Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter

slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"

Comments

Youtube

[Ethanol-fueled]

Has anybody been to youtube lately?
Almost every link to a video worth watching(with the rare educational exception) leads to "This video has been removed due to...."
Control is controlled by the need to control. The content providers will shoot themselves in the feet so many times that they won't have a leg to stand on.

Re:Youtube

[LiquidCoooled]

You are right, but I think we should help them.
Lets remove all pirated content everywhere.
No more illicit MS Windows, no more photoshop, no more movies, no more music.

Let them go out of business when they realise word of mouth is 99% of the battle.

Re:Youtube

[vux984]

You will probably find most pirated copies of Windows users also have valid OEM licenses, they just choose to use the retail or MSDN or VLK edition. This will have little impact on the Windows market. It is when Windows is not TAXED on OEM hardware you will see an impact.

No. Not by a long shot.

You will find that MANY pirated copies of windows (at least in the western hemisphere) are 'justified' in terms of I pirated XP because my last computer had OEM XP, it died, and the system restore disk wouldn't work on my new PC. Technically that is an infringing copy, as OEM versions are non-transferable to new units.

You will also find boatloads of people with XP Pro that 'upgraded' from their XP Home, and wouldn't pay the ridiculous retail upgrade price from one to the other. You'll also find people with an infringing copy of XP Home or Pro installed because the PC originally came with 98, 2000 or god forbid, ME.

I'd say its true that most of boxes out there are backed by a legit windows license, but most are not the version/edition that they are licensed for.

Yeah, there's people that have OEM Pro and installed VLK or MSDN edition to avoid activation hassles. (I myself was on an infringing VLK edition for a while, because my 'legit' was an original retail upgrade, while the VLK was a full version SP2... so it was FAR less hassle (no disk flipping, no activation, and hours of patches avoided.) When genuine advantage came out and got in my face and I got tired of hacking around it I reverted to the legit copy. Wasted half a day. (I couldn't just change the key because it rejected my legit original upgrade key.)

But in my experience that's a distinct minority, most people with XP Pro VLK/MSDN didn't actually have a legit version of XP Pro. They had a legit version of Windows XP Home, or an older version of windows... but not XP Pro.

Re:Youtube

[cpt kangarooski]

Fundamentally, it comes down to whether it is moral to prevent the free flow of information and creative works, including derivative works of other artists, for one's own financial benefit, or whether it is moral to try to spread those works, to preserve them by distributed effort (n.b. the libraries of antiquity did not survive; only the widespread dissemination of works got us what little we have), and to encourage and assist in the free use, enjoyment, and creation of others.

I can tolerate copyright on utilitarian grounds, but it is basically amoral, and if not that, then immoral.

Disaster strikes

[nagora]

As this year's television pilots are automatically blocked because they're blatent rehashes of old ideas. Not to mention the Flintstones being blocked for being a violation of The Honeymooners' IP.

TWW

It's all a big joke

[jimicus]

One day, maybe in the not too distant future, there will be an article on /.

It will read like this:


Your Rights Online: MPAA admit that everything they have said for the last 5 years has been a practical joke
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday Cantrembember 75th @ 27:00
from the i-knew-it department
Anonymous Coward writes: The MPAA has finally admitted what a lot of people on Slashdot have suspected for a while. Everything they've done for the last 5 years was all part of a practical joke.

"The lawsuits, the absurd DRM, the crazy "the entire industry is going to collapse" rhetoric - we never believed any of this crap", said a spokesman. "What actually happened was someone suggested that perhaps we could somehow start announcing these ridiculous ideas, record the reaction then release it as a movie. Kind of like The Truman Show, only much much bigger." Has the MPAA finally gone too far? Will this lead to their ultimate collapse? Quiver with excitement. Tremble with fear. Eat peanuts with raisins.

Give them the filter

[femto]

I say give them the filter. It should be built into every node of the network, so the network flat refuses to transmit Viacom's material, or that of any other copyright holder who wants out of the Internet. Surely a network that will only transmit stuff under a free license would have to be every free software author's dream?

Proposed Copyright Standard

[jc42]

industry standard to filter copyrighted material

How about we suggest the following standard:

1. the © character (Unicode 00A9, or decimal 251), followed by
2. the date of the copyright, followed by
3. the name of the copyright holder, optionally followed by
4. an email or web address to contact the copyright holder

I've heard that a system similar to this (but lacking part 4.) is already in use in some publications.

Such a copyright standard would make it easy to use hundreds (or thousands) of programs that already exist to filter copyrighted material and determine what to do with it.

Think anyone would go for it?

Maybe we should write up an RFC ...

Re:It shouldn't

[jc42]

I have mentioned before that we will come to a time where the Internet as we know it will no longer exist in the way we see it now. There will be the "Trusted Computing" Internet where these low-jacked computers will communicate and there will be the "Hacker/Hobbyist" Internet where custom built machines, not running the majority OS, will connect to. Guess which one your banking, newspapers, search engines, most of your friends, jobs, etc will operate on?

Actually, this sort of thing happened back in the 1980s, when we had a lot of commercial networks, controlled by the corporations, each one in use by only a small set of corporate customers. Then news got out about this other network called the "Internet", built on government projects by a flock of "hackers", and not controlled by anyone.

It's pretty clear which one people decided to use.

So now the corporate world is hard at work bringing the Internet to heel, with strict corporate controls on what you and I can see or do. If they succeed, your scenario will happen once again. And as the Internet becomes as unusable as all those other networks back in the 1980s, people will slowly move to the network that actually works.

Re:on anarchy

[ScrewMaster]

A copyright holder can't demand cash keep flowing to him, he can only demand that for a limited number of years he have a monopoly on publishing his work as granted by the Constitution.

The current duration of copyright is effectively infinite, and will be extended as necessary by the likes of Disney. You can no longer use the "limited duration" of copyright in any rational discourse on this subject. Also, since you brought up the Constitution, I feel compelled to point out that the Founders did not intend copyright to provide an unlimited cash flow to content creators. They certainly did not intend it to have the dramatic negative effects that modern copyright law is having on the whole of our society. No sir. The intent was to enrich the public domain, so that all can benefit from the creative minds among us.

So, copyright holders got a limited time to make a buck: the presumption (and it was only a presumption) was that potential remuneration was required to encourage the production of such works. The fact that you believe that to be true has little to do with the primary function of American copyright, which was to make more creative works available to all. Jefferson himself considered copyright to be a loan from the public domain! Ideas and creative works were never meant to be kept under private control indefinitely, yet that is precisely what has happened. It's my belief that we would be far better off abolishing copyright completely rather than maintain the current state of affairs. Modern copyright is diametrically opposed in purpose and effect to what the Founders wanted: a vibrant public domain that enriches us all.