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Entertainment Industry's Dystopia of the Future
renek writes "If you think the RIAA/MPAA's tactics have been outlandish, laughable, and disconcerting in the past, you haven't seen anything yet. From government-mandated spyware that deletes infringing content to border searches of media players, this reads like an Orwellian nightmare. Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see how far this goes and how under the radar it stays."
I will gladly run their spyware on my PC once they tell me where to send the invoice.
My current hourly rate to manage their software is $850 per hour.
My current rates for computer time is $245 per hour per processor.
I hope their spyware runs under Ubuntu.
I'll also start to carry about a few dozen old 128Mb-2Gb flash drives whenever I
travel. They are all filled with multiple TrueCrypt volumes full of random data which
is re-encrypted dozens of times. I'll gladly hand over all the decryption keys but
it'll still cost them time and money to check.
You can't possibly protect content without directly affecting the people who play by the rules. Things like the Patriot Act suffer from the same problem.
Living With a Nerd
Sure, congress bends over when it comes to passing favorable copyright laws, but that's a long way from acting as enforcers of private property rights, which the *AAs seem to be indicating here. When it the feds have to pay their own money, you'll see far less bending over going on.
That we citizen elect the politicians.
Yes, but we don't select them.
To be unnecessarily extreme, we can essentially pick between Hitler and Pol Pot. While it's a tough choice, it's not a choice I want to make.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
If they treat consumers as enemies they will become enemies.
crazy dynamite monkey
Surely this is more a case of haggling. Ask for an infeasible price knowing you then have more scope to haggle down to a still unfair price.
The Right to Read was written 13 years ago, and is still remarkably prescient.
I am officially gone from
Trouble is, cartels tend to work outside of the free market...
crazy dynamite monkey
A few times in copyright threads, while alluding to the insanity of the media corporations, I have testified that one of my big paranoid fears is legislation that requires content filtering software on all computers and related devices. Fine and dandy for Windows and Mac, but implementing that for all the Linux distros would be ridiculously hard. The solution? Outlaw Linux. "It's just a hacker's tool anyway."
*shakes head*
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I thought you could write whomever you wanted onto your ballot?
Or is your objection that voting for third-party candidates is useless because only Republican or Democratic candidates get enough votes to win and so your vote is only useful in helping one of those two to win?
I've seen this objection before. I'm pretty sure what makes it that Republican or Democratic candidates are the ones that get enough votes is because so many people choose to vote for them. So it seems your objection amounts to something like: "The majority chooses who wins, and I'm not part of the majority!"
And if they successfully legislate their survival?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media...
Wrong metaphor; It is not the government who is getting screwed here. On the contrary, congressmen are collect big checks from media corporations for selling off our rights. I think you mean.
Given the US government's willingness to force citizens to bend over for Big Media
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Look, the reality is that the U.S. economy currently depends almost exclusively on culturally created content/entertainment. Nothing gets made in the U.S. and exported anymore BUT movies, music, etc. So it's not a surprise that it's becoming more and more draconian in trying to defend those assets.
It's like if one country controlled all the oil. They'd jack up prices, but they'd also do everything they could to stifle the creation of oil alternatives. They'd start to insist changes in engine designs that used their oil, or else they wouldn't sell you the oil. They'd limit anyone trying to purchase the oil then refine it on their own, because they'd want to do all the refining themselves.
Every indicator I see says that this is going to get much worse in the future.
This probably isn't true. The point of the article is that the entertainment industry is trying to push obscene measures to stop "piracy." While in a normal market situation people would just stop supporting these companies and go to a competitor, such a scenario is unlikely to play out since there are no real competitors besides companies that will probably be squelched as illegal.
Think of it this way: would the automobile ever have taken off if the buggy industry owned and legally controlled all materials and technology related to the making of wheels? Sure the buggy makers could adopt the new automotive technology, and it would be better for the consumer if they did, but there is no immediate incentive for them to do so.
The music industry as a whole controls the vast majority of music, and are pushing laws to crush emerging technologies that might obsolete their main revenue source. There is no reason for them to switch and take advantage of these new technologies, because they don't have to. The average consumer of entertainment just doesn't have the self control to stop listening to songs or watching films for an unknown amount of time just to put pressure on the industry, and groups like the RIAA know this. Thus, they have every incentive to try and legislate the problem away, as the market has no way to correct. Only if their grip on copyright is loosened, or some form of piracy allowed to flourish, is there any pressure to adapt to changing realities in the world.
That we citizen elect the politicians.
Yes, but we don't select them.
To be unnecessarily extreme, we can essentially pick between Hitler and Pol Pot.
Or Kang and Kodos! (Simpsons did it!)
Bow-ties are cool.
I thought you could write whomever you wanted onto your ballot?
Nope. They have to be pre-approved (pdf in Google Docs) or they just plain won't be counted.
"The majority chooses who wins, and I'm not part of the majority!"
No, my objection is that the minority choses who the majority gets to pick. The US version of an "election" is a joke relative to modern systems.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
That we citizen elect the politicians.
Yes, but we don't select them.
To be unnecessarily extreme, we can essentially pick between Hitler and Pol Pot. While it's a tough choice, it's not a choice I want to make.
Yes, that is unnecessarily extreme. Why is everything in politics like this these days? Aren't there shades of wrongness? I mean really, we have a choice between politicians who have authorized the killing of millions of people? How about, 'we can essentially pick between Franco and Peron?' Both pretty bad, and fascist corporatists like many of today's politicians, but, you know, they didn't murder millions of people.
Rational politics requires rational citizens. Throwing around names like Hitler and Pol Pot does nothing to increase the rationality of voters. It does not motivate people to go out and vote or work for change. After all, what can one guy do against Hitler? Comparing our politicians to Hitler or Pol Pot is more than unnecessarily extreme. It is divisive and encourage irrationality, fear, and hopelessness. It also lumps all politicians in all races together into the 'utter monster' category, thus blurring the real distinctions that do exist. I mean, you can choose between the corporatist that wants to give you health care, or the corporatist that wants to regulate who you fuck. That's actually a pretty big distinction.
Not all politicians are evil monsters. And amongst the evil monsters, there are levels of evil. It is possible to pick the lesser of two evils if you don't lump all politicians together into the same evil madman stew.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Don't you just hate it when you're not even finished with your great American dystopian Sci-Fi novel and it suddenly morphs into a friggin' documentary?
You seem to be confusing "upset with big media controlling the law" with "pirate everything under the sun". Personally, I believe in financially supporting my entertainment, but I'm still sick of the US government bending over backwards for big media by creating more and more over-restrictive IP laws. Copyright law was originally created to give authors a TEMPORARY monopoly on the rights to their works, in exchange for their works eventually entering the public domain. The fact that copyright law has, at the behest of big media, been extended from the original maximum of 28 years (assuming the author was alive to renew it after the first 14 years) to author's life plus 70 years means that once the work DOES enter public domain, it's completely irrelevant and forgotten by modern society.
Bottom line: copyright law was created to benefit SOCIETY, not big media, and we have every right to be upset with them removing any value we receive from it.
My sig can beat up your sig.
The PP will probably never win an election, it's just there to show them how many votes they lose when they support the RIAA.
(OTOH I'd bet the PP could get quite a few votes in today's America...)
No sig today...
When I was a child our house was heated by oil, a tank car came by every now and then and fueled up a tank in the back.
That no longer happened. The guy who drove the tanker, has lost THAT job.
Coal was used earlier, and a lot of people made their money mining the coal in Holland and shipping it to homeowners. The mines have closed. The miners are gone.
In Amsterdam and many an old city you can still see evidence of horse stables in the center of the city. Evidence that once horses were the only method to power transport and the industry that made it happen.
Gas lighters once went around, turning on each street light individually, a job typically given as a charitable cause for people who could not earn their money in another way.
Countless jobs are gone as companies claimed that putting them in other countries was best for society, for the world, for the future.
And now, it is the time of the artist to loose their job, to see their means of earning a living turned upside down.
Does that matter? Is it worth halting progress to keep some people earning money the same way they are used to?
We could have stopped the car from ever going faster and thereby saved the horse industry. But at what cost to our society?
But art is different. Why? Great art has been created LONG before copyright was added (the current copyright is a recent invention and was fought tooth and nail by the record industry) and that art will remain.
Will people stop performing Opera because the composer is no longer being paid... oh wait, the composer died centuries ago.
Then perhaps people will stop making new art... except unpaid art is produced all the time. Go to flickr.com for just a tiny sample. Nobody there expects to be paid, yet they are producing art.
Yes, some artists will perhaps die of starvation. Just as lost of coal miners lost their job and countless stable boys before them.
THOUGH LUCK. The MPAA/RIAA/Brein/Bumastemra all love to claim that our society will collapse when no more "play for cash only" bands will exist. No more spice-girls, no more backstreet boys. The end of civilization as we know it. I could just cry.
But does it matter? I am not going to argue that pirates buy more CD's because I am trying to make a far bigger point. If indeed the end of copyright means NO more music is produced. Will that matter? Or is it just another development of our society? Imagine a world without movies. Ain't that hard, movie tech is not all that old. One thing often miss about Star Trek is that it is a fictional world without money (ToS and TNG at least) but ALSO without art. Think about it, there are no paid for artists and content in the series itself. We watch on TV a TV-less world. They make their own content, for their own consumption and art is "merely" something that each does for the fun of it, not for profit.
The RIAA and the likes hate such a future. They want us to believe that the artist who works for profit, a Michael Jackson or Madonna IS the ONLY part of our modern civilization that is worth anything. Everything else is secondary to them. The Spice girls are the 20th century, and everything else just plays second role to it. If content is not paid for, it does not exist, it is not worth it and if it is content it must be paid for.
This goes to such extremes that copyright mafia's collect royalties for music for that isn't even subject to royalties. If I produce a piece of music and put it in the public domain and it is played on the radio (in Holland at least) then Bumastemra collects a fee for it. A fee I, the person who created the music can't collect, nor can anyone. They have a legal right to collect money for something they don't own and which they never have to pay out to anyone. It would be like giving Shell the right to collect a fee from anyone on the road, no matter if they drive a car or not.
And the Internet, personal liberties, common sense, artisic license, law, they all got to bend or be broken s
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But what protects that same guy from the RIAA/MPAA/**AA bankrupting him and ruining his life for (maybe) sharing a few songs?
That's more important to you than your civil liberties?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
The EFF isn't "pirate friendly". They just have different priorities: namely civil liberties.
Calling civil libertarians "pirate sympathisers" is a nice bit of Orwellian Newspeak.
Pirates are simply preferable to the alternative.
Although the real value of "eliminating piracy" is highly disputable. It's not a given that it would benefit artists.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What's going on?
We're moving towards media technologies that allow Amazon to snatch back your copy of 1984.
It doesn't get much more "Orwellian" than that. There is no hyperbole here. That's the problem.
Sugar coating the situation is hardly going to help anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, they can try to force legislation that will pay them through taxes, effectively selling themselves to the government, a move that is certain to backfire on them. They can force legislation that would require Americans to purchase their products, which seems unlikely to succeed. They can also try to force legislation that would require artists to go through them to distribute their works, but I suspect such a law would get overturned by the courts rather quickly.
The recording industry blames their decline in sales on piracy, but I suspect it has much more to do with the increasing quality of material available from other venues. Artists can publish their material cheaply and easily over the internet. By using this method, they are free from the recording industry's abusive contracts, and they also retain ownership of their creations. In this way, the internet is revolutionizing how artists interact with their audiences, and even big name musicians are turning to it.
Meanwhile, the RIAA continues to alienate its consumer-base, with lawsuits, uncompetitive prices, rootkits and outlandish demands. For decades, they could control their content producers with harsh contracts, accepted only because there weren't any other practical options. Now the artists have another option, and the RIAA's policies are driving both them and their audience to it. Why should I sign a recording contract which requires me to sell so many hundred thousand albums or become the professional property of the corporation, when I can publish my material on YouTube? Why should I pay $15 for a CD which might have only one or two songs I enjoy, when I can find all of the satisfying material I want for free on YouTube?
They're losing ground because they've failed to alter their business model to compensate for the changes technology has made to their market. They can try to force all sorts of legislation, but their efforts will only be in vane.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
You know what's entertaining?
Watching people argue for rights they don't have against people enforcing rights they don't have.
So many flaws, so little time.
First off, your price comparisons are off. Cats and other pets are not free; they require regular feeding and care. Playing your own instrument is closer to free, but still requires an initial cost to get the instrument and possibly small costs to maintain it. Plus, you may have to pay some fee to obtain music to play, or lessons on how to play, if you aren't naturally gifted. Still, let's accept that there are things you can do to entertain yourself that are almost entirely free.
Second, why do you believe that advertising, and not people themselves, determines what is most enjoyable? I enjoy walking in the park, but I would get bored with it pretty fast if that was my only option. It's not advertising that makes me like the experience of listening to music, watching a movie, or playing a game. Advertising might make me aware of my options, and might even push me towards a particular one (if said ad is well-crafted by my standards and persuades me that the music/movie/game might be something I would like). But it doesn't define my enjoyment of a thing. I would still enjoy music if advertising didn't exist.
Finally, my world would be a much bleaker and more expensive place if it weren't for advertising. Advertising lets me use Google to search for things of interest on the internet (free), and to use all the other great Google tools (free), and to visit sites like this one (free). It lets me listen to music free (via the radio or a site like Pandora). It lets me play some of my favorite web games free. With advertisers footing the bill, I get to enjoy a lot of the things I enjoy, WITHOUT having to pay a dime for them myself (excluding any basic costs like the internet connection itself or the hardware used to access said entertainment).
You want to know how to block ads? Train your mind, not your computer. Recognize that just because some disembodied voice is trying to convince you to buy something, YOU have the choice not to. If an ad becomes too obnoxious or intrusive, then by all means block it or go elsewhere. Me, when I see an ad that bothers me, I make it a point to avoid products from that source if I can reasonably choose a competitor's alternative. But if everyone took your advice, and advertising magically failed to work any more, then we'd all have to pay full cost for all the things we enjoy. That would be a tragedy.
Trouble is, cartels tend to work outside of the free market...
I would argue that the black market is more free then the free market.
The War on Drugs has worked out remarkably well so far, I think we can all agree. I am sure that aggressive steps to locate and prosecute copyright infringement will have the same amount of success and public support.
Or, not.
Put together enough "War On X" programs and eventually, it's just "War on You."
Look at what happened to Colbert when he tried to run in South Carolina. He was shot down because "he could never win,"
I'd argue that he was shot down because "there is a real possibility he could win, and/or garner enough votes that we would have to take him seriously"
Personally, I think he sold out to Big Medicine, and what we ended up getting will require a lot of fixing. We need a single payer system that guarantees free health care to all, like every other civilized country on Earth. It's a moral issue: we're Americans and we shouldn't let Americans die like rabid dogs in the street. That's third world bananna republic bullshit.
What we got is not a system that guarantees health care to all, it's a system that basically hands money from taxpayers directly to insurance companies. In case you didn't know, insurance companies do NOT provide healthcare. They shuffle paperwork and money, and keep a lot of the money for themselves. They don't provide anything of value.
If you want to give the people healthcare, then you need a system where money is transferred from the taxpayer directly to those who provide healthcare: doctors, hospitals, clinics, etc. Sticking a middleman in there who takes a giant cut and only complicates the provision of care doesn't help any.
Obama didn't "sell out" to Big Medicine. He and the rest of the Democrats were already bought and paid for by Big Insurance.
Mark my words, what we ended up with is going to be even worse than the mess we had before, and cost an enormous amount of money that will bankrupt the country. The insurance companies and their CEOs are going to get filthy rich, but there will still be Americans dying like rabid dogs in the streets, because there won't be enough healthcare providers to provide care for them, as doctors will leave the country or go into other professions (as they're already doing, because of the insane cost of malpractice insurance).
Suggesting that corporate profits are more important than individual liberties is itself an extreme position.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The market tried to sort out the banking industry, but the the goverment stepped in and handed a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the banks for no good reason, ensuring they wouldn't learn a lasting lesson from their foolishness.
The government certainly has a role in regulating the logistics of markets: creating a standard language for contracts, defining standards for weights and measures, enforcing contracts, and protecting against fraud. They had a serious failure in doing so with the mortgage derivatives market that caused so much hassle. But the regulation needed there was simple "look, trade this shit on the CBOT or another major exchange, so that everyone is using the same standardized set of contracts". This is required for most other financial intruments, and creates enough transparancy to keep the market functioning (without the government even needing to create the standards, just insisting that there are standards.
Plus, of course, the mortgage fraud was starting to get out of hand before the collapse, but we didn't need any new laws for that, just to stop turning a blind eye to it.
Rather than doing the simple, non-instrusive job the government is suposed to, it created a problem which it then used to nationalize a big chuck on the American economy. Ditto healthcare, and to some small extent auto manufacturing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You right wingers love to point out that we are a constitutional republic, but that does not negate anything I said. Technically, I am right, hehehe, you even admit it. But look up the commerce clause.
Yes, the insurance companies do say that. If hold the only source of food, and I say, "suck my dick or starve to death," what will you do? Enter into a dick-sucking-for-food contract? If I hold medicine that will cure you, and I demand an outrageous price for it, what will you do? Economic coercion is real, especially when property rights are backed up with government guns.
You call my use of the word freedom 'misuse?' I'd say, protecting the rights of the wealthy to oppress the poor is even more of a misuse of the word.
The record shows that the free market is incapable of providing good reasonably priced health care solutions. Sorry that the facts have such a liberal bias, but the rest of the first world has awesome socialized health care that works, for less per capita than ours.
Your lies about the UK are, in fact, lies. My mom just died over there this Christmas. Because she couldn't get good health care here. Sarah Palin admitted to sneaking into Canada for health care.
Uh, none of the services you mentioned are actually bankrupt. And medicare, for instance, puts most of the money into actual health care instead of the pockets of paper pushing time wasting insurance leaches.
I'm sorry, but the imbalance of information and power inherent in any doctor patient relationship means the free market can not arrive at an equitable price for the service. You can't 'shop around' for health care. If you were seriously il;l, what would 'shopping around' mean? And how would you even know when you'd gotten a good deal.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But unlike Communism, we don't get killed for voting for someone else.
Perot was a viable third party candidate in '92 and '96. Nader was a spoiler in '00, Ventura became governor of Minnesota as a third party.
We have independent party Senators.
Yes, as a moderate Republican (they call me a RINO now) I have alot in common with the Blue Dog Democrats, but someone like Ron Paul is not virtually identical to President Obama. McCain and Obama were similar in 2008, but had McCain stuck to his stances he ran on in 2000 they would have been alot different.
Palin or Paul in 2012 will not be virtually identical to President Obama.
Also, "Couldn't find package dystopian-copyright-protection"
Hidden file system entries. You need to be in group "mafiaa" to access those.
That's "sudo apt-get install dystopian-copyright-protection" dumbass.
Not if you're Sony. Sony always runs as root.
Thank you. I think the problem is that it's a meme that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. are pushing. Their lobbyists go to congress and claim that if they don't get bailed out and propped up, then no music or movies or art of any kind will be created anymore and the entire economy will implode.
We wouldn't even be having this discussion if a whole lot of people hadn't gone hog-wild and used Napster to literally STEAL music back in the day.
I'm sure what you meant to say was:
"We wouldn't even be having this discussion if, in the 90's the utter morons in the music industry had recognized the huge demand for music in a portable digital format at a reasonable price with minimal restrictions as a huge opportunity and moved swiftly to supplying product to meet that demand by and allowing us to literally BUY music back in the day."
Instead they acted like total fuckwads whose very belief system would be destroyed by such a move and they did everything in their power to try to push back the huge waves of the digital revolution that simply washed over them, leaving them mere flotsam and jetsam on the seas of progress.
For years, while others downloaded with abandon, I (a hard core music lover who had bought over 6,000 vinyl lp's and and 500 CD's) held back for many years waiting for them to provide me with this highly deisreable option. I even used to chastise downloaders in these very forums for 'piracy'. And I waited and waited for the industry to deliver.
After over half a decade of waiting, I gave up. Can you guess what my next move was?
I just re-read your comment, and thought I should provide you with an answer, since you sound like you're probably not an American citizen.
why do you even need insurance companies in the loop ?
Simple: because the politicians who wrote this legislation were given large bribes, err, campaign contributions, by these insurance companies, so they were required by their employers (the lobbyists) to write the legislation to benefit them.
I think a lot of people don't realize that America's government is just as corrupt as, if not more than, Mexico's.