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Analog Hole Legislation Formally Introduced
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica is covering a recent bit of legislation introduced to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee this past week. The laws would seek to close the 'Analog Hole' that serves as a sort of last-ditch pirating mechanism when corporate DRM goes all crazy and tramples on your fair-use rights: 'Calling the ability to convert analog video content to a digital format a significant technical weakness in content protection, H.R. 4569 would require all consumer electronics video devices manufactured more than 12 months after the DTCSA is passed to be able to detect and obey a rights signaling system that would be used to limit how content is viewed and used. That rights signaling system would consist of two DRM technologies, Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL) and Content Generation Management System--Analog (CGMS-A), which would be embedded in broadcasts and other analog video content.'" We've previously covered this bill.
... but I think the whole A.Hole joke was covered in the previous slashdot article about the legislation ;)
Calling the ability to convert analog video content to a digital format a "significant technical weakness in content protection,"
I'm keen to see how these technically-inclined *ahem* folks intend to remove the digital-analog conversion: to the very best of my knowledge our eyes and ears are analog devices.
H.R. 4569 would require all consumer electronics video devices manufactured more than 12 months after the DTCSA is passed to be able to detect and obey a "rights signaling system" that would be used to limit how content is viewed and used.
I foresee a frenzy of electronics sales around ($DATE + 11_months).
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
They still can't prevent me from watching the film and telling people what happens...but I'm sure the MPAA is currently bribing a senator to sponsor the Psycho-Implant Motion Pictures Erased Digitally (PIMPED) bill.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I predict a sudden upsurge in the sales of old video hardware on ebay.
This isn't bad because it limits freedom or any such nonsense. That's a lot of hot air blown by zealots with lots more free time than brain cells.
This is bad legislation because it attempts to force certain types of technology into existence. While a government program designed to discourage people from engaging in media piracy would be a good thing, mandating that all devices have this built in is simply a way to skirt the issue while appearing to be tackling the problem.
Such a law does not stop what it is intended to stop. Pirates will still be able to break the encryption, replicate the media, and resell it on the open street in lands far away from where American law can reach. This law is useless anywhere other than America.
What you get, instead of stopping piracy, is a mandated standard form of copy encryption and DRM that may or may not be adequate for everyone's needs. Instead of letting the market figure out what forms of DRM will be used, the government decides that it's items A, B, and C that need to be addressed. Nevermind that in the future item B may no longer be useful and item D is not provided for at all.
It's unfortunate that the respectable John Conyers (D) is drafting this bill. I would have expected more from the gentleman.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
They just couldn't keep up and I am sure now they will stop pirating since this law was introduced.
Pirates always follow the law.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Just a definition, from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Fascism is a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.
For all you Bush-haters, this is not a rant about Bush, because he has zero power to pass laws. This is about members of both major parties in Congress, who regularly put aside their differences to expand the state-granted power of privileged businesses at the direct expense of our rights. This is fascism, by definition, yet we keep saying, "Thank you sir; may I have another?"
The problem is that politicians need pander to voters only on two or three issues, and then are free to do whatever is most profitable to them on all other issues. You might even be able to make the argument that the "major" issues we hear Congress critters rant about (the war, social security, the war, taxes, the war) are simply a smokescreen for the corruption, because it keeps our rights off most peoples' radars.
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Yet another piece of legislation that will do nothing to stop the real pirates! Indeed, as *AA imposes more and more restrictions, inconveniences, and expense upon consumers, they will make the cheaper and relatively hassle free offerings of pirates even more compelling. It's been argued before, but it seems all too clear that the most effective way to combat piracy is to offer a better product at a reasonable price. But I guess some people just have to learn the hard way.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This will stop people who actually want their fair use rights from making their own copies, but will do nothing to stop the people selling pirate copies on the street or the release groups putting the content on the net. I doubt there will be even a single day where releases are stopped because of this.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Remember, Wisconsin and Michigan residents, these are your representatives. Unless you support the massive "content creation" in your area, you might want to drop these assholes a note:
http://www.house.gov/sensenbrenner/
http://www.house.gov/conyers/
Oh, and this is how they think on the subject:
Tell them why they are wrong.
So it applies to consumer electronics.
Not kits? How about components? Hardware hackers will be making money on the side selling stuff. Or maybe the Chinese will just make it and sell it.
Also, I remember how easy it was to mod a scanner in '93 to make it pick up cellphone signals -- just remove a single SMT resistor. This was the work of minutes. And voila -- full band reception.
So easily modded consumer goods (whatever that is) will be banned too.
This looks to be tough to enforce.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Keep on making shitty movies and music that suck ass, and you'll kill all motivation to illegally copy them. This is the real solution, and the MP/RI-AA is a lot closer to it than they realize.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It doesn't. It's to prevent John Q. Public from doing anything - they couldn't care less about the random EE inclined hacker who would could patch something together.
They are our representatives, yet they don't represent us.
It doesn't matter - I haven't watched Hollywood movies or TV in the last 6 months - and you know what? I found out I don't have a need for it either. Hollywood isn't going to get another dollar of my cash nor a minute of my attention anymore (TV). That's how I'm voting from now on.
I'd rather have a good book or website or/and do something productive with my time than be a slave to the media industry anymore.
Not so much because these systems can be broken, but because it's yet another way to criminalise what you have the right for to do today. This combined with illegal evesdropping, data retention laws and other BS makes for the perfect toolset to turn each and every one of us into criminals.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
From my point of view it is the principal that is the problem, not the implementation. Yes, the technical restrictions will be broken, but the fact that large corportations are able to purchase legislation that goes against what the (previously) law abiding public want as well as those who choose to break existing laws is extremely worrying. Copyright infringement is illegal, why introduce the DMCA's non-circumvention clause? If you're circumventing DRM in order to infringe copyright, there's a law to stop you already. If you're circumventing DRM for 'fair use' reasons then the law should be on your side. Same goes for the blank media tax that several countries now have - assume you're a criminal, charge you the money for a crime you may or may not commit. Hell, even the length of copyright is only appropriate to big business - most other professions don't continue paying for almost a century after your death, yet copyrights last that long even against the wishes of the original content creators (Happy Birthday, for a start).
The current laws don't seem to be stoping the traders. New laws from a slightly different angle will not help.
The analog hole will always exist as long as 'we' amature musicians can buy microphones and 'us' engineers can buy or design data aquisition hardware (MP3's are just data points). Can't wait to make my PIC based Analog to digital converter/recorder.
People who have more freedom than US citizens will not be affected.
No, I did not RTFA. Maybe I'll go back and do it now.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
"Encoded Video Invisible Light"?(EVIL)
"Video Invisible Light Encoded"?(VILE)
Doing This Can't Stop Anything
Distrustful Thieving Corporations' Self-Annihilation
Doesn't The Congress Seem Absurd
Such a law does not stop what it is intended to stop. Pirates will still be able to break the encryption, replicate the media, and resell it on the open street in lands far away from where American law can reach. This law is useless anywhere other than America.
.i.e. share. These restrictions, along with big warnings along the lines of "You cannot record this program", "you do not have permission...." "It is an offense..." etc, etc, all reinforce the idea in his head that a video or sound recording is not his/hers. It is still someone elses, despite copyright law and any monies he/she may have paid for the product.
This law is in no way designed to go after the big guys. It's all about the small fish and keeping them in check.
Essentially the TV and Movie industry is terriffied that what happened to the music industry will happen to them. I.e., people will stop viewing entertainment as a commodity. Or at the very least, people will realise that the prices they pay for it are unreasonable.
How does this law try to change that? Essentially it makes it more difficult for Joe Consumer to view his music, movies, films, tv shows, etc as something he can do what he likes with,
The movie industry is afraid of what's already happened. New technologies have made people realise that information is cheap, and even cheaper to duplicate. There is no justification for charging $20 per gigabyte when I can upload terrabytes for less than a dollar. And people have realised this. Even Joe sixpack cops it after a few days in front of his computer.
But, if you can legislate, you can slow this tide and perhaps even reverse it. It is possible. Rhetoric won't make people revolt. An example of this system failing, but having lasting effects, is alcohol prohibition in the 30's. An example of this system working well( for its proponents) is the illegalisation of marijuana.
May the Maths Be with you!
The only real solution: copy-protect the actual audio output from the speakers, say by adding a high-energy ultrasonic screech which instantly obliterates all recording devices within hearing range.
This won't stop the professional pirates, who have ALWAYS been able to break any sort of crypto and produce clean DIGITAL copies, and who will ALWAYS be able to do so.
It won't stop the kiddiez from pirating stuff onto Kazaa or through BitTorrent. Maybe at first they'll have to produce the files through literally aiming a video camera at their monitor and using a stereo microphone for sound... but I seriously doubt it.
This bill won't do a goddamned thing. It's a waste of our lawmakers' time and energy.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
"Hollywood isn't going to get another dollar of my cash nor a minute of my attention anymore (TV)."
Which just "proves," statistically, that you must be pirating the steaming piles of shit.
Obviously we need a Content Remembursment Appropriations Policy (CRAP) Act to make sure the content providers are suitably recompensed out of your tax dollars for all the shows you're stealing from them by not watching them.
Of course not watching the ads in the content you aren't watching is going to be a criminal offense, you fucking thief you.
KFG
So the analog-to-digital channel is denied -- big deal! How many times have I passed vendors in the NYC subway hawking copies of movies that have just been released in theatres in cheesy cases with obviously color-copied covers? As long as you can afford a digitial video camcorder, DVDs, and a burner, you can copy movies or TV or whatever. Who needs analog?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
China does a pretty good job of censoring the internet. Major telcos want to create their own internet and rights management will be one of the big "benefits" of this new infrastructure.
You'll buy the first set of eBooks because they'll be so convienient and have so many great features. We'll all decry the closing of bookstores with lots of comments like, "Oh, I still read a hard-book every now and then, it's got more feeling that way. Too bad everyone else prefers eBooks." Then, once the eBooks are the majority, they'll jack up the DRM. Hell, these days, most people will buy the eBooks even if the DRM is restrictive.
Let's see... then they'll pass legislation restricting the use of printing presses due to their analog nature and potential for rights abuse. Firemen will be dispached to finally burn all the leftover paper books because "all you need is your offically-licensed DRM eBook reader to enjoy all content." Most people will participate willingly, holding neighborhood book burning parties.
It's so easy to forsee and the corporations are extremely patient. Sure, there will always be EE's and hackers out there who can get around the protections. The protections don't have to be perfect, just enough to stop most casual users, as this legislation will do. Eventually possession of unrestricted content will be a crime. Funny how any "subversive" books and information will be restricted content, but yet nobody will publish it legally. Insert your desired definition of subversive here. Today's version is Mao - which gets you a visit by Homeland Security.
For the record, I stopped watching TV and most movies as well, but for more practical reasons, not as a protest of any sort.
If this gets passed, nobody outside the USA will want to buy American made hardware.
In terms of TVs and other consumer hardware, this might not hurt too much - it's all made by the Japanese and Koreans anyway. However, if this nonsense gets integrated into computer hardware, it would spell the end of any export sales for such equipment.
And as other posters have commented - it won't stop the dedicated.
A story, care of a very smart machinist: At my grandmother's funeral earlier this year in November, I had the opportunity to meet one of my father's schoolmates who stayed in his hometown. He's 60 now, and to me, he seemed plenty sharp. He was talking to my dad and another one of my dad's friends about the machining trade, and how they're having problems getting help, because American kids aren't getting into machining. The conversation shifted to the foundries he gets his castings from. He explained that when he started getting castings from Chinese foundries a few decades ago, they sucked. Shitty casts, weak alloys, etc. But sure enough, their quality eventually equalled home grown American casts for a fraction of the cost. Guess who went out of work? Same went for his machinist tools. They went from bring short lived, cast pieces of shit to forged, superior tools.
The moral or the story? The Chinese aren't stupid, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a goddamn fool to believe they will not surpass us if we continue down the road where no one can earn a living unless their job is management of some kind. Exporting all labor will turn us back into a country of farmers, once places such as India and China figure out they no longer need us to do their own thing. I almost don't want to have children simply because if I can't escape the United States, I wouldn't want to raise a child into the situation that we both know is about to happen.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
... as long as one proviso is added. In addition to requiring all consumer devices to honor the copyright protection system, the law must also require all consumer devices to honor all of the exceptions codified in current copyright law. In particular, devices need to detect and permit Fair Use as well as reproduction of content whose term of copyright protection has expired. The things that copyright law allows are just as important as the things it restricts, so if you're going to require device manufacturers to build devices that enforce the law, they need to enforce *all* of the law, not just most of it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Anyone who seriously wants to record HDTV and has a modicum of technical knowledge can bypass all this cruft. Fast A/D converters on the RGB drivers and scan circuitry of an HDTV set plus some code to convert the raw voltages back into pixel data would do it. The same thing in the digital domain would work for LCD drive signals. VEIL, HDMI and other encryption systems will do bupkis to prevent recording at this level because it's directly at the point of display and that HAS to be unencrypted for himan beings to make sense of the visual and auditory data.
I'm really curious, what hardware is made in america these days?
I've been suggesting this ever since learning about the encoded patterns that make dollar bills uncopyable.
I haven't had time to play with it yet, but I'd laugh pretty hard if people couldn't print hardcopy pictures of me wearing a certain shirt. (Oh man, my next drivers' license photo would be a fiasco. "I don't know *why* the printer spits out a purple page!")
"US House Judiciary Committee"
OK, so the people that could and should be pursuing articles of impeachment against President Bush for his illegal domestic wiretaps are instead spending their time whoring themselves out to the MPAA?
Maybe they should look into enforcing existing laws every once in a while instead of writing new and needless laws.
Here is a link:http://judiciary.house.gov/CommitteeMembershi p.aspx
Here is a list of names and states they represent..... If you care about this topic take the time to write them and let them know how stupid this is.
Hon. Hyde(R) Illinois, 6th
Hon. Coble(R) North Carolina, 6th
Hon. Smith(R) Texas, 21st
Hon. Gallegly(R) California, 24th
Hon. Goodlatte(R) Virginia, 6th
Hon. Chabot(R) Ohio, 1st
Hon. Lungren(R) California, 3rd
Hon. Jenkins(R) Tennessee, 1st
Hon. Cannon(R) Utah, 3rd
Hon. Bachus(R) Alabama, 6th
Hon. Inglis(R) South Carolina, 4th
Hon. Hostettler(R) Indiana, 8th
Hon. Green(R) Wisconsin, 8th
Hon. Keller(R) Florida, 8th
Hon. Issa(R) California, 49th
Hon. Flake(R) Arizona, 6th
Hon. Pence(R) Indiana, 6th
Hon. Forbes(R) Virginia, 4th
Hon. King(R) Iowa, 5th
Hon. Feeney(R) Florida, 24th
Hon. Franks(R) Arizona, 2nd
Hon. Gohmert(R) Texas, 1st
Hon. Berman(D) California, 28th
Hon. Boucher(D) Virginia, 9th
Hon. Nadler(D) New York, 8th
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Damn slashdot filter wouldn't let me finish the list... Here is the resti p.aspx
again this is from:http://judiciary.house.gov/CommitteeMembersh
Hon. Scott(D) Virginia, 3rd
Hon. Watt(D) North Carolina, 12th
Hon. Lofgren(D) California, 16th
Hon. Jackson Lee(D) Texas, 18th
Hon. Waters(D) California, 35th
Hon. Meehan(D) Massachusetts, 5th
Hon. Delahunt(D) Massachusetts, 10th
Hon. Wexler(D) Florida, 19th
Hon. Weiner(D) New York, 9th
Hon. Schiff(D) California, 29th
Hon. Sánchez(D) California, 39th
Hon. Van Hollen(D) Maryland, 8th
Hon. Wasserman Schultz(D) Florida, 20th
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
If you are a filmmaker in the established industry, you'll be able to afford the pricetag for the professional equipment that ignores and/or omits the copy protection on your work product, optionally adding it in only for the final print.
If you're a small, independent filmmaker using only consumer-priced equipment, all your equipment will include copy protection on everything, so each print you make will have to be a single continuous take since it will prevent you from making any copies or entering it into a consumer-level editing system.
And thus Hollywood is protected against independent filmmakers able to make good movies on the cheap entering their market.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
that entertainment will slip out from the big companies' hands. Suddenly people will start producing creative-commons TV shows, and broadcast them over the internet.
Plus, there is a tiny detail these companies have forgotten: They can't lobby other countries. Try passing a law that forbids analog recording in Venezuela, Argentina, Indonesia or Hong Kong (not to mention the great dragon).
What will happen when the average american finds himself at disadvantage with other countries?
If TV companies insist on closing the doors to their own viewers, suddenly they'll realize they only locked themselves out.
Smart move, really.
Funny enough, that sort of thing isn't reserved to just cheap knockoffs. Take, for example, the Yamaha S2500. That's Yamaha's top of the line DVD player. MSRP is $750, street price is probably around $500. Ultra high-end components, DVD Audio playback, etc, etc. Ultra high end in other words. However, a brief search on the net reveals that it has a region hack built in. Just enter some codes on the remote, and like magic, no region lock.
>And thus Hollywood is protected against independent filmmakers able to make good movies on the cheap
>entering their market.
Here's the real clincher, and if I were giving the MPAA types high credit for brains, this is what I'd peg as the real reason for the legislation. Instead, they produce so much CRAP that they don't deserve the credit for thinking this cleverly. So I suspect they're asking for what they really want, for the reason they really gave.
The real issue, according to the US Constitution:
To promote invention and the arts, artists and inventors are granted limited exclusive rights to their works. Most of us think that the purpose of this is twofold. First, to get them funding so they can keep inventing or artisting. Second, the patent/copyright was supposed to expire, so future inventors/artists can build on that work. So the real issue in the entire current copyright brouhaha should be how do we insure that artists are properly compensated so they can keep creating.
At the base of all of this, electronic communications, as embodied by the Internet, has turned the concept of publication on its ear. It has reduced the incremental cost of copying information to zero. Yet we still have publication industries in place, trying desperately to preserve their existence. So in an Orwellian turn, these publication industries, especially ??AA, are spending an incredible amount of time *preventing* publication. In truth, the "replication" portion of the publication industry is pretty well obsolete, leaving the "studio," "editorial," "promotional," and other such functions. Well, even the "studio" function is diminshed as electronics makes many of those capabilities much more affordable. One could argue about the fine line between "promotional" and "payola", and one could also argue, given the quality of today's media about how well they're doing with "editorial."
But this is ALL about protecting a business model. Last I knew, there was no protection in the Constitution for business models. It just needs to be exposed as this.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.