What your ISP (or the NAT/router box that you run at the edge of your network) *can* do is to prioritize your own bandwidth based on the urgency with which any packet needs to get somewhere.
I agree this is what the ISP should do. I'm in Canada using Rogers -- and the problem is they deprioritized BitTorrent (and only BitTorrent) so that the uplod speed was about 0.1 k/sec. Which basically makes the entire protocol useless, and makes the traffic shaping a frustration, instead of a boon, to users.
I want to play fair. I want my p2p traffic to have lower priority than my own (or my neighbour's) VOIP, web surfing, etc.
But I paid for a high-bandwidth pipe so I could use BitTorrent; I will accept a lower speed at peak times, but not their model which kills the speed ALL the time, whether the network is congested or not. And only for that one specific application - eMule, UseNet, FTP, HTTP, all work at full speeds.
Needless to say, I was fed up, switching ISPs is not an option, so I'm using uTorrent with packet encryption and everything runs well.
But the goal of QoS is defeated - my roommates and I now have to individually throttle our bittorrent clients instead of letting my router handle the QoS. The ISP can't adequately tell encrypted traffic from p2p traffic and general quality suffers. All because of an over-agressive filter.
So why then are researchers worried? Why are security experts like Ed Felten spending a third of their time with lawyers?[1] Clearly it's not as easy as you claim to dismiss frivolous lawsuits; the mere possibility of them is having a negative impact on research.
1. I don't have an internet link to this, but Michael Geist imparted this information to a Hart House audience citing a personal interview with Dr. Felten.
That's a red herring. They don't need the DMCA to hang up on your request, they always had the right to ignore you.
But before the DMCA, you were within your rights to brew your own solution to their inadequacies. Now if you try that, you get thrown in jail (see ElcomSoft).
By using their existing right to ignore you, combined with the technical and legal protections of DRMs, they are in fact creating new, arbitrary, rights for themselves.
But remember, the same thing happens when the government makes a law about terrorism, or illegal drugs, or health care, or the enviornment, or anything else.
As an aside, I think your examples are poorly chosen. I'm pretty sure the majority of slashdot readers don't support any anti-terrorism laws, or the war on drugs... precisely because of the negative consequences you mention.
That doesn't mean you won't support the law anyway, but it means that like a drug, you need to know what negative effects it might have in order to evaluate the risks.
This is a valid point -- for any law, you need to evaluate the cost/benefit ratio -- but you don't take your argument to it's natural conclusion. The problem with the DMCA (and terrorism laws, and drug laws, etc.) is that the costs are enormous, and the benefits are limited to a very few, select people (unfortunately, the very people who have the power and influence to get such laws passed).
This may be a little OT, but the lightsaber talk reminded me of a parliamentary debate I was at once... debating is a time-honoured tradition and very serious matter, but usually the university leagues have some 'fun' summer debates that are just silly. This one happened right around the time Episode I had come out...
One debate they decided to run backwards, so essentially the opposition got to build up the case for the government and proceed to destroy it, and they chose the resolution that Anakin skywalker should be anally raped by Princess Amidala with a lightsaber.
The arguments for it centered around how it was a typical hazing ritual for new Jedi Knights, it would bring him and the princess closer together, and would bring Anakin closer to the force. Arguments against were, well, it would probably kill him (or at least scar him horribly, requiring some weird life support -- oh wait...)
I just thought it was about the funniest thing ever. (yes, that may be quite sad...)
(Until the following year, when a team ran a case that a conservative and inexperienced young woman on said team should have sex with the notorious womanizer on the other team, forcing said womanizer to argue that she should not sleep with him... that was awesome...)
As much as I love getting my weekly fix of TV for free off Bittorrent, I just don't see ISP's allowing this to continue for much longer. Once they work out an effective way to stream content I can see them filtering it out all together. They are not going to let people to get what they are selling for free. Both of the local broadband ISP's here already are cracking down on it by heavly throttling all traffic to users who exceed a cerntain threshold.
... and users are responding by encrypting their data so it's not clearly identifiable as bittorrent traffic. (If you were referring to traffic shaping).
I agree with you that the current flat fee per month model offered by ISPs would quickly collapse at the current rapid expansion of bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer to peer, but I don't think that the ISPs will be able to solve that problem by shutting down a certain type of application. Even if they could, I don't believe they *should* be allowed to.
Any technological attempts they take at throttling / limiting traffic of one type will be met by technical changes and innovations in sharing to make it harder and harder for ISPs to differentiate 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' traffic. This just highlights the fact that the ISP should not be classifying traffic like this (the exeption may be for prioritizing things like VoIP via QoS or somesuch).
Instead they should focus on the amount of bandwidth. I would love to see a system where we paid for the bandwidth we used. That would also curb rampant filesharing as your 'free' bittorrent download might now cost you $2 of transferred bits. Such a model does not exist for residential consumers in a practical package, despite that I think it would be the most fair. No longer would the hordes of e-mail checking grandmas be subsidizing the l33t pir8 scene....
I think this is also the logical solution to the ISP's complaints of inadequate infrastructure to support the new bandwidth demands. Increase the rates at the ends of the pipes to the users who pull data or push it so you can keep up with this demand -- don't charge some weird tax for premium access to inadequate pipes! It just doesn't make sense!
Oh wow. Ad Hominem, Straw Man, False analogy... all in a few short sentences! I'm wondering why I bother feeding the trolls, but here I go:
I almost didn't reply to this post because I try not to waste my time on petty pseudo-attorneys like yourself,
If ordinary citizen 'pseudo-attorneys' cannot have a meaningful discourse about points of law, why bother with a democratic system of government to make them? Why bother with juries, if ordinary people cannot understand any part of the law? If my interpretation is somehow false -- an interpretation I arrived at by parsing the English structure of the law, and by not finding any exception or clarification elsewhere -- please feel free to correct me. I find the fact that you have not made such an argument suggestive that you cannot make one.
Fact: you feel it's your right to steal movies. It's not. Stealing is against the law. Therefore, stealing is WRONG.
Since you are so enamoured with facts, I should point out that copyright infringement is not, in a legal sense, equivalent to stealing. It is a completely seperate offense. I concede the point that both stealing and copyright infringement are illegal, and many would contend immoral, but nowhere in my post did I say anything about my perceived rights vis-a-vis stealing or copyright infringement.
I did hint at the fact that I believe it was my right to space-shift legally obtained media onto the format of my choice. This, as far as I am aware, is in fact my right under something called 'fair use'.
As an aside, if I did believe I was entitled to free movies/music/latest awful TV show, I could very easily get such materials from Usenet, BitTorrent, etc. much more rapidly that somehow obtaining a physical DVD and spending the time to rip it with obscure and hard to use software like DeCSS. You may also note that the legal status of such an act of downloading (without making the media available for upload) is much more ambiguous than the clear-cut prohibition against 'circumvention'. When I download a ripped song from the Internet, I am not violating the DMCA. (IANAL, but I'm certainly open to correction if I am wrong on this).
And this really brings up the crux of the issue: laws like the DMCA allow corporations (as TFA points out) to impose further limits and control on cultural works and the technologies used to enjoy them, and bludgeon any potential innovative competitors into the ground. This is an incredible burden to bear, and the loudly proclaimed benefits -- increased protection against digital piracy -- have yet to materialize in the 8 years or so since the law was passed.
Has that exception ever successfuly been used? If I remember correctly, the DeCSS case argued exactly that, that the program fell into that exception. And look what happened -- it was deemed illegal even to link to the code, much less distribute it yourself.
Possibly because if you read the wording you quote, it permits circumventions by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to the work in question. Therefore, you are right, Joe Sixpack could claim that he is fully within his right to circumvent such protection to put his favourite DVD movie onto his video iPod, or put his iTMS purchases onto his Creative MP3 player.
That is all well and good, but Joe Sixpack has no idea how to do this from scratch -- and here's the problem -- there is no provision in the DMCA for distributing the tools for circumvention, for any reason. Thus, DeCSS is illegal, Microsoft cannot make an iTMS compatible player, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
I had my linux server handle all my p2p a while back, using MLDonkey. It's really quite nice -- supporting most of the popular p2p networks. Apparently now they have Kad support for eMule too, and you can run it all remotely via a GUI or an http client.
It let me and my roommates all shut off our personal computers overnight and saved us unknowingly re-downloading the same.iso (uhh... legal linux distros of course... *wink*) someone else had just aquired.
I'm not running it now because I haven't found the hour or two it would take for me to reconfigure it on my recently rebuilt box (my old one got r00ted something bad -- not because of mldonkey; it was a 2 year old Gentoo box running FTP/SSH/etc. that I hadn't bothered to patch. Serves me right...)
Episode IV slower than III? Did you see the same movies I did?
I admit the 'action' scenes in IV didn't have quite the 'wow' factor with people jumping around and stuff blowing up, but it had something much more important -- characters and a plot you actually CARED about.
Whether it was more charisma from the acting or better direction, IV's plotline went from scene to scene revealing a bit of the story each time without any filler. Characters were developed. We learned of the dangers of the galaxy and depravations of an empire along with Luke.
In III, there were far too many effects without enough substance to make the audience care.
Take the opening scene of III -- a technically impressive space battle, but one that is totally uninspiring. It is introduced with some text, but what ships are whose? Why the hell is there a batttle being fought? Whose ships are whose? It's so chaotic it's hard to relate to.
Contrast that with ANH's opening scene -- instantly you know the score. Big bad empire chasing little ship. Youre in suspense. You are sucked in...
The whole movie's like that. III spends way too much time dicking around with unimportant plot points, trying (but failing) to paint a convincing picture of Anakin's slow descent to the dark side...
... until I noticed it's for AGP only cards. I got a 'cutting edge' PCI-Express 6800... which according to the article are made with only 12 pipelines. *sigh*.
Well, I guess I'll just buy another card and turn on the SLI on my motherboard... hehe...:D
I'm trying to figure that out as well, since all their new/good trailers are being released this way. I want to save the.mov to my drive and iTunes won't let me do that... a method to find the direct link would be useful.
The difficulty is, however, that with a single player game, even an authentication method such as Steam will NEVER give you the same level of protection against piracy. In fact it could be argued that imposing these restrictions on single player games would push people TOWARDS piracy simply for ease of use.
It might have taken the warez crackers a little longer to get a pirated version of HL2 out that worked properly, but it was done rather quickly nonetheless, using a Steam emulator run locally. Ironically, such a warez version is much much more convenient to install and operate than the retail version.
With online play -- especially for MMORPGs -- where the whole purpose is to gather in a community of other gamers, the developers can control the keys to said community and charge access. It is much more costly for the 'pirates' to set up alternate communities (which would generally be inferior to the official ones), and therefore adds limits to piracy.
Past experience (e.g. copy protected-disks / CDs) shows us that authentication measures for non-value-added products like single player games tend to cause more trouble for legitimate users and hinder pirates not at all; so I question your equation; the gain in sales that would have been pirated is limited to those addicted gamers that cannot wait the extra day or two for a proper warez release, but would be offset by frustrated customers who refuse to buy / return the product. Not to mention the costs of running the authentication servers / bandwidth / customer service for this complicated scheme...
The difference: Half-Life 2 is a single player game. With a MMOG, you need to have an account since you need to pay the company for the ongoing cost of developing plot updates and maintaining servers. People accept that.
(As an aside, you can in fact transfer your licence for many MMOG games - the new owner would still have to pay subscription fees, but not the initial fee).
When a company forces you to do the same thing with a game they expect you to play on your own machine, it's a whole different story...
Yes, but if those companies are deemed illegal, what's to stop *AA from going after the open source projects...?
If lawmakers and enforcers actually started to make a distinction between infringement for profit versus sharing, we might actually get something that made sense. At the moment, they want to shut down all p2p. The companies mentioned are simply the first targets.
Re:How different would it be if?
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You're right, people report crimes because they consider it harmful. I would report a murder / rape / mugging / whatever because because I emphasize with the victim and certainly don't want the perpetrator on the loose and potentially do harm to others (such as myself).
Copying software though? There's no victim. No one has had anything stolen (in the sense that they are deprived the use of something they had). The only 'crime' is that of lost opportunity - they didn't sell a copy of the software. Is this a crime against society? Do I fear for my safety or welfare because of it? No; so I won't report it.
Yes, distribution of said archives is illegal (just like "oh here, I'll just copy this new Metallica CD for you!" is illegal).
Actually, no, it's not. You can copy stuff for your friends all you want (as long as you don't charge money - it has to be "non-commercial").
Why? Because part of the cost of the CD-R/Blank tape, etc. you or your friend bought went to the RIAA because they *EXPECT* you to copy stuff for your friends. So you're paying for it already, and they have no legal or moral recourse against you for making copies.
This is the defense Napster is using. However, the scale of distribution by Napster and the fact that hard drives (the storage medium of choice for Napsterites) do not have this royalty is a tricky point. We'll have to wait and see.
Hmm... now I agree that the gov't made the right decision. But suppose for a second that they had granted it (or that in trial it ends up being so they have to remove the name)... would that not set a great precedent for any company to sue, say CyberPatrol, for blocking their site? It would be the same type of thing - a service people can chose to use blocking data from a site based on their opinion of it. (Can they do this now, I wonder?)
Typically of slashdot - and anywhere else for that matter - this disscussion has degenerated into a bipolar argument over which side, cops or portesters, is better than the other. But we cannot divide things this simply
The truth is, there are very good reasons that the protesters are crowding Philly. These reasons did not come out in this article because frankly, the author seems to be caught up in a power trip which percludes him from utilizing what little intellectual capacity he may have. Guy, it's a very bad idea to aggravate a bunch of highly trained police officers with weapons, no matter what some piece of paper drafted in Washington says, especially when you're just doing it for the sake of aggravation. Being polite and insistend gets you much further than screaming obscenities. In this situation, the police seemed to do the exact right thing.
This does not mean that in other places they behaved properly. I can very easily believe that they overstepped their bounds in many situations. Remember, the police do not serve us except on paper - they serve the existing power structure, the very power structure all these protests are against. (Though they must maintain a good image or said power structure will be undermined.) They are protesting the corruption of our governments and the out of contnrol corporate power grabs that have been so successful recently. No wonder the media and the police are doing their best to suppress attention onthese issues as much as possible.
It is a pity that uneducated, unthinking people like the author of this article are giving so many opportunities for the media to spin the police actions as justified. If the protesters behaved in a courteous manner, calmly but firmly demonstrated their views, instead of insulting everyone who does not agree with them, they might convince people to listen and agree.
Well, let's put it this way. I'd rather have the FBI read my mail and catch a child molester, pornographer or some other kind of pervert than have privacy and dangerous people loose in society. Since I'm not a criminal I've got nothing to worry about. Only criminals need to worry about a system like Carnivore.
This argument may seem to make sense at first, but
there is clearly something wrong with it. I think this quote illustrates the point:
"First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers.
But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users.
But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me.
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
- Alara Rogers, Aleph Press
The moral of this story is - when you start giving up freedoms you've enjoyed, you begin the slide down a slippery slope. Today they're asking for the unlimited power (if they can do it with Carnivore, they will, warrant or no) to monitor all e-mails. Tomorrow what will it be? All traffic on the Internet? Cameras in your house? Bugs in your clothes? The more you give, no matter how reasonable it seems, the more they will want to take.
And always remember, if you give something up, you should get something in return. In this case, to circumvent carnivore, all you have to do is encrypt your e-mail. The smart criminals - that is, the ones that extra measures would be useful for in the first place - would definitely do this anyway.
So we are giving up our freedom for nothing.
DeCSS does not circumvent encryption on a work!!!
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He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
Sorry to comment yet again on this topic, but I was reading this post on the OpenLaw forum which says that DeCSS is not a circumvention device after all!!
As I understand it, a DVD contains 2 pieces of information: the actual movie, or video, which is encrypted with CSS and needs a key to decrypt. The key needed for is called the "title key" which is also stored on the DVD, and encrypted differently. To access the title key, one needs a "player key" such as the one in the Xing player.
If you recall the wording of the DMCA, it outlaws anything that circumvents effective measures to controll access to a work. But what DeCSS does is it circumvents the encryption on the title key, bypassing the need for a player key, and then uses the title key to decrypt the movie. Therefore, it is not circumventing measures to control access to the work, but measures to control access to the title key. Note how this is not against the DMCA, because it is preposterous to claim copyright over a particular large number... and the key itself is on the DVD, and signals the authorization of the copyright holder to access the work!!!
Unfortunately for us, I've read most of the transcripts of the case and I don't think this point came out in any of the evidence. It might be useful on appeal, if nothing else.
Re:I read every line of that trial, my prediction.
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My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
I agree with you that he has to rule that 2600 is in the clear for posting DeCSS. But wether its use is a violation of the law is still open to interpretation. The law says that any device used to break an "access control" measure. That term is still very ambiguous, but in my interpretation CSS is not access control, it is use control. What is access control? Access control is the sharp-eyed clerk who makes sure you don't walk off with the DVD from the store, the fancy security systems. It is the scrambling of pay-per-view cable channels. It is NOT the encryption of data on a DVD that has been purchased. The DVD is in my possetion - I paid for it! I already have "access".
I sincerely hope they will find that access is better defined as above, and not the overbroad way the MPAA seems to think.
Movies are a form of creative expression. Code (and, by extension, compiled software) is a form of creative expression. You can put a EULA on code. Or a GPL. Or a BSD license. Or whatever. So why can't you put these on some other form of creative expression? Note that all these licenses have substantial influences on what you can do with the code or the binary after it's in your hands.
Yes, but the GPL license for example weakens the traditional protections of copyright law, by using the law against itself. I agree with the purpose and even the interpretation of Copyright Law - the creator of a work has a right to make money and control its distribution. But once legally acquired, the user can do whatever they want with the work, as long as it is private. Redistribution of the work or derivatives must adhere to copyright law, which may or may not be weakened by permissions of the author. (i.e. feel free to give this to as many people as you want, as long as you publish your changes.)
The MPAA is trying to strengthen the reach of Copyright Law into where it was never meant to go - to dictate how their creative work may be used, not just how it may be distributed. I have issues with this, and I don't think I am alone.
Now you may bring up EULA for software that impose rules against reverse engineering, etc. but as far as I know the enforcability of these provisions is questionable, as it should be.
Please show me how my logic is flawed. I'd love to know how we can reap the benefits of genetic modification without screwing up the world we have today.
What would you rather have us do? Live in a static, unchanging world because anything we do might break it? Must we tread on eggshells with everything we do?
I hate to break it to you, but this is impossible. The general public isn't interested in banning technologies that have such great potential; even if our government did, other governments with less concern for their people (China?) would do it anyway.
But lets say humanity did make a collective decision to abandon research in this area. Would the world not change then? Hell no! Change in the form of mutations has been going on since life first started on this planet. Random, natural events can screw up the delicate balance of an organism's genes just as easily as a human can. And most of the time "screw it up" is what random chance does - a mutation is lethal almost all the time, has no effect in the remaining cases except for a tiny insignificant fraction that produces minutely positive, viable changes in an organism. Which are likely to be wiped out by chance before they can spread into the gene pool, anyway.
The idea is that by applying our intelligence and skills, we reduce the randomness; we promote positive, beneficial changes that could help people all over the world live in better harmony with themselves and all other life on this planet. Yes, we might make some mistakes, we can never control every single aspect of this - but then, if we don't do it, we control nothing, we leave everything up to chance, and any random mutation could be just as devastating -- except we won't have the technology to combat it.
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What your ISP (or the NAT/router box that you run at the edge of your network) *can* do is to prioritize your own bandwidth based on the urgency with which any packet needs to get somewhere.
I agree this is what the ISP should do. I'm in Canada using Rogers -- and the problem is they deprioritized BitTorrent (and only BitTorrent) so that the uplod speed was about 0.1 k/sec. Which basically makes the entire protocol useless, and makes the traffic shaping a frustration, instead of a boon, to users.
I want to play fair. I want my p2p traffic to have lower priority than my own (or my neighbour's) VOIP, web surfing, etc.
But I paid for a high-bandwidth pipe so I could use BitTorrent; I will accept a lower speed at peak times, but not their model which kills the speed ALL the time, whether the network is congested or not. And only for that one specific application - eMule, UseNet, FTP, HTTP, all work at full speeds.
Needless to say, I was fed up, switching ISPs is not an option, so I'm using uTorrent with packet encryption and everything runs well.
But the goal of QoS is defeated - my roommates and I now have to individually throttle our bittorrent clients instead of letting my router handle the QoS. The ISP can't adequately tell encrypted traffic from p2p traffic and general quality suffers. All because of an over-agressive filter.
So why then are researchers worried? Why are security experts like Ed Felten spending a third of their time with lawyers?[1] Clearly it's not as easy as you claim to dismiss frivolous lawsuits; the mere possibility of them is having a negative impact on research.
1. I don't have an internet link to this, but Michael Geist imparted this information to a Hart House audience citing a personal interview with Dr. Felten.
That's a red herring. They don't need the DMCA to hang up on your request, they always had the right to ignore you.
But before the DMCA, you were within your rights to brew your own solution to their inadequacies. Now if you try that, you get thrown in jail (see ElcomSoft).
By using their existing right to ignore you, combined with the technical and legal protections of DRMs, they are in fact creating new, arbitrary, rights for themselves.
But remember, the same thing happens when the government makes a law about terrorism, or illegal drugs, or health care, or the enviornment, or anything else.
As an aside, I think your examples are poorly chosen. I'm pretty sure the majority of slashdot readers don't support any anti-terrorism laws, or the war on drugs... precisely because of the negative consequences you mention.
That doesn't mean you won't support the law anyway, but it means that like a drug, you need to know what negative effects it might have in order to evaluate the risks.
This is a valid point -- for any law, you need to evaluate the cost/benefit ratio -- but you don't take your argument to it's natural conclusion. The problem with the DMCA (and terrorism laws, and drug laws, etc.) is that the costs are enormous, and the benefits are limited to a very few, select people (unfortunately, the very people who have the power and influence to get such laws passed).
This may be a little OT, but the lightsaber talk reminded me of a parliamentary debate I was at once... debating is a time-honoured tradition and very serious matter, but usually the university leagues have some 'fun' summer debates that are just silly. This one happened right around the time Episode I had come out...
One debate they decided to run backwards, so essentially the opposition got to build up the case for the government and proceed to destroy it, and they chose the resolution that Anakin skywalker should be anally raped by Princess Amidala with a lightsaber.
The arguments for it centered around how it was a typical hazing ritual for new Jedi Knights, it would bring him and the princess closer together, and would bring Anakin closer to the force. Arguments against were, well, it would probably kill him (or at least scar him horribly, requiring some weird life support -- oh wait...)
I just thought it was about the funniest thing ever. (yes, that may be quite sad...)
(Until the following year, when a team ran a case that a conservative and inexperienced young woman on said team should have sex with the notorious womanizer on the other team, forcing said womanizer to argue that she should not sleep with him... that was awesome...)
I agree with you that the current flat fee per month model offered by ISPs would quickly collapse at the current rapid expansion of bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer to peer, but I don't think that the ISPs will be able to solve that problem by shutting down a certain type of application. Even if they could, I don't believe they *should* be allowed to.
Any technological attempts they take at throttling / limiting traffic of one type will be met by technical changes and innovations in sharing to make it harder and harder for ISPs to differentiate 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' traffic. This just highlights the fact that the ISP should not be classifying traffic like this (the exeption may be for prioritizing things like VoIP via QoS or somesuch).
Instead they should focus on the amount of bandwidth. I would love to see a system where we paid for the bandwidth we used. That would also curb rampant filesharing as your 'free' bittorrent download might now cost you $2 of transferred bits. Such a model does not exist for residential consumers in a practical package, despite that I think it would be the most fair. No longer would the hordes of e-mail checking grandmas be subsidizing the l33t pir8 scene....
I think this is also the logical solution to the ISP's complaints of inadequate infrastructure to support the new bandwidth demands. Increase the rates at the ends of the pipes to the users who pull data or push it so you can keep up with this demand -- don't charge some weird tax for premium access to inadequate pipes! It just doesn't make sense!
If ordinary citizen 'pseudo-attorneys' cannot have a meaningful discourse about points of law, why bother with a democratic system of government to make them? Why bother with juries, if ordinary people cannot understand any part of the law? If my interpretation is somehow false -- an interpretation I arrived at by parsing the English structure of the law, and by not finding any exception or clarification elsewhere -- please feel free to correct me. I find the fact that you have not made such an argument suggestive that you cannot make one.
Since you are so enamoured with facts, I should point out that copyright infringement is not, in a legal sense, equivalent to stealing. It is a completely seperate offense. I concede the point that both stealing and copyright infringement are illegal, and many would contend immoral, but nowhere in my post did I say anything about my perceived rights vis-a-vis stealing or copyright infringement.
I did hint at the fact that I believe it was my right to space-shift legally obtained media onto the format of my choice. This, as far as I am aware, is in fact my right under something called 'fair use'.
As an aside, if I did believe I was entitled to free movies/music/latest awful TV show, I could very easily get such materials from Usenet, BitTorrent, etc. much more rapidly that somehow obtaining a physical DVD and spending the time to rip it with obscure and hard to use software like DeCSS. You may also note that the legal status of such an act of downloading (without making the media available for upload) is much more ambiguous than the clear-cut prohibition against 'circumvention'. When I download a ripped song from the Internet, I am not violating the DMCA. (IANAL, but I'm certainly open to correction if I am wrong on this).
And this really brings up the crux of the issue: laws like the DMCA allow corporations (as TFA points out) to impose further limits and control on cultural works and the technologies used to enjoy them, and bludgeon any potential innovative competitors into the ground. This is an incredible burden to bear, and the loudly proclaimed benefits -- increased protection against digital piracy -- have yet to materialize in the 8 years or so since the law was passed.
Has that exception ever successfuly been used? If I remember correctly, the DeCSS case argued exactly that, that the program fell into that exception. And look what happened -- it was deemed illegal even to link to the code, much less distribute it yourself.
Possibly because if you read the wording you quote, it permits circumventions by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to the work in question. Therefore, you are right, Joe Sixpack could claim that he is fully within his right to circumvent such protection to put his favourite DVD movie onto his video iPod, or put his iTMS purchases onto his Creative MP3 player.
That is all well and good, but Joe Sixpack has no idea how to do this from scratch -- and here's the problem -- there is no provision in the DMCA for distributing the tools for circumvention, for any reason. Thus, DeCSS is illegal, Microsoft cannot make an iTMS compatible player, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
I had my linux server handle all my p2p a while back, using MLDonkey. It's really quite nice -- supporting most of the popular p2p networks. Apparently now they have Kad support for eMule too, and you can run it all remotely via a GUI or an http client.
.iso (uhh... legal linux distros of course... *wink*) someone else had just aquired.
It let me and my roommates all shut off our personal computers overnight and saved us unknowingly re-downloading the same
I'm not running it now because I haven't found the hour or two it would take for me to reconfigure it on my recently rebuilt box (my old one got r00ted something bad -- not because of mldonkey; it was a 2 year old Gentoo box running FTP/SSH/etc. that I hadn't bothered to patch. Serves me right...)
Episode IV slower than III? Did you see the same movies I did?
I admit the 'action' scenes in IV didn't have quite the 'wow' factor with people jumping around and stuff blowing up, but it had something much more important -- characters and a plot you actually CARED about.
Whether it was more charisma from the acting or better direction, IV's plotline went from scene to scene revealing a bit of the story each time without any filler. Characters were developed. We learned of the dangers of the galaxy and depravations of an empire along with Luke.
In III, there were far too many effects without enough substance to make the audience care.
Take the opening scene of III -- a technically impressive space battle, but one that is totally uninspiring. It is introduced with some text, but what ships are whose? Why the hell is there a batttle being fought? Whose ships are whose? It's so chaotic it's hard to relate to.
Contrast that with ANH's opening scene -- instantly you know the score. Big bad empire chasing little ship. Youre in suspense. You are sucked in...
The whole movie's like that. III spends way too much time dicking around with unimportant plot points, trying (but failing) to paint a convincing picture of Anakin's slow descent to the dark side...
... until I noticed it's for AGP only cards. I got a 'cutting edge' PCI-Express 6800... which according to the article are made with only 12 pipelines. *sigh*.
:D
Well, I guess I'll just buy another card and turn on the SLI on my motherboard... hehe...
I'm trying to figure that out as well, since all their new/good trailers are being released this way. I want to save the .mov to my drive and iTunes won't let me do that... a method to find the direct link would be useful.
The difficulty is, however, that with a single player game, even an authentication method such as Steam will NEVER give you the same level of protection against piracy. In fact it could be argued that imposing these restrictions on single player games would push people TOWARDS piracy simply for ease of use.
It might have taken the warez crackers a little longer to get a pirated version of HL2 out that worked properly, but it was done rather quickly nonetheless, using a Steam emulator run locally. Ironically, such a warez version is much much more convenient to install and operate than the retail version.
With online play -- especially for MMORPGs -- where the whole purpose is to gather in a community of other gamers, the developers can control the keys to said community and charge access. It is much more costly for the 'pirates' to set up alternate communities (which would generally be inferior to the official ones), and therefore adds limits to piracy.
Past experience (e.g. copy protected-disks / CDs) shows us that authentication measures for non-value-added products like single player games tend to cause more trouble for legitimate users and hinder pirates not at all; so I question your equation; the gain in sales that would have been pirated is limited to those addicted gamers that cannot wait the extra day or two for a proper warez release, but would be offset by frustrated customers who refuse to buy / return the product. Not to mention the costs of running the authentication servers / bandwidth / customer service for this complicated scheme...
The difference: Half-Life 2 is a single player game. With a MMOG, you need to have an account since you need to pay the company for the ongoing cost of developing plot updates and maintaining servers. People accept that.
(As an aside, you can in fact transfer your licence for many MMOG games - the new owner would still have to pay subscription fees, but not the initial fee).
When a company forces you to do the same thing with a game they expect you to play on your own machine, it's a whole different story...
Yes, but if those companies are deemed illegal, what's to stop *AA from going after the open source projects...?
If lawmakers and enforcers actually started to make a distinction between infringement for profit versus sharing, we might actually get something that made sense. At the moment, they want to shut down all p2p. The companies mentioned are simply the first targets.
Actually, you should have read the article more closely. To be perfectly correct you should have directed readers to Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder...
You're right, people report crimes because they consider it harmful. I would report a murder / rape / mugging / whatever because because I emphasize with the victim and certainly don't want the perpetrator on the loose and potentially do harm to others (such as myself).
Copying software though? There's no victim. No one has had anything stolen (in the sense that they are deprived the use of something they had). The only 'crime' is that of lost opportunity - they didn't sell a copy of the software. Is this a crime against society? Do I fear for my safety or welfare because of it? No; so I won't report it.
Yes, distribution of said archives is illegal (just like "oh here, I'll just copy this new Metallica CD for you!" is illegal).
Actually, no, it's not. You can copy stuff for your friends all you want (as long as you don't charge money - it has to be "non-commercial").
Why? Because part of the cost of the CD-R/Blank tape, etc. you or your friend bought went to the RIAA because they *EXPECT* you to copy stuff for your friends. So you're paying for it already, and they have no legal or moral recourse against you for making copies.
This is the defense Napster is using. However, the scale of distribution by Napster and the fact that hard drives (the storage medium of choice for Napsterites) do not have this royalty is a tricky point. We'll have to wait and see.
Hmm... now I agree that the gov't made the right decision. But suppose for a second that they had granted it (or that in trial it ends up being so they have to remove the name)... would that not set a great precedent for any company to sue, say CyberPatrol, for blocking their site? It would be the same type of thing - a service people can chose to use blocking data from a site based on their opinion of it. (Can they do this now, I wonder?)
Typically of slashdot - and anywhere else for that matter - this disscussion has degenerated into a bipolar argument over which side, cops or portesters, is better than the other. But we cannot divide things this simply
The truth is, there are very good reasons that the protesters are crowding Philly. These reasons did not come out in this article because frankly, the author seems to be caught up in a power trip which percludes him from utilizing what little intellectual capacity he may have. Guy, it's a very bad idea to aggravate a bunch of highly trained police officers with weapons, no matter what some piece of paper drafted in Washington says, especially when you're just doing it for the sake of aggravation. Being polite and insistend gets you much further than screaming obscenities. In this situation, the police seemed to do the exact right thing.
This does not mean that in other places they behaved properly. I can very easily believe that they overstepped their bounds in many situations. Remember, the police do not serve us except on paper - they serve the existing power structure, the very power structure all these protests are against. (Though they must maintain a good image or said power structure will be undermined.) They are protesting the corruption of our governments and the out of contnrol corporate power grabs that have been so successful recently. No wonder the media and the police are doing their best to suppress attention onthese issues as much as possible.
It is a pity that uneducated, unthinking people like the author of this article are giving so many opportunities for the media to spin the police actions as justified. If the protesters behaved in a courteous manner, calmly but firmly demonstrated their views, instead of insulting everyone who does not agree with them, they might convince people to listen and agree.
Well, let's put it this way. I'd rather have the FBI read my mail and catch a child molester, pornographer or some other kind of pervert than have privacy and dangerous people loose in society. Since I'm not a criminal I've got nothing to worry about. Only criminals need to worry about a system like Carnivore.
This argument may seem to make sense at first, but there is clearly something wrong with it. I think this quote illustrates the point: "First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers.
But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users.
But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me.
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
- Alara Rogers, Aleph Press
The moral of this story is - when you start giving up freedoms you've enjoyed, you begin the slide down a slippery slope. Today they're asking for the unlimited power (if they can do it with Carnivore, they will, warrant or no) to monitor all e-mails. Tomorrow what will it be? All traffic on the Internet? Cameras in your house? Bugs in your clothes? The more you give, no matter how reasonable it seems, the more they will want to take.
And always remember, if you give something up, you should get something in return. In this case, to circumvent carnivore, all you have to do is encrypt your e-mail. The smart criminals - that is, the ones that extra measures would be useful for in the first place - would definitely do this anyway.
So we are giving up our freedom for nothing.
He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
Sorry to comment yet again on this topic, but I was reading this post on the OpenLaw forum which says that DeCSS is not a circumvention device after all!!
As I understand it, a DVD contains 2 pieces of information: the actual movie, or video, which is encrypted with CSS and needs a key to decrypt. The key needed for is called the "title key" which is also stored on the DVD, and encrypted differently. To access the title key, one needs a "player key" such as the one in the Xing player.
If you recall the wording of the DMCA, it outlaws anything that circumvents effective measures to controll access to a work. But what DeCSS does is it circumvents the encryption on the title key, bypassing the need for a player key, and then uses the title key to decrypt the movie. Therefore, it is not circumventing measures to control access to the work, but measures to control access to the title key. Note how this is not against the DMCA, because it is preposterous to claim copyright over a particular large number... and the key itself is on the DVD, and signals the authorization of the copyright holder to access the work!!!
Unfortunately for us, I've read most of the transcripts of the case and I don't think this point came out in any of the evidence. It might be useful on appeal, if nothing else.
My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
I agree with you that he has to rule that 2600 is in the clear for posting DeCSS. But wether its use is a violation of the law is still open to interpretation. The law says that any device used to break an "access control" measure. That term is still very ambiguous, but in my interpretation CSS is not access control, it is use control. What is access control? Access control is the sharp-eyed clerk who makes sure you don't walk off with the DVD from the store, the fancy security systems. It is the scrambling of pay-per-view cable channels. It is NOT the encryption of data on a DVD that has been purchased. The DVD is in my possetion - I paid for it! I already have "access".
I sincerely hope they will find that access is better defined as above, and not the overbroad way the MPAA seems to think.
Movies are a form of creative expression. Code (and, by extension, compiled software) is a form of creative expression. You can put a EULA on code. Or a GPL. Or a BSD license. Or whatever. So why can't you put these on some other form of creative expression?
Note that all these licenses have substantial influences on what you can do with the code or the binary after it's in your hands.
Yes, but the GPL license for example weakens the traditional protections of copyright law, by using the law against itself. I agree with the purpose and even the interpretation of Copyright Law - the creator of a work has a right to make money and control its distribution. But once legally acquired, the user can do whatever they want with the work, as long as it is private. Redistribution of the work or derivatives must adhere to copyright law, which may or may not be weakened by permissions of the author. (i.e. feel free to give this to as many people as you want, as long as you publish your changes.)
The MPAA is trying to strengthen the reach of Copyright Law into where it was never meant to go - to dictate how their creative work may be used, not just how it may be distributed. I have issues with this, and I don't think I am alone.
Now you may bring up EULA for software that impose rules against reverse engineering, etc. but as far as I know the enforcability of these provisions is questionable, as it should be.
Please show me how my logic is flawed. I'd love to know how we can reap the benefits of genetic modification without screwing up the world we have today.
What would you rather have us do? Live in a static, unchanging world because anything we do might break it? Must we tread on eggshells with everything we do?
I hate to break it to you, but this is impossible. The general public isn't interested in banning technologies that have such great potential; even if our government did, other governments with less concern for their people (China?) would do it anyway.
But lets say humanity did make a collective decision to abandon research in this area. Would the world not change then? Hell no! Change in the form of mutations has been going on since life first started on this planet. Random, natural events can screw up the delicate balance of an organism's genes just as easily as a human can. And most of the time "screw it up" is what random chance does - a mutation is lethal almost all the time, has no effect in the remaining cases except for a tiny insignificant fraction that produces minutely positive, viable changes in an organism. Which are likely to be wiped out by chance before they can spread into the gene pool, anyway.
The idea is that by applying our intelligence and skills, we reduce the randomness; we promote positive, beneficial changes that could help people all over the world live in better harmony with themselves and all other life on this planet. Yes, we might make some mistakes, we can never control every single aspect of this - but then, if we don't do it, we control nothing, we leave everything up to chance, and any random mutation could be just as devastating -- except we won't have the technology to combat it.