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DRM and the Myth of the Analog Hole
Art Grimm writes "Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet's George Ou writes: "There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content.""
I will not buy any DRM crippled product, movies or music and am not shy about encouraging others to boycott them. Respect my personal property rights after the sale, or there will be no sale.
How ya like dat?
The real analog hole that the studios are trying to eliminate is the massive amount of legal content already in people's homes that the studios think is stopping people from buying new content.
Pirates are just a useful scapegoat.
I was recently looking for a DVD player/recorder for my parents. They wanted the player for two reasons, one to record shows they like, and two to send some home videos off to my sister in England. When I went to a few stores to check out the models they had, I asked one of the sales staff if the recorders could encode region free DVDs (so my sister could pay them on her TV). He looked at me like I was some kind of crook and actually said: "here in Canada we obey international copyright law".
Sure I could have reencoded the DVDs after they were recorded, but that is beside the point. My parents own the copyright to their home videos and should be able to do whatever they want with them. This is just another case of the industry hurting the consumers.
We didn't buy.
you don't *have* to buy bottled water. same psychology as starbucks: people like to splurge on themselves. you *have* to go through time warner if you want the movies they own the rights to. this is a limitation on what you consider yours: your culture. thus the resentment and the impetus to act
there are two kinds of riches: financial riches and cultural riches. content creating companies are limiting the public domain as much as they can, and will push the limits forever, until there is no public domain. the impetus to do that is driven by financial gain, theirs, at a corresponding culturual loss, ours. songs and movies that should have gone into the public domain years ago won't go into the public domain now until you are dead, thanks to sonny bono
so that is what is happening in your world todya. ip law has ceased to make sense and ceased to be morally sound. corporations are enriching themselves at your detriment. you should own your culture, all of us should own our culture. but if it were up to bmg, time warner, etc., they would own your culture forever
it's a balance. the content creators DO have a right to limit your access to content they create. this provides them with an incentive to create content. but only in certain ways, and only for a certain amount of time. and yet currently, the limitations on what they can do to limit your access and how long they can limit it are exapnding beyond the common sense balance between financial incentive and cultural considerations
what do those limitations do? they impoverish you. not financially. they impoverish you culturally
that's not morally right, nor even financially sound, in the long run, for the content owners. for pulic domain culture is the basis for the creators of content for the next big financial gains of tomorrow
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it