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Macrovision Wants Old DRM to Work Forever
Grv writes "Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analog video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitizing such video, as any good digitizer would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organizations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn't overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analog recordings."
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
If these are analog signals, does the DMCA apply here? Is cleaning noise out of a signal considered "hacking" now?
"Wanna watch Erik The Viking?"
"Can't. It would be a violation of the law."
"What Law?"
"The one that prevents us from taking the old video tape I bought of it, which I can no longer watch on newer video devices due to built in DRM and I am prevented from recording onto a computer and removing the old DRM and writing to digital storage which the new digital video devices read."
"Man, obeying the law sucks!"
"No, creating laws which paint people into a corner and then hand them the brush suck."
Ultimately, the way DRM and DMCA is going, you will not have owned DVDs, CDs, LPs, 45s, etc. You will merely have rented them until the march of technology locks you out of enjoying the content any further.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought that the DMCA did that already. These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape. Regardless of how you feel, the DMCA specifically outlaws this. According to TFA, the problem is that the means by which the program strips DRM is through converting it to digital and by outlawing the program the judge could outlaw AD conversions.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
And the sad thing is not enough people care about it to get anything done about it.
We have law A which states fair use and then law B (The DMCA) which says fair use as long as you're not USING it.
I wonder how much the RIAA and MPAA paid to get the DMCA passed. A-holes.
I am shocked that people still care about "rights" (sic) abuses on analogue material, the only reason you would be doing this is because you had bought a copy a long while ago and now want to be able to enjoy that copy on a system you have. Do they even make VHS? new piracy would be stupid from this angle. Besides cracking it in digital format is far easier...
They are just trying to screw you over again and again and again. Fortunately I don't live in a country with the DMCA or equivalent, but I sympathise, I hate getting screwed over by companies and the government when their working against the people.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I don't know how good it is at color corrections but it did a fine job of removing macrovision before my new DVD player came into the picture.
I for one endorse this product if you have the need.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have nothing against the content producers making financial gain from their efforts. In fact, I work for a company that makes a considerable amount of money licensing code to third parties. I'm well aware of the situation that copyright creates, and I'm all for ownership of intellectual property.
That said, ownership is a two way street. I exchange my ownership of the code I produce for the salary my company pays me. I consider it a fair deal - I work a given number of hours in exchange for a one time payment. Once I've cashed the check (before, actually), I no longer own the code that I write. I have no problem with this arrangement. Whether my company sells one copy or a million makes no difference to me, because I've already been paid for the work I did. If the company can't sell my code, well, that's their loss, not mine. Or, if they are obscenely profitable, that's their gain. After all, they bought my code, and they own it. For them to make obscene profits does not impose any additional work burden on me.
However, the movie industry is actively opposed to intellectual property. When you buy a movie from them, they take your money, yet behave as if both the money and the movie are still theirs. You see, they don't believe in property. When you sell a piece of property, you give up any and all claim to the property. The movie industry's idea of a sale is more like an indefinite lease - you get to have a copy of the content for as long as it suits the studio. They feel that if they are not making enough money, they have the right to charge you time and again for the same material. (i.e. new movie on DVD instead of VHS, the "director's cut" version, etc...)
And you are supposed to like it. You pay for the DVD, but you don't own it:
Granted, I know there are ways around all of these, but they are not easy to come by, and require a technical aptitude beyond what the average user will possess. In effect, the studios are "Indian givers" - they aren't satisfied with either your money or the movie - they want them both.
Which, I think is one of the key reasons why I seldom buy movies anymore. It just doesn't seem right to give money to someone whose stated purpose is to explicitly rip off their customers, and goes to great length to defend the practice .
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
As far as I am aware, DMCA covers only digital media and encryption.
Wo what the hell has that got to do with VHS.
It's not digital, nor it contains encryption.
Basically this was sold as a way to prevent anyone from using two VCRs to copy a rented videotape. It (Macrovision) was placed on most commercial videos of Hollywood product from the mid-1980s to the present. Since the 'owner' of the video content had to pay a stiff license fee to Macrovision company, almost no porn tapes from that era had this nonsense added.
Macrovision is a burst of noise added to the vertical sync in the brief period after the current frame has ended and the next frame (a single 'photograph' or still image on the television set) begins. This burst of noise happened about once every ten to fifteen seconds. It caused the picture image to lose sync and 'roll' and/or 'tear up' for a short period of time until the vertical sync stabilization circuitry in the recording process
kicked in and made the picture stable.
This is how Macrovision was able to mess up the video copy without destroying the video integrity when watching the original commercial video tape. The sync stablizer circuitry only was active during the recording period, not during playback. But the video copy was polluted by tearing and rolling every ten seconds or so.
The way to defeat this pollution was/is to use an 1881 sync seperator IC, a track-and-hold circuit, a 4053-type analog 1-of-2 switch IC, and a timer on a microcontroller (or a 555 one-shot timer IC). Use the sync seperator to detect the beginning of the vertical sync pulse. At this time, sample the black video level using the track-and-hold. After sampling, switch the video signal to the recorder (for the content being copied) to the sampled black level for the period before the actual video image analog signal begins. Then switch the recording back to the analog video signal of the original. Your copy will be solid and without tearing and rolling.
Oh my goodness!?! Did I just break your fucking law by explaining this? Oh my, I am sooooooo sorry! Oh well, to quote Emil Faber, "Knowledge Is Good". That's from the first video that I thought was worth copying.
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I wont stand for a product which is made inferior on purpose, even if that purpose is supposedly to stop piracy.
If I spend my good money on a product I expect the best that product will give me... Well I guess it will be another example of me voting with my feet.... NO SALE!
No one here cares about rights. This is simply macrovision trying to survive. If:
1. Anyone can overcome macrovision protection,
2. It will be useless to even build it in anywhere.
4. No company will by the protection from macrovision.
5. Loss
and why do we care about what articles he lovingly selects for slashdot and which he doesn't?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analog video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording
Is that what they are trying to do. I never can tell, the window that pops up to tell me what DRM scheme is being bypassed flashes by WAY too quickly for me to catch it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This is just a drop in the bucket. I'm curios to see if I'll live to see it publicly recognized, that having a law, writing that ownership on an idea exists, is fundamentally wrong. The problem is so elemental that many people will have to die before this thruth comes forcefully to light, just like it was with communism.
With so much outsourcing for the actual work, with services so expensive, America more than anyone is dependent on the cash flow from copyright. To make matters worse, the society is based on greed and the only stopper to that is competition, twisted so much as it turned into distributed greed, helped to prosper by the law. Even if a spiritual revolution should come tommorow, and looking at who is the elected president there are no worries for that, the enterprise demons created by this society won't just dissapear without a fight. And that is natural.
A thick, well established and powerfull layer of people fight over your bodies as you stand and watch your politically correct shows day in and day out. How can this perfect 1984 society claim to honour freedom as it's founding fathers did, when freedom was lost a long time ago? How will you be able to kill the sick system that already exists when all you know is TV and TV dinners? How can you justify yourselves the fact that your copyright laws caused millions on this planet to die in horrible sufferings because medicine developments are stalled when you need dozens of patents to even start research on anything?
I'll humbly suggest the first step: Literally throw away your TV and start caring about each other. Stop buying crap, stop buying movies from Hollywood and start getting your music by going to concerts played by your local artists. Maybe then, your children will have a fighting chance and the rest of the world won't have to enter in the third war against a once great nation.
P.S: I appologies for my english. It should've been better by now.
if the mysterious "HQ" technology that suddenly started appearing on all the VCRs had anything to do with Macrovision or copy protection? I have always suspected this, as, by my recollection, HQ appeared around the time this copy protection arrived. All that whining about putting a special "tax" on blank tapes went away around the same time as well. It all makes me wonder if the "HQ" (that allegedly gave you a "20% better picture") wasn't actually the enabler for copy protection. This could help explain why TVs didn't have a problem with copy protected content, but VCRs did. I thought maybe someone in /. land might have some first hand knowledge about HQ and could shed some light on this.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Your company isn't paying you for just a single copy of your code - they are paying you to assign them the copyright, so they can make as many copies as they like.
It would certainly be possible for you to pay to media companies to assign the copyright to you, but it would cost a lot more then $15.
The fact that you got modded +5 insightful only illustrates how difficult it is to sort out intelectual property owernship issues. Almost all analogies made with cars or computers or whatever people tend to come up with don't work - this is a different beast and as a society we haven't figured out yet how to deal with the problem of something as essential as culture being a commercial product at the same time. Perhaps our culture isn't all it is drummed up to be?
I have a Humax Tivo with the DVD burner and front inputs for recording camcorders etc. I recently recorded an old VHS (via the front inputs) to transfer to DVD. The Humax lets me record to Tivo (on HDD) but it blocks me from burning it to dvd or transfering it to my computer via media option. Tivo lets me bend a little but not break Macrovision. It's the first time I have seen the "Copy Protected" symbol on my Tivo.
What Macrovision does is to mess up the automatic gain control (AGC) on the vcr. A tv also has an AGC but it reacts fast enough that the visible picture isn't affected. Old VCRs are either not affected or can easily be adjusted so they aren't. Any VCR made in the last fifteen years is pretty much tamper proof with regard to the AGC. Macrovision tricks the AGC by deliberately messing up the "black level" during the vertical sync period. It's not noise per se. As the parent points out it is easy to defeat. In fact, every decent video studio or tv station has equipment which, as part of its normal operation, removes macrovision from a video signal.
Simply a nuisance which many would not bother to circumvent, but by no means a strong licensing enforcement mechanism like DRM.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really that different from a book, the one exception being fair use of excerpts.
You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
When a new version comes out (like the English version of "A Clockwork Orange", a paperback, or an ebook) you have to buy it if you want it in the new format or with the extra material. If your book wears out, or you spill coffee on it and it become illegible, you have to buy a new copy.
The biggest difference is a book never becomes unusable due to technological obsolescence.
I don't think the MPAA has weighed in on the net neutrality debate yet. I fail to see your point. You seem to have lumped all the companies that you don't like into one big pile.
TimeWarner AOL?
Cable companies?
Despite what the MPAA wants you to believe, there's more to "content providers" than than your local movie theater.
How else did you expect them to run a perpetual ownership system without perpetual copy protection?
Sarcasm aside, the thought still stands: of course they don't want old copy protection to stop working. To them that would be a gigantic flashing neon sign saying "FREE MOVIES HERE!" (Never mind that copyright law is the protection they need/want/have, not Digital Rights Manglement.)
Do you like Japanese imports?
Have you completely ignored the astroturfing campaign, including TV ads, that attacked Net Neutrality in specious ways? Do you really believe the MPAA did not have anything to do with that?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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How can this be protected under the DMCA? I believe it would be more properly protected under the AMCA. And as that was never passed, or even proposed, well... too bad.
When Hollings (D-Disney) was proposing the SSSCA/CBDTPA, I wrote to Pres. Bush and asked him to work against it, and veto it. I spewed a lot of malarkey that I didn't believe, such as "Hollywood liberal elite", "Unnecessary regulation of business", etc...
Putting someone's own prejudices to work for you is sometimes all that you can do.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
They have a pretty ironic name for being so short-sighted.
The copyright clause in the Constitution allows Congress to enact laws to protect the work of authors only for limited periods of time.
Now, in the Mickey Mouse case, the court said that protection periods on the order of 100 years are OK, but the Court kinda hinted that it might not go along with this much further.
Anyway, the technique of leveraging DRM protections in via a copyright and then having them live forever is rather a slap in the face of the Constitutional limitation on the duration of copyrights.
Of course, Congress does have a weasel-way out: they might say, "oh, we allow DRM to exist forever as part of our powers over commerce among the states."
But in practical terms, DRM forever transforms what is supposed to be a copyright of limited duration into a copyright that lasts for all eternity. And that, is contrary to the purpose, a purpose actually stated in the US Constitution, to promote the arts and sciences, for copyright and patents.
See my note "The Rule Against Digital Perpetuities". It's short, so I'll just copy it here:
The Rule Against Digital Perpetuities
It seems to me that in the fight over copyright and digital rights management few have considered what happens in the distant future when the material being protected is no longer covered by copyright. That thought led me to propose the following rule and accompanying pledge.
The Rule Against Digital Perpuities:
No Digital Rights Management (DRM) limitation or anti-copying mechanism may endure longer than the original copyright in the protected work.
The Pledge:
I pledge to neither specify nor standardize nor implement any system that does not conform to the Rule Against Digital Perpetuities.
You can kill someone with a hammer; are they gonna make those illegal too now?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Use less media. See fewer movies and NONE at the theater. Buy no new music, just buy used CD's.
Golly, you might not be cool, but you won't be a sucker, either. Fuck the media companies that want to ruin our intellectual property system.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I bought one of (WARNING-POPUP) these http://members.fortunecity.com/videotransfer/# a number of years back for about $30. There are schematics available on the internet for equivalent devices built with half a dozen cheap IC's.
A better solution is to make a really really good digital copy. I thought the idea was that your TV could display the signal with macrovision noise added, but your VCR would lose sync and get all garbled because it was unable to make a good copy of the "noise". If you make as perfect a copy as you can, wouldn't you be able to play it back? It may still violate copyright, but you wouldn't be circumventing anything - the macrovision would be intact.
Just wanted to let you know the comment is right on.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
As classic video (magnetic) tape only lasts 10-20 years, you cannot expect anything on tape to still be around in 100 years. Without killing the macrovision, there will be no archives other than what might be on (real/reel) film.... Not that I expect congress to leave the dates alone.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Have you completely ignored the astroturfing campaign, including TV ads, that attacked Net Neutrality in specious ways? Do you really believe the MPAA did not have anything to do with that?
I think AT&T, Comcast, and the rest of the telcos are perfectly capable of hiring a PR firm and buying some TV time. Nothing about that implies the involvement of the MPAA.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is another reason why I joined the US Pirate Party. The laws need to be reformed and the DMCA needs to be replaced with a more sensible, consumer friendly version. I'm simply sick of being told what I can and what I can't do with my legally purchased media, as long and I don't like that trying to make it into a rent style system.
We need to form together to help change these laws. I believe joining the Pirate Party may be a start to this. Boycotting also works effectively, but only if enough people do it. Raising awareness of these issues is also a very good thing to do as many people simply aren't aware that it happening until it is too late. Even just trying to talk to your representatives may help things as most of th time they aren't even aware of these types of issues or if they don't listen, then vote for someone else next time. If we can get enough people to realize what is really occuring, then change can happen.
Isn't that rather like arguing that you never really owned your record player, because you were forced to buy an iPod in order to keep up with technology? You can still play your old beatles records on an LP player.
I happen to have an old enough pre-amp that I can still hook up a turntable (record player to you.) A friend bought a new amplifier at the local Ciruit City (or equivilent) and found it couldn't accomodate his trusty old turntable Phono Input. He got by with some goofy little pre-amp which hangs off the back and requires a plastic cube to power it. How long before all these things are optical? How soon before the only video options you have don't include RF and/or Composite?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since the United States has disavowed all knowledge of the thing called 'property rights', by both the voters and the politicians, you really don't own anything anymore; we all rent everything we "buy." Buy a car? Not unless you get licensed by the State to drive it. Buy a house? What is it that you pay each and every year in order to live in that house? Property taxes. Buy a DVD? You're only borrowing it until someone says so. At the base of freedom is the right to own property fully, or create new property using your hands no matter who created it before you in a certain way.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
My Phillips Matchline VCR from factory removes macrovision from my DVD player. The same DVD player into another VCR generates distorted macrovision colors etc. I wonder if the Phillips DVD Recorders also strip macrovision?
If overturned though it will be interesting. Does it not set a precedence that it could be illegal to create DRM that cannot be bypassed when the copyright has expired?
And all this is because I'm up late working on a talk.
But I bet there are no spelling or counting problems there.
You're right about throwing their arguments back in their face, but fact is, those who buy legislators really don't care what fashion the arguments are dressed up in. Conservative & liberal ideals alike are being sold down the river; Feinstein can wrap 'em in organic paisley sackcloth that never needs washing, and Frist can put 'em in navy polyester pinstripe with an overstarched white oxford. The arguments have nothing to do with anything. The legislation exists, and pragmatic interests move on to finding arguments that support the next item on the agenda.
The next revolution will be pseudonymous. The one after that will enable secure financial transactions among the participants in aforementioned revolution. After that, Atlas shrugs, and the relevancy of government to daily living steepens its inexorable drive towards zero. Funny that something as "trivial" as copyright law is what's ultimately spurring the technology here. For some kid in Seattle, it's about being able to share Green Day tracks without fear of financial ruin for his parents. For some kid in China, it's about being able to get to Wikipedia without fear of his family being organ-farmed.
Pi Ran Out
Politics makes interesting bedfellows, eh? I probably believe a higher percentage than you of what you spewed as malarkey, but here's to your (hopeful) ability to do it articulately & persuasively. On the flip side, I suppose I've turned a phrase or two about selling the working man out to behemoth corporate interests, depending on the stripe of legislating commodity item I'm writing to.
Then again, I acutally think these legislative vending machines *are* selling Joe Average out to behemoth corporate interests. Where's a con to go who still yearns for a free enterprise system as unfettered by government as possible, yet thinks the current crop of gargantuan, stockholder-owned organizations are verging on being more of a social ill than their economies of scale can justify? The tension is harder to resolve than most flip answers can appreciate.
Pi Ran Out
No, really... the *government*? If that ain't the height of naïveté. I get glazed over looks from the same people whose iPod / iTunes setups I have to [cough] "fix" whenever they change computers, but unless you're giving 'em other reasons to peg you as a tin-foiler, that's pretty cold.
Just remember, Jack Sparrow is a Good Man, and will likely prove more useful in skin-saving than the Queen's henchmen or the East India Trading Company, right?
Pi Ran Out
Sorry, gotta call you up on this.
Buy a car? Not unless you get licensed by the State to drive it.
You own that car, and can do what you like on your on property with it, but to use the roads built by the state you need a license that says you are capable of operating it without killing thousands.
Buy a house? What is it that you pay each and every year in order to live in that house? Property taxes.
Property taxes (certainly over here UK) pay for police, fire, ambulance, street sweepers, rubbish collection etc. OK, some pocket lining, I agree, but think what your neighbourhood would be like without any of the above...
Buy a DVD? You're only borrowing it until someone says so
True, and not good, but the rest was a bad comparison. There is no good comparison I've heard, as there is nothing like digital rights/IP/etc
Dear Macrovision:
While you were busy making life hard for legitimate customers, I downloaded four movies that had been Macrovision-scrubbed for my convenience.
Sincerely,
Ha Ha Ha!
PS: Eat a dick.
I built macrovision defeating electronics way back when I was still a minor, as I'm now 30 that should put a date on how long ago macrovision was broken.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
After installing ATITool 0.24 or newer, four clicks is all that it takes to get rid of Macrovision.
Click "Settings", then choose "Miscalleaneous" tab and from there check "Remove Macrovision detection from analog input driver". Now you can use the card's analog inputs and outputs as you wish.
I disabled mine so long ago I don't remember if you'll have to reboot afterwards.
Does anyone know a similiar procedure for Nvidia cards?
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
Even if photocopies or digitized scans of books are legal for personal use, it wasn't until recently that such a thing was technologically possible. The very nature of the book prevented you from making a copy of it, without laborious hand copying, which is akin to, but much harder than, the type of copying possible of DVDs and video tapes. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays. Even now, scanning a 300 page book, running it through OCR, and fixing the inevitable problems is much harder than copying a DVD. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays.
To me the biggest change has been for the creators of content - in the past one was happy when one's works were heard, read, watched, because that made one popular, and thus, successful. Writers didn't actively encourage copying, but they didn't fight it too hard, as long as they were credited for the work, and as long as the work wasn't too corrupted. Shakespeare never made a penny off his plays being published, but he gained in popularity due to their publication.
Since we don't have sponsors anymore, writers need to make money off selling our work. That puts artists in the place of wanting their work to be wide spread, but also controlled. It's an odd situation to be in. I'd love everyone to read my work, but I'd also like to make some money off of it. Some are successful at allowing free usage (look at Thinking in Java for an example) and some aren't.
I still think the difference between DVDs and books aren't that different when it comes to ownership. Both can be copied, if one is willing to work hard enough. In both cases it's not the physical media that one buys, but one particular instance of the content.
>They want it illegal to copy, illegal to break content protection systems, even
>illegal to remove or bypass things like region encoding. They want market regulations.
Yes, lets regulate the work market as well. That way, they can't use manufacturing plants in one "market" to supply another market. They can't press their CDs, say, in Asia and sell them in Europe or USA, that work is region marked to Asia. Want to set up a call centre in India? Sure, but those people's work are area marked for India only, can't circumvent that and have people phoning from USA get help. And so on. SHould work great. After all, why should THEY be able to trade, ship and use workforce freely in the world when normal people and their customers are not!
I'm not. I'm fundamentally against the doctrine that ideas may be subject to ownership.
I can see the value of copyright, at least if the duration of the legal monopoly is brought back to something sensible. I can see value in a patent system, although not in the systematic abuse of the system, as reported all too frequently on this board. I'm happy with the existence of trade secrets, NDAs and licencing models.
But none of that adds up to ownership.
I don't support the concept of intellectual property - and somehow I don't think you do either. For instance:
What you seem to be doing here is getting confused between the movie as an absract legal entity (the intellectual properly) and the physical medium which allows you watch the movie on a television set.
See, the studio here is absolutely asserting it's ownersip of the movie as intellectual property. They are saying "all you buy when you buy a CD is the physical disc. The copyright, and any other legal rights remain ours, thank you very much. And as such, we reserve the right to add additional conditions to your use of this property".
And, if you uncritically accept the concept of "itellectual property", and all that that implies by analogy with meatspace properties, then you'd have to conceed that they had a point.
Now what you're objecting to here is the restriction on what's known as "fair use" rights. There's nothing in the concept of intellectual property to support fair use at all. There's quite a bit in copyright law, but that is not the same thing as intellectual property, any more than patents are the same thing as a non-disclosure agreement.
So, while I agree with your basic point, I don't agree with "intellectual property", and I don't think you do either.
In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "I don't think it means what you think it means".
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Only on Slashdot can a comment with the phrase "Eat a dick" be considred (+4) Insightful.
God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man - Kronecker
>You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
Yes, you own the copy of the book.
The only restrictions on it is is use in various forms involving making it available for the public. Of course, you can't make NEW copies in several cases either. Ownership has nothing to do with copyright though. It applies equally regardless of if you would own the book or not. That is irellevant.
Illegal in the US, that is.
Trust me, I work for the government.
If this is allowed to stand, it paves the way for tearing down the Sony vs Paramount precident which gave us all the ability to use any tape recorder for recording sounds or video. At some point, it would be illegal to own any cassette recorder, VCR or any digitizing device (aka computer!) as these devices would be simply tied to illegal copying. I swear, I smell the pundgent scent of lawyers nearby causing all this fuss.
I like the line in Back To The Future Pt. II, "Justice works swiftly now that they've abolished all lawyers"...
We're getting very close to this happening.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Noise ain't digital nor a form of encryption. So what's the DMCA to do with this?!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I don't see how Macrovision can even be considered copy protection. Videos with Macrovision are defective. If you 'own' a video with Macrovision on it, you probably have a good case for fraud. As other posters have explained, all Macrovision does is destroy the signal to the point at which it is barely playable. Ideally, a Macrovision video will look okay in playback, but it will be so badly degraded it can't be copied. Often though, depending on your equipment, it won't even display adequately for playback. There's nothing really fancy or high tech about it. Macrovision doesn't add noise and then remove it on playback, like some kind of sophisticated watermarking. They actually just destroy the signal of the original.
Selling videos with Macrovision is like selling books that are so poorly printed that a page can't be photocopied and many users won't be able to read all the text in the original. One key difference is with a book, you could see how badly printed it is and avoid buying it. In contrast, with Macrovision, you don't know until you try to play it - at which point many people mistakenly blamed their equipment.
All kinds of pro video equipment can repair some of the damage done by Macrovision. This is not equipment designed for removing Macrovision, It's designed for ensuring a high quality signal is maintained throughout the production process. This equipment is comparable to the equipment a print house might have to ensure books are printed with some measure of quality.
Simply putting your trademark on a common type of analog degradation does not get you a form of copy protection, it simply ensures products are (in)consistently defective.
Because they have money and power and the normal people don't.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In the UK law cannot be applied retroactively, i.e. if it has been done before (copied and removed by libraries) they cannot apply the something like the DMCA now? Does US law not have something similar?
MV doesn't really inject noise so much as supress the video sync pulse. VCRs and DVDRs are made deliberately so that they don't pick up a weak sync pulse when recording. I think the DVDRs will outright refuse to record such a signal. They'll digest a weak sync pulse just fine during playback, however.
Consumer electronics is required, by law, to respect Macrovision(R) protection, and is so specific that Macrovision(R) is actually part of the language of the law. I can't remember or cite it, but I was floored to find that they (Macrovision(R)) had managed to codify their protection by name. I want their lobbiests next time I need something done in congress.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Buy a house? What is it that you pay each and every year in order to live in that house? Property taxes.
.25% sales tax that is given to the local major league baseball team to pay for there stadium. Why am I paying for it, when they make millions off of it?
Property taxes (certainly over here UK) pay for police, fire, ambulance, street sweepers, rubbish collection etc. OK, some pocket lining, I agree, but think what your neighborhood would be like without any of the above...
In the US each state is different. In the state that I live in, I pay 2.5% per 100$ valuation of the the property. It should be noted that the state constitution limits them to 1.5% per 100$ valuation. They just do not think it is enough so they ignore the constitutional restriction. They have been sued over it and lost the case. The courts ordered them to reduce the amount. They just continue to ignore the constitutional and the court order. The state decides the value of the property. Which I see as a conflict of interest. It pays only for public schools. (For me, somewhere in the range of $10,000 each year)
There is a 1.75% sales tax that pays for city services such as fire and street sweeping.
There is a 6.25% sales tax that goes to the state; I am not sure what that is for.
There is a
There is a loto that has generated 9Bil for the state. This was suposed to go to the schools and reduce the property tax. Instead it goes into the general accounting fund and is used for, well I am not sure what it is used for.
Police make there money by writing tickets, this may change as one town of 7,000 people made the news. They had over 10mil in outstanding tickets for the last year. All written to people outside the city.
The city charges 64$ a month for rubbish collection. If you do not pay for it you can not use the dump, and they will ticket you for excess garbage on your property. The will also give you environmental tickets if you try to burry it or burn it. Those are city code tickets, fail to pay them and they take your property.
You have to be licensed to drive the vehicle, great (50$ every 3 years). Then you have to license the vehicle at a cost of close to 95$ per year. Then there is inspection of the vehicle, costs around 85$ a year.
This is just on the state and local level; don't even get me started on the federal level!
So in some ways the original poster is right. I really do not own any of it. The state can take it back when they decide and I am forced to pay for stuff that I may or may not use. Fail to pay and they will take your house, car, etc.
As to the vehicle, I have a title on it. If I own it and can use it any way I want on my own property, why do I have to transfer the title to the state I am living in? If I move I have to transfer the title to the new state.
Just something to think about.
Macrovision would cause copies to exhibit a pulsing fade out. That is, on a copy the image would go from fully there to very dim (often colorless) and noisy, then fade back in.
This is because when the AGC is fooled into thinking the signal is stronger than it is, it attenuates the actual signal during recording, so it fades out.
Macrovision also has another protection that is used only on DVDs. This encoding puts an error in the color burst on each line. This encoding cannot be used on videotape, as VCRs cannot reproduce it. On DVDs, the framing portions of the video signal are created "on-the-fly", not just replayed from a recording and thus these errors can be put in.
Macrovision on DVDs is optional, the publisher of the DVD has to pay Macrovision a per-copy fee to activate it. Since all copying of DVDs now is done digitally at high speed instead of by recording the analog output of the DVD player, the value of Macrovision protection to the publisher is questionable. So many DVDs are now released without this protection.
The sync supression system described is the system that was used on cable (HBO) in the early analog days. It was used on some video recordings, but it caused compatibility problems and was not very effective at preventing copies, as it would require multiple generational copies before the desired reduction in video quality and stability really took effect.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Macrovision's argument (and judges who agree with it) in this case is truly repugnant. Macrovision's "technical measure" should not be judged as "effectively controlling access" to the content, because it just doesn't do that. All it does is subtlely interfere with some equipment's ability to make a good-looking copy.
It would be one thing if the digital devices that Macrovision objects, went to extra trouble to get around their "protection" system. Then they might be able to credibly claim that their technical measure is being bypassed. But they're saying that these devices should go to extra trouble to detect Macrovision's stupid system, and then behave differently. That's ridiculous. If the default, easiest way to access content is to not even notice that it's "protected", then the technical measure should not be judged as "effectively controlling access."
Shame on any judge that plays along with this bullshit. They're either bought or stupid. There is no way anyone can accept this crap and still come out looking wise and honorable. This makes Kaplan's ridiculous DeCSS decision look uncorrupt by comparison.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Someone should develop a copy protection system that is defeated by the hardware error correction of as many next-gen game consoles as possible while stil falling unter the DMCA - if one does not even need a liberal interpretation of the DMCA, so much the better. Then sue Sony to stop rolling out the Playstation 3 in its current form as it infringes on the DMCA (with the right timing that'd mean delaying the release of the console for a couple months while Sony has to redesign at least the Blu-Ray drive and/or wage a lengthy legal fight). If the copy protection system is protected even under a very narrow interpretation of the DMCA (and the plaintiff has deep enough pockets) Sony might be very interested in settling outside of court as well as calling up the senators on their payroll to order a revision of the DMCA.
The same could be done with Microsoft, but they don't have as much to lose when their next-gen console runs into trouble (as they already made money off it) - of course, nailing Microsoft as well as Sony might be a good idea if your pockets are infinitely deep.
The general concept is to abuse the DMCA to create the threat of damages in the ten-figure range to those companies who both love it and have the means of buying a revised version.
OTOH, they could buy a revised version that effectively excludes non-megacorps from using it...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The point is that the U.S. government is increasingly concerned with regulating its constituency while relaxing regulation on corporations. The market is increasingly free for large corporations--which I'm willing to accept as a possibly good direction!--but decreasingly free for consumers and new business models. The imbalance is unacceptable if not outright dangerous.
You know, we're getting to a point where some parts of the Shadowrun background story appear less as Cyberpunk fiction than realistic predictions of the future...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
lack of space is no excuse. None. Get a damned bigger house or quit stealing from Britney Spears.
Not all products are sensitive to the macrovision corruption of video signal. Macrovision relied on the slow response of the VCRs AGC. I don't see why anyone would mandate that things like video timebase stabalisation, and high speed AGC be banned, just because it disables the shoddy copy protection scheme of the Criminal Media Monopoly Mafia.
Macrovision are scum. They charge ridiculous amounts for their inferior FlexLM, which I unfortunately have experience in implementing for my employer. If really poses very little difficulty to remove (just about every product with FlexLM has been cracked), and in my opinion, it is not worth the amazingly high price tag for each platform. Someone should clone at least the client libraries, if only just to take some of the revenue away from these parasites.
I cant see how the court hasn't thrown this out.
Macrovision is an ANALOG system that puts slowly verying square pulses in the blanking region of an ANALOG video signal, quite how this relates to the DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act I don't know.
Macrovision was developed well before the millennium and its not digital in any way shape or form.
My panasonic dvd player / recorder even outputs this on the progressive YUV output, this upsets my flatpanel display, I have to revert to the interlaced S-video connection.
I since discovered its alot easyer to just run xine on the linux pc I have connected to it.
One day I might cobble together a few 556 timers and a 4066 switch to just chop out the macrovision.
No they wont. They will simply, blindly mourn the market shift. This is underway with VHS right now. Do you see the market angry right now? No. I have heard a few friends lament over a movie or two, but that's penuts compared to the number of movies not produced for DVD. The only movies that I know had a strong market demand to release a DVD version were the Star Wars movies. Aside from blockbusters, there will be miniscule demand. Where there are individuals missing movies, most of them will be sad, and not angry. This may be a sad state of affairs, but it's true. I have seen it.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
And you don't think that part of the reason for doing this is scoring points with the MPAA, so they can make a deal for future services?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I live in Florida. We have one Democratic senator and one Republican. When I write to them (and I do) to bitch about some issue, you can bet I frame my arguments very differently, depending on their political affiliation. It makes me feel a little dirty, but it's more likely to be effective.
The noise that the Macrovision system adds to normal analog is just noise that shouldn't be in the signal by the spec. The vertical and horizontal blanking space should be zeroed (practically grounded for analog signal). A signal with the noise by Macrovision has additional crap on those parts of the signal. The resulting signal isn't up to the original spec and that's is the reason it cannot be successfully recoded by some devices. If you use a device that is known to fix this kind of problems from the signal (i.e. a device that can fix a corrupted, against the spec signal, etc.) you now break the law?
Perhaps they should ban all the other systems that fix or improve analog signals, too? Pretty much all CLD and plasma displays do this already because they, too, are digital and wouldn't be able to display the "correct" signal without removing the noice by Macrovision from the signal. The only real difference is that the device made by Sima is external to the display device.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Wait a minute here.. Isnt the DMCA geared towards *Digital* media, and arent we talking about analog content in the suit? ( no i didnt read it.. cant get there from here ).
Aside from that, why is anyone suprised? If their products can be negated so easy ( legally ), it will hurt their business.. Of course they are going to sue.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
macrovision is an old dinosaur that hasnt evolved, its time for it to die