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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.

7 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future by kfg · · Score: 3, Funny

    And don't you dare photoshop the cover art to make it look like it looked before we photoshopped them. We're watching for that shit.

    KFG

  2. Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future by feepness · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's sad how much faith they have in people who are genuinely trying to screw them.

    Or perhaps encouraging how little they care about watching Buffy: Season Three in 2018.

  3. Is that what it's supposed to do by grasshoppa · · Score: 2, Funny

    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!
  4. Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future by cpu_fusion · · Score: 5, Funny

    With all due respect to your well-thought-out-argument, if the DMCA prevents me from watching Erik the Viking in 2050, then it has finally done something good for once. ;)

  5. Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future by gsn · · Score: 2, Funny

    Maybe because the song is what gives the physical medium any value to us...

    Also if anybody ever asked you if you had a CD of Pink Floyd do you think they cared about the physical medium or listening to the content.

    A physical medium is a delivery device - an outdated one because it costs money - the great thing about digital media is that you can make N copies for effectively free - you can change its format, you can rip a section of it (either a time segment, or only the audio from a movie say) - its more versatile and powerful. It also has the nice side effect that it takes a lot more to make the data unretrievable. My grandfather used to have some recordings on tape spools - just open tape that went between two reels - player broke - no one around could convert the damn things. Media companies recognize these benefits and you can be damn sure they use it - e.g. cut out the people who make the physical film in favour of digital video recorders.

    Thats also the problem with the digital medium though - if you treat things as a bunch of 1s and 0s and liberate it from a physical medium then your buisness model whcih relied on you delivering that physical medium fails. Unless they can control the hardware which is what HDCP tries to do, and is the point of all this trusted computing stuff that scares me. But really such control of the hardware is an artificial limitation of technology. What you should do is change.. or die. Theres no rule that demands that these recoding companies have to survive this century - music won't die. It might just become less corporate.

    So sure let them say you have no real right to the song and all you can do is play if from the original medium you bought it on. And let people with cdrom drives and cd rippers and mp3 codecs and mp3 servers and p2p networks tell them to go take a flying leap.

    --
    Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
  6. Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future by grolschie · · Score: 2, Funny
    "Wanna watch Erik The Viking?"
    Sure, I love that movie! "Olaf Tryggvason used to throw up on every single voyage... the whole time... non-stop... puke... puke... puke..."
  7. Re:Here Here! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I think you mean "right (on)."

    I think you mean to say "RIGHT-ON (tm) Allwest Associates CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 752 Orchard Dr. Paso Robles CALIFORNIA 93446"