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Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS (myce.com)
jlp2097 writes: It looks like the recent activities by Hollywood studios and the AACS LA finally led to the closing of Slysoft Inc, creator of the popular AnyDVD HD tool for creating personal backups of BluRay/DVD/etc. Slysoft Inc's website confirms the closing due to "recent regulatory requirements". The final nail in the coffin has also been confirmed with slightly more details in their forum: "this is final. Slysoft is gone." Sad to see them go — it looks like legitimate buyers of BluRays will now have to find other sources for backing up their property to HTPCs and NASes.
I'm astonished that they lasted as long as they did. They always seemed to avoid trouble with a certain stylish insouciance.
Ironically, though, I never bought it, rather I just got cracked copies off kickasstorrents.
Well that's a bummer. Who's going to take up the torch against the terrorists? Is there another program that does something similar?
Point out this case to them. Point out the total value to the economy of things like the iPod and other personal digital music players. Point out that this is vastly more than the total music and movie industries combined. Point out that laws surrounding DRM have ensured that no one could release a portable movie player that let you rip your DVDs / BluRays and so an entire industry has been unable to exist. Ask them why they hate job creation so much.
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They should just open source the product before they go :)
Well, if they can't make money off it anymore we will gladly accept it uploaded to git hub.
Momento Mori
Guess we'll have to rip our DVDs the old-fashioned way: with every other program out there, including AnyDVD's torrent copies.
MakeMKV. You're welcome.
Many PCs (including my own HTPC) running software such as XBMC and MediaPortal depend on slysoft to play legit BluRay discs. I guess next time they update the BluRay encryption, I'll just have to download a pirate copy instead, because I won't be able to play the legit discs.
They should have offered Hollywood the final finger: Upload a free version of their software everywhere that they could and post it on every torrent tracker they could find. Having 100M downloads of AnyDVD freeware floating around on the web might teach the greedy bastards a thing or two, and essentially defeat the point of legally harassing companies like this going forward.
While you can argue piracy, the USA it is perfectly legal to make backup copies of commercial media you legitimately own. Very important for owners of old DVD, VHS tapes, laser disks and so on. Once nice thing about linux is it's a lot harder to just "shut down" because it's world wide and the USA is the most anal when it comes to copying laws. It's inverse is China where it's apparently unfashionable NOT to copy things..(and in many cases sell the copies..). Anyway, there are reasonable policies when it comes to backups of things we purchase but in the USA, the business are trying to require people to purchases their media more than once if possible. We gotta rethink these IP laws as they don't encourage innovation as much as they promote lazy fat cats to just rest on the laurels of a single creation for not only their lifetime, but the lifetime of their descendants.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
"buyers of BluRays ... backing up their property"
Buyers of any media, at all, don't own anything but a limited right to enjoy such media until the storm-troopers say they don't.
Get with the program pops.
you're the moo prick, aren't you. moo was better. (still shite).
I was a licensed user, but failed to download the 2/15/2016 update. Does anyone know if there is a download mirror?
Unitl a "cracked" version is all over the torrents?
Please can someone post a (no-malware) mirror installer?
This is probably the result of illegal conduct, either by members of the US legal profession, or US businesses, or the US government. We've seen many examples of similar illegal conduct by such people. It's time for that to stop.
Any form of reasonable conduct is protected in US law under the highest law in the land, the Bill of Rights, as part of the 9th Amendment, where reasonable is defined in the eyes of the people. This includes making copies under reasonable circumstances, and thus protects tools that support doing this, whether or not those tools are free or commercial, and whether or not they are made in the USA. For any member of the US government, or any US professional, or any US based-business, to take actions to the contrary is thus a violation of US law, whether or not those actions take place in another country.
If any such people were involved in this action, then I accuse them of illegal conduct. For the legal professionals, such conduct is a violation of their oaths to uphold the law, immediately and permanently disqualifying them from engaging in the practice of law: attempting to paid as legal professionals for having participated in this action constitutes fraud. Similarly, for US government officials to have participated in this action immediately and permanently disqualifies them from holding any position of public trust or responsibility: for these individuals to attempt to continue to get paid as government officials, or accrue pension or benefits also constitutes fraud. Any member of the US government that knowingly keeps such people employed becomes an accessory to the original violation.
The right to reasonable conduct provides protection for individuals in many situations where they might otherwise be forced to hire the protection of a lawyer. As such, this right not only applies on its own, but also follows from the 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law (certainly an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law).
As with violations of other rights "retained by the people", the normal rules for immunity and right to pardon do not apply. There can be no rights retained by or reserved to the people if any entity of government can allow violation of such rights (whether by law, or precedent, or by preventing penalties from applying in the case of such violations - proof by contradiction).
The US legal profession, as a class in society, is of course in a position of multiple ethical conflicts of interest with respect to recognizing rights retained by the people: any laws, rules, orders, or precedents that would allow US people to participate in such an action not only exist in violation of the Bill of Rights, but can be presumed to represent unethical practice of law.
Further, if US people were involved as described above, then this is an attempt to deny the public rights granted to them by federal law, specifically "Fair Use" rights. As in other cases where businesses have attempted to do this, an appropriate penalty is for those businesses to lose the copyrights that were only granted subject to compliance with US law.
Further, a right to long term public oversight over US government, over the practice of law, and over US-based business arises under the 9th Amendment: as such, any agreement or policy that would keep secret participation in this matter by US government officials, US lawyers, or US businesses is also illegal.
Money talks and bullshit walks. You don't get anything by writing letters.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I wish I had mod points to give the parent poster. I'm so sick of the "it won't do any good" cynicism posts like those above. You know what REALLY won't do any good? Sitting on your ass doing nothing except crying "woe is us" on Slashdot.
Do you know how we got to the point where a lot of elected officials don't care what people think? People sitting around grousing about how elected officials don't care what they think. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you're going to simply tune out of everything going on and not care or hold people to any standards, then really, why should anyone care what you think? I know if I were an elected politician, I wouldn't give a damn what people think who don't bother to let me know, or even vote. Why would I even waste my time?
I vote in every election and primary I can. I do write to my Congresscritters. I tell my friends what I think about stuff going on and the people who are in and running for office. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't do any good, especially being a liberal in the Bible Belt South. But you know what? At least I'm trying. At least I'm not just whining about problems. And sometimes, people actually do make a difference, especially at a local level. You don't have to save the world, you just have to care. If you don't, then it sucks to be you, but stop trying to piss on the parade of those who do.
By the way, for those of you in the "it doesn't make a difference" crowd, by all means, keep sitting on your asses. Your apathy gives people like me disproportionate say over things going on, so you know, thank you very much for that.
Decoding both DVD and BD are "known things". AnyDVD was not the only product doing it.
Two important parts to doing BD, though - One is having a valid key to get past the AACS, and being able to replace it when a version of AACS comes out that revokes your current key. If your key has been added to the revoked list, simply putting a disk in the drive with that version of the list essentially "bricks" the drive for reading ANY Bluray disks until you change your key.
The second is being able to implement the BD+ interpreter to fix up deliberate errors introduced into the video... And it changes periodically.
Where the companies that sell such products get their "market lock-in" is keeping up these changes. AACS is easier than BD+, from what I read, because you don't always have to change your key when a new AACS revocation list comes out, but the BD+ programming can and does change multiple times per month.
What was so illegal about this software? There seems to be a bunch of options for ripping BLue Ray and DVDs, as well as extracting video files.
Bush, Rubio will have pre existing condition come back + alot more HB1's to take our jobs as well.
Virtual clone drive was the only image mounting program worth a damn on windows.
I buy the blu-ray of a movie I like, then download it off a pirate website. I don't even own a blu-ray player. It's just that I have a home media server and would prefer to have movies in a format I can stream throughout my house. But Hollywood insists on only letting you stream movies over the Internet. No simple way to have a local copy which plays on all my devices.
At first I borrowed a friend's BD drive and tried ripping the blu-rays and re-encoding the movies to a smaller size (raw rip of the LotR trilogy was nearly 200 GB). After struggling with merging the two-disc parts into one movie file and keeping subtitles synchronized, I threw in the towel and just downloaded it from a pirate site. Someone much better at video encoding than I had already licked those problems, plus his encode was smaller yet higher quality than mine.
So I ditched my plans to buy my own BD drive for ripping, and now I just pirate the movies after buying the blu-ray. Though I'm not sure you can really call it pirating, since I own the blu-ray which by Hollywood's insistence that I'm buying a license not a copy means I'm licensed to own and view the content. What does Hollywood think will happen to folks who used Slysoft's software to rip their own discs now? If the lack of updates means the software won't be able to rip future blu-ray releases, those folks are going to start doing what I'm doing - buying the blu-ray and downloading the movie from a pirate site. Only some of them won't be as honest as me and will quickly realize they don't really need to buy the blu-ray in the first place.
BTW, this inverts the backup argument. The blu-ray disc becomes my backup copy, safely stored in its case. Heck, I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap off of most of them. Though I prefer to think of them as a physical certificate of the license to the movie, and my backup would be downloading the movie off the net again.
Well, this all goes back to first sale theory and possession.
If I buy something, I own it. To copy, alter, gift.
This applied until the EULAs had the "licensing' clause.... and the courts upheld the 'licensing' clause.
For software.
Then Hollywood lawyers and some programmers ( they are guilty also ) came up with DRM
and keys for holding hostage anyone who 'might' copy something, even for backup or educational use ( Fair use ).
For movies and songs.
Now 'they' are going after any tools to break their locks. ( they are Hollywood, US Government, and some millionaires and billionaires).
The congressmen are already bought, FBI also, laws have been passed, so it is too late.
Only a Furion can stop this. Or The Joker.
Or maybe a religious movement - OH! The televangelists have been bought also? Damn!
Just how far can they pursue this route and kill off fair use before they end up killing off demand for their product and their industry as a whole in this day and age?
I mean 40 years ago, they had a pretty die hard lock on stuff as the costs made it too expensive make much of anything like Movies or Music but now, that isn't the case anymore and it is getting cheaper and cheaper to replace them and the industry by the year.
As it stands, they are fighting copying Blu-Rays and such with DRM, they are attempting to fight streaming companies attempts to replace the set-top box. If they truly get what they want in this day,I think they will end up killing off most of the demand for their products as a whole since people will lack format shifting capabilities or be locked into annoying limitations like forcing you to watch a warning or 15 minutes of previews every time you put in your movie.
As it stands, I don't even have a DVD or Blu-Ray player in my living, what I have is a Blu-Ray drive in my computer, a copy of Handbreak and a 2 Terabyte Hard drive to put them on so I can keep my copies safe from the kids and allow me to watch it when I want to, how I want to along with Hulu Plus (Got this one for free) to watch the TV shows as they come out and Netflix just because I love the service and back catalog.
If I can't format shift the movies, I don't get them, just that simple and if either Netflix or Hulu starts getting too bad off following them, I can just as easily drop them as well.
This is the same logic that means you are stuck with a two party system, (the stooge on the left or the stooge on the right) don't vote for the independent, that is like throwing away your vote. Vote for the person you believe in most, it is not like vote counts for that much anyway. If enough people buy into this nonsense it becomes true. If Donald Trump has a personality you either like or hate, if you hate him you will vote for anyone who runs against him.
If we can no longer make legal backups of our own discs, the only feasible alternative is to just pirate them all. No DRM, no ads, no unskippable crap... no bullshit. If the disc is damaged, just burn it again... or, keep the video file as part of a digital media library and gain the ability to stream it from anywhere. I see 0 value in physical media anymore.
I would probably miss this software if I ever had or used it, but it's not the case. I don't care about copying DVDs or anything. I care about stomping on dogs. When I see a dog, I stomp on it. Dogs bark, bite and piss on car tires. That's why I stomp on dogs. I stomp them flat. Stomp stomp stomp.
They used to. When I used to bother ( before I could just buy digital copies and Steam) it was a constant battle between them and slysoft. Maybe they don't bother anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
I can't wait for my house to catch on fire then call the insurance company and demand they cover my house. And if I lose my house with everything I own in it, it can greatly destroy my ability to care for my self and family.
Hillary will also add a lot more HB1 visas too. Really, the ones most likely not to do it are Trump, Sanders, and Cruz
It's funny that people represent a long standing senator as some sort of "man of the people". He's as much part of the establishment as anyone. Regardless of his politics and his campaign slogans, he's simply not what he's pretending to be.
If you really want to vote for a 3rd party candidate, than just do that. Don't pretend the Senator from Vermont is some sort of maverick outsider.
See Ted Cruz for an example of "maverick outsider" senator. He's what that really looks like and it isn't pretty.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hilary has corporate donors because she has to work within the f*cked up electoral system we have (thank you Citizens United and a gutless, pro-corporate supreme court).
That was done in large parts to even the playing field against big union campaign money. If the democrats hadn't capitalized on that money for the past 40 years, Citizens United would never have had to be implemented.
Bush, Rubio ... + alot more HB1's to take our jobs as well.
With the democrats, we won't even need to have that program once they start legalizing anyone that crosses our border.
I would love to see every owner of a DVD and blueray file a class action against the MPAA
Do not but media you cannot copy.
Let that shit sit on the shelf and collect dust.
Let them take that blue ray shit and shove it up their asses sideways.
1. Let Hollywood know you are boycotting their products until they let you use the content you legally purchased, e.g., ripping a DVD or BluRay to make a backup or upload to your NAS to play on your Wifi-enabled TV or iPad.
2. Stop buying all Hollywood products: CDs, DVDs, BluRays, movie theatre tickets, etc.
3. Use only *legal* alternatives to buying these products, e.g.,
a. Go to your local public library to borrow CDs, DVDs, BluRays, etc.
b. Organize a "swap" to swap CDs, DVDs, BluRays, etc. with your family, friends and co-workers.
c. Patronize flea markets, garage sales, and used book/cd/dvd dealers to buy these products second-hand
4. Create your own content and share on sites like YouTube. Or donate to groups who make such content such as the ones making StarTrek fan films.
5. Create a website to encourage more people to boycott, and post on https://www.reddit.com/r/boycotthollywood
6. Forget about trying to influence your politicians: They're bought and paid for by Hollywood... At least until you deprive Hollywood of enough revenue that they can no longer afford to buy political influence!
Leave him alone. The apps guy is funny, damn it!
Well done AACS! You have managed to crush a product that allowed people to rip DVDs in an age when DVDs are obsolete. Unfortunately, you've also crushed a product that is completely legal and allows us to mount DVDs that we have legitimately downloaded from software vendors! You have absolutely succeeded at the wrong goals entirely.
This is why I've joined the Free State Project. We're getting to 20,000 signers and 10% have already moved. In the years to come we'll have the first libertarian state where the goal of those in power will be to abolish laws rather than create them. It's pro individual-liberty anti-big-government. It might seem cold hearted to throw people out on the street, but that isn't the goal of libertarians. The goal is to keep government out of our lives. We can house those who are impoverished, feed the needy, and take care of ourselves without the government. The problem isn't that we can't do those things. The problem is government has taken away our abilities to do these things voluntarily. I can't afford to send my kid to a private school when the government steals a significant portion of my income that would've allowed me to do so. While the libertarian might prefer to abolish the public school system that isn't necessarily the same thing as ending the guarantees on education. A government could very selectively guarantee loans to those below the poverty line and relieve that debt at a particular future date should a person never be in a position to pay it back within a reasonable amount of time. There could be a 20 year period to pay back a 20 year debt after which that debt becomes the liability of the state.
If this holds up and there is no comeback, look for Netflix DVD and Redbox revenue to dry up faster.
Let's face it streaming video is nice, but the studios frack it up with there contracts that cause content to disappear from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. It is the absolute worst customer experience to add something to your watch list only to find it gone when you go back to watch it.
Slysoft should release a new version that has a plug-in architecture.
- the new version (as sold) will only rip unprotected DVD/BDs
- 3rd parties (cough, cough) can distribute plug-ins that have the decryption functionality
Ideally those plug-ins will be open sourced and given freely on the web.
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
Because health insurance isn't like other insurance. If you have to change jobs, that means you need to change insurance, so now suddenly the new insurance doesn't have to cover the old condition? That's bullshit. That's why they outlawed it. The root of the problem is tying health insurance to employment, but I don't see the Repugs trying to fix that either.
So are you're blind.
If we weren't so busy trying to make insurance magically make outrageously expensive healthcare somehow magically affordable, perhaps it wouldn't be so important (just cover all citizens and be done with it), but pre-existing conditions frequently left people un-covered or trapped in a terrible job.
Alas, none of the republicans would be at all interested in joining the civilized world or even pushing back against the highest medical costs in the world.
While in theory the libertarians should try addressing the problem by removing the prescription and other laws so that someone might try to take care of it themselves or roll the dice with someone that doesn't have the expensive certification, in practice I don't hear a peep out of them about that anymore.
With the threat of deportation removed, the foreign workers will soon begin demanding reasonable American pay for an American job.
1 - If you can't rip it to use how you please, what is the point in paying for it? (And if you can rip it, somehow you are a criminal.)
2 - If you pay for it, you are providing cash that can be used (buying laws, lawyers for suing) against you.
One of the 'P's in HIPPA is portability. When you left your old insurance, you would get a certificate of prior coverage which you would give to the new insurance company, which would block the pre-existing condition and waiting period bullshit. Though if you happened to have a diagnosis before you had any insurance, you were still fucked.
I think DVDFab is going to see a huge surge in sales. Too bad they don't have stock I can buy.