Death By DMCA

Dino writes "There's a good article in the IEEE Spectrum, titled 'Death by DMCA', which talks about how whole classes of devices were eliminated, and how others won't even see the light of day as a result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One example is ReplayTV's TiVo-like devices which featured sharing capabilities, along with automatic ad skipping; the company was sued to bankruptcy, and the reincarnated device supported neither sharing nor ad skipping."

Comments

Re:The only way to fight the DMCA

[Bezben]

It always amazes me when people think voting will change anything. You honestly think exactly the same think won't happen? All you vote will do will let you chose who passes these things for the **AA.

Re:Non-U.S.'ers not safe either

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we have BitTorrent which has a centralized tracker, but intelligently set up to not host or transmit anything copyrighted

Nope, nice try, but BitTorrent trackers use derivative works based on the original work and therefore fall under copyright law as completely illegal. .torrent files contain an SHA1 hash of various pieces of the original file. Therefore, a .torrent file is a derivative work of the original. In order to uniquely identify torrents with the tracker, an SHA1 hash of the various SHA1 hashes is used. This is also, therefore, a derivative work. So the tracker details with derivative works.

So, yes, a tracker is still completely illegal as it deals with a derivative work based on the original work. But it's a nice try to work around law and morality. No matter how you slice it, illegally trading works (piracy) is legally and morally wrong. There are no loopholes.