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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.
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.''
They really sincerely believe that people won't stand for it and that the government will stop the content distributors from doing this.
It's sad how much faith they have in people who are genuinely trying to screw them.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
"How we feel" is the central tenet of a democratic society. If a law is unjust, it is our duty to defy it.
:)
As long as you are willing to face the consequences of such actions, yes. Defy away; however, a more reasonable and responsible citizen might suggest that if a law is believed to be unjust, they have a duty to try and get it overturned through legal and ethical means first. If that doesn't work, then I think you have a tea party
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Telling my friends and family this have gotten me accused of everything from lying to fear mongering.
Those old Beatles records you bought years ago, you can't just digitise them so you can listen to them on your iPod. Not with the RIAA's blessing anyway. And TFB if you have something on vinyl which never came out, or in the case of my ELO Out Of The Blue double-LP, was clipped when making the abbreviated CD version.
stormtroopers are standing by
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, see, with that line of reasoning you get into the "why can't I download music without paying for it when it's not harming anyone" line of argument. Which has some merit to it, sure, but it's hard to blame the companies for trying to make a buck. Anyway, I have made digital copies of old material in the past, I'm just curious why people seem to think that they've bought the song instead of the physical medium containing the song. The music companies make it quite clear that you have no real right to the song itself, other than being able to play it from the original medium which you bought it on.
Well, if you have an ATI TV Wonder card, you can simply modify a value in the source code that will eliminate Macrovision "interference". I do this on my home system so that I can watch my DVDs and Video Tapes on my 17" monitor. I don't have a lot of room where I live, and I sold my TV a while ago. So I have a dual monitor setup, with one being used as my "TV".
I don't see why modifying said value could be so hard for the other drivers...but it probably works on all BT8x8 based cards.
ttyl
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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.
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.
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."
Wow, I can't believe it took this long for someone who actually knows what they're talking about to post! You're right, Macrovision messes with the AGC--you can see the "pulses" outside the legal range on a waveform monitor.
Now, the really troubling point in all this to me is that a time base corrector, without which you can't edit analog tapes, removes macrovision as a matter of course. How are the courts going to "protect" macrovision without making time-base correctors illegal? And if time-base correctors are legal, then all Sima needs to do is start marketing time-base correctors.
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?
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
How does the DMCA define "technology"?
If the GPL could be considered "technology", then anything that prevents copying (DRM systems) could be classified as a "circumvention device".
>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!