Slashdot Mirror
Proposed Amendment Would Ban All DVD Copying
Ynefel writes in with a PC Magazine article reporting that the DVD Copy Control Association is considering an amendment to the agreement equipment vendors must abide by, which would completely ban all DVD backups, whether fair use or not, and prevent DVDs from playing without the DVD disk being present in the drive. The amendment is being voted on imminently and if approved would go into effect within 18 months. Quoting: "The proposed amendment was made public in a letter sent by Michael Malcolm, the chief executive of Kaleidescape, a DVD jukebox company which successfully defeated a suit by the DVD CCA this past March."
In my entire life, I've only met one person that copied movies - and he was doing it using two VCRs. It was simple, anyone could do it. You buy two VCR's and you record the movie from one onto the other. A grade-schooler could probably figure it out. My point is the same as yours, however, he's the *only* person I've ever known that's done this.
These execs need to be focusing on places like SE asia where burned movies are sold on the street like penny candy. When will they learn to stop biting the hand that feeds them? Do I want to copy my DVD's and CD's? Yes! Why? Because when the original media is scratched it RUINS your enjoyment of that movie / music. I copy as many of mine as I can so that I don't have to worry about it. I also keep burned copies of my CDs in my car to protect me from theft. If some jackalope breaks into my car and steals my CDs... I don't care, I'll just buy a spindle and re-burn them - because the probability of the cops getting them from the thief or of insurance fully reimbursing me for their worth is pretty slim. Ever lent a CD to a friend and gotten it back trashed? Of course you have... that's why copies are great.
As a consumer - if there's no simple, legitimate way to protect the media I've invested my money in then I'll just find another means of acquiring it.
Did he win in court because he pointed out the license agreement didn't prohibit this usage, or did he win on other grounds? If they're changing the license agreement to close up some holes (think GPL 3), he may have a case of unfair and tortorus interference in his business. If he won on other grounds, this might not affect him -- or us, under the same decision -- at all.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to support removing ALL rights from the movie industries. They'd still find a way to survive, and even prosper, but not in the insane taking of public rights they now enjoy.
Remember, everyone who initially came to Hollywood to found the western movie industry did it because they were stealing the use of Edison's patents, and were trying to avoid his enforcers. They were all a bunch of thieves to start with, and that hasn't changed all that much since!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But it would still allow backups to be made, because that part is illegal, so the clause that contains the part about making backups won't be able to be enforced. However, I still don't know if this works. Stopping somebody from doing something legal is not actually illegal. For instance, I could license you my patent on the terms that you may only sell the product by people ordering directly via telephone. Normally it would be legal for you to sell the product whichever way you want, but since you're agreeing to the contract, you have to abide by it, or you are in breach of contract.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And if you believe this has never happened before, you're wrong. The so-called "music blank CD's", which are the only sort your audio component CD recorder would ever accept use exactly this same trick! A music writable CD-R is identical to a computer CD-R, except that it has a special media code that the audio component CD-R recorder recognized, and this indicated that a tax (up to $0.30/CD-R) was charged for this otherwise identical recordable media. It worked there, and would be hard to defeat here if the content industries can force through legislation mandating its use in all equipment and players sold in this country.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I know more than one person who grinds through netflix rentals as fast as he can burn them.
In fact, I very typically rip a rental DVD to my HD as soon as I receive it. The reason I do so is that these DVD's are scratched to hell and my player doesn't like them, but my DVD-ROM does. My DVD-ROM is, however, awesomely slow to spin up and seek video DVD's, so I just play it right off the HDD. When I'm done, I delete them. Sometimes not immediately, but I do.
Not that they're going to effectively take that away from me, and I suppose I'm already a criminal. And I know two wrongs don't make a right, but I seriously can't muster the tiniest amount of sympathy for the CCA and the MPAA, given their past and present behavior.
Yes, it doe make them less competitive. I'm not saying it isn't. To me it seems more of a cruelty on the consumer.
//e when almost everything was copy protected. Eventually companies gave up on protection because they realized it wasn't worth the money and effort and those that were going to pirate would do so anyway. In that case, they didn't push too hard but realized their version of DRM wasn't worth it. On the other hand, now, the MPAA is pushing too hard. They tried that with VCRs when Jack Valenti told Congress that VCRs were to the movie industry what Jack the Ripper was to women of 19th century London. Eventually, though, they realized they could not control the public and found ways to profit from a new business model. The more they push the public, though, the quicker the public is to pirate or find ways to copy or circumvent the "protective" measures.
They just don't care and will accept anything *ANYTHING* the media cartels can push through congress.
I don't think so. I remember when CDs came out. Vinyl was about $8 per album and CDs were about $16 per album. CDs were cheaper than vinyl, but at the time, it was hard for people to react in any way since home burners were not available at that point. Once they were available, blank media became popular, then, finally, there was Napster. While I think there are always greedy people who will take what they can for free, most are willing to pay a reasonable price for it. Napster was, among other things, a rebellion against the high price of CDs. Even though the prices had not gone up in the roughly 2 decades CDs were out, people still felt they cost more than a fair price. That's why iTunes is so popular. While it includes DRM, $.99 a song is a much more reasonable price to most people.
I remember back in the days of my Apple
You can't do that without special equipment or breaking the encryption. The CSS system (redundancy ahoy!) uses a special track which does not exist on rewritable DVDs. In fact, DVD drives have special commands for reading the track. The information on that track is encrypted with a set of "player keys". The Player Keys are contained within licensed software, and are used to decrypt the disc key track. The disc keys are used to decrypt the title keys, which are the actual keys used to watch the movie.
In addition, the DVD drive has to authenticate a CSS disc with its own encryption checks before it will allow the disc to be read.
DeCSS works by brute-force cracking the encryption. (CSS uses a 40-bit key.) So it's not really possible to create a *legal* backup of a DVD disc without a license and equipment from the DVD CCA.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade