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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...
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?
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.
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."
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
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.
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.........
*fap* *fap* *fap* *fap* *fap*
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.
"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.
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.
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