea of Brittany Spears and claiming to still own the music out of Brittany Spears' mouth.
I've said screw 'em before and I just was a voice in the wilderness. Now I'm producing my own content. All of it. And with the internet and cheap production and post production tools, they can KMFA.
PodSafe forever forward.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Probably the organization that might have an interest in this would be the DVD-CCA. This organization owns the rights to license CSS and region encoding. From their point of view, it's their technology that's being compromised by DVD Jon et al, and it might make sense for them to create a "legal alternative" that makes it unnecessary for programs like VLC to contain CSS decoders. Another group would be the movie studios, or, say, their representative, the MPAA. This institution, at the very least might have an interest in something that would boost the value of the DVDs their members sell.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
*fap* *fap* *fap* *fap* *fap*
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
...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.
Sometimes my kids want a CD. I won't control their choices, but they have to listen to a lecture from me about the evil they would support: RIAA harassing customers, exploiting artists, milking their back catalog and not spending nearly enough money finding/deveoping talent.
The MPAA hasn't [yet][ gotten so bad, so I still spend north of $1000/yr on DVDs.
"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.
IANAL.... Actually, I'm not sure if either violation is applicable....
Isn't the DMCA just to prevent people from selling cable "descrambler boxes" and such... It only prohibits technology, devices, etc whose **main** use/purpose is to circumvent copyright protection. The decrypting of a DVD for playback purposes seems like it would be legal -- this is normal use of DVDs. (all commercial DVD software does this anyway).
However, "ripping" (and decrypting) a DVD to a file is a bit more questionable... This use directly disables the copyright mechanisms (where the main application would seem to be illegal reproduction) and the DMCA would appear to apply.
And wouldn't copying encrypted DVD images to a large harddisk (e.g. for a video server) be considered Fair Use? (Fair Use laws allow copies of copyrighted works to be made for the purpose of increasing computer performance)... For example, the mere fact that when you are viewing a copyrighted webpage, multiple copies exist in the CPU caches, a copy in the main memory, another in the swap-file on the harddisk, a copy in a file on the disk (browser cache), an image exists in the video-card buffers, and potentially pieces exist in the network card buffers... Thus your computer is storing *multiple copies* of a copyrighted work... This is all fine and perfectly legal, since these copies are temporary and whose sole use is to increase system performance -- not related to illegal reproduction.
Also, couldn't one claim their video server as a backup device?
Now if you load up your server and then sell/lend out your DVDs, things quickly start getting questionable...
Disclaimer: I do not own/use any such video server... I'm only trying to point out that some laws actually grant more rights than people realize... (although likely not so with the Patriot Acts).
We are weakening our own freedoms by thinking that the DMCA makes everything illegal.
But the ability to view implies the ability to rip. What, in the end, is viewing, if not ripping to video memory rather than to the hard disk?
Effectively what we're doing is something like
$ cat /dev/dvd | decss | videoplayer | /dev/videocard
That's a legitimate use for decss, right? Viewing. But what if instead we
$ cat /dev/dvd | decss | transcode > piratecopy.mpg
As the earlier post said: we need decss in order to view these DVDs. However, by its very nature that also allows us to rip. The same is true of commercial, closed source, Windows DVD players, it's just that there it's rather more difficult to obtain the decrypted video data and direct them to the hard disk rather than to the video card.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Interestingly though, if you have Lindows, you can watch dvds in linux without ripping or other changes. They have a legal player you can buy for 30.00. So, how are they getting away with it legally?
I think you're wrong about that, and I'll prove it with my Open Source Beer:
Mash grain at 150 degrees in 80 oz. water for 20 minutes. Sparge with 80 oz. water at 170 degrees. Add extract, 1 1/2 oz. Nugget, 2 tsp. gypsum. Add water to about 3 gallons. Bring to a boil. Boil for 15 min., add 1/2 oz Nugget. Boil for 30 minutes, add 1/2 oz Perle. Boil for 15 minutes (total 1 hour boil).
Cool to 75 degrees, then pitch yeast.
Ferment for about 1 week, rack to secondary, add 1 1/2 oz. cascade.
Allow secondary to ferment for about 1 week. Rack to priming bucket, adding about 5 oz. priming sugar (preferred) or dry malt extract. Bottle. Allow about 30 days before refrigeration.
THIS RECIPE LICENSED UNDER THE GPL.
There you go!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Put down the moonshine and re-study your history. The Prohibition movement was far from a majority; they were an extremely vocal minority, sufficiently large and well organized to be able to swing elections, and motivated by a religious belief that the ends justified the means, pushed a large variety of bad science about the degree of harm of alcohol. The analogy to the prohibition may not be that bad after all, although the religious right in general and the intelligent design movement in particular are probably closer to the prohibition movement than the copyright forces.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I don't think the above is true... it's NOT "perfectly functional" to simply image copy a protected DVD to another DVD, because protected DVDs have keys hidden on them in areas that normal DVD readers don't access. Only settop boxes access these areas where the keys are stored, and must be manufactured to be capable of this only by dint of being licensed to do so.
If normal DVD readers don't access those areas of the DVD, how is a software player like PowerDVD or WinDVD determining the key to decrypt the video for playing?