Not duplicating anything clears you from copyright violation.
But nothing, ever, saves you from patent violations. You can live under a rock on Mars and invent something without even knowing of the existence of intelligent species on earth, and if it's patented, you're _still_ violating the patent. A patent forbids anyone else from even having the idea.
The BIOS, needless to say, wasnt patented, and you couldnt patent software anyway in those days. Much to the annoyance of IBM, I suppose, but much to the benefit of the rest of humanity (and economy).
Oh, sure. Instead they'll drive you out of buisness before you get started by suing you up your ears for violating _their_ patents (which may be close, or the _SAME_ as yours (the GIF compression algorithms are patented by at least 3 companies IIRC, altho only Unisys has been bitching about it)). On, and then they'll throw a bunch of lawyers on getting your patents overturned. Good luck surviving that.
What patents do today has nothing to do with protecting the 'little guy'. The 'big guy' will win either way, but the patent system also protects the 'big guy' from getting undercut or outinvented by the 'little guy' by giving them a perfect legal leverage for killing the 'little guy'.
Re:What about manufacturing vs producing ideas?
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2
Small companies who do design dont _have_ to have the resources to bring the design into being. Most large companies dont even do that. That's why you _buy_ the manufacturing. Pretty much every chip design company outsources manufacturing; it just isnt worthwhile to have your own plants for most companies.
Intel did use pretty much every resource at their disposal. Fortunately, Intel does not have a monopoly marketshare, and they had no choice but to give people an option when some segments just about quit buying Intel and turned to AMD instead. Had they been even more hardline and not sold ordinary SDRAM systems, they would have priced themselves completely out of the desktop segments.
Retraining isnt an argument. People learn to navigate websites, people easily learn to use games, and those are the most UI-divergent 'applications' in existence today, far more different than Windows-vs-GNOME/KDE. Not to mention you have to 'retrain' all those people every time you upgrade MS software anyway.
If they can handle all that, they can *easily* handle doing their basic job with Linux rather than Windows.
People arent *quite* as stupid as some UI experts would have us believe (well, most people at least. The helpdesk hoggers are another matter, but they call even if their desktop looks the same as it did yesterday). Most people can easily move from one piece of software to another. They do it every day.
There are a lot of buisness plans that work well with open source. However, making money by selling distributions isnt one of them. Especially not selling distributions in an market which is as crowded as this.
Any distribution created after Redhat is pretty much doomed. Redhat does the job well enough, it has the necessary marketshare and corporate mindshare, it has the best long-term chance of survival (of the commercial dists), and it's giving back enough to the community.
The fragmentation in the distribution market does little good for the community. There is room for maybe two or three distributions total, and those would, in my opinion, be primarily Debian and Redhat. One is a not-for-profit, and one is a commercial vendor who has, since the beginning, understood that they wont make money selling free software.
SuSE has been playing far too close to the line of proprietary to be well accepted among the Free Software people and, like it or not, those are often the ones who push linux internally in corporations, the market SuSE is after.
Mandrake is nice, but began as RedHat+KDE, which aint exactly a major selling point. It has since improved and diverged, but the very diverging that makes it not-redhat makes it not-supported-by-vendors for server use. For the desktop market, what is needed isnt another distribution, it's improvement of the existing distributions. Ximian got that one right, but it remains to be seen if they can capitalize on it.
The rest of the distributions have a snowballs chance in hell of ever making any money.
Well, here they at least pay the annual fee for our cards. Um, oh, yeah, and the company can apparently get the limits on the cards raised fairly easily (that was practical when we had employees stuck in the US after 9/11 who had to pay upwards $10K for tickets).
But they're not good for much else. The company-pays type cards are usually not something the average grunt (no matter how expensive grunt) will see in their lifetime.
The goal of the media giants has nothing to do with piracy really. They want the infrastructure for pay-per-view/play, which will make their profits skyrocket beyond comprehension. Watch that movie again? Pay again. Play that song twice? Pay twice.
Piracy is a good excuse. If they can use the 'piracy threat' to force DRM technology to be adapted, it opens the way for a pay-per-view model.
Not quite. There have been several cases on this, and as far as I remember, it has gone both ways.
You _may_ be able to get out of the license in court. Unless you're in a UCITA state, in which case your politicians have been looking out for your interests really well, and ensured that you dont have rights anymore.
Re:You are not anal enough either. (IAAL)
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2
Apparently the lawyers of every company that has ever gotten notice of GPL violations from the FSF disagree with you. The reason there are no precedents is that nobody has ever dared go up against the GPL in court. All cases have been resolved with the companies deciding to comply with the GPL.
'Look at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?' - Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal history at Columbia University Law School, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation.
Nope, EULA's go beyond copyright and may do other things. They can forbid you to disclose your opinions on the product, they can forbid you to disassemble the product and they can force you to wear noseglasses while using the product. None of the restrictions in an EULA are dependent on wether or not you want to do something restricted by copyright law. They are additional restrictions, and you are (maybe, depending on a courts point of view) bound by the license if you use the product at all.
There have been several instances of people and/or companies 'getting caught'. No company or their lawyers have, in more than a decade of GPL enforcement, seen fit to challenge it in court.
For some good info on how GPL enforcement is usually done by the FSF, read this article.
'Look, at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?' - Professor Eben Moglen - FSF General Counsel
Actually, I think they all _are_ indicating something other than data. Somewhere around when we went from 300/300 baud modems, most manufacturers changed to indicate traffic activity rather than data, because it became hard to see low-level traffic. You can probably try pinging with different packet sizes over your equipment, or transmitting files with different content, for example all 1's or all 0's, and see if there is a marked difference in the reactions of the leds.
On the equipment I have, it's easy to compare the intensity of full-on leds with the transmission indication leds. If the actual data traffic was indicated on the leds, they'd have different intensity, due to them being only half-on. There is no difference in intensity, so the pulses likely indicate something else, with a delay-switchoff time.
Nah, not really these days. The few times I've checked, the LED indicators actually indicate something other than the actual data; a full packet, a certain number of bytes, a byte plus a switchoff delay time, because otherwise it has become a sortof weird indicator where you can barely see traffic if it's low density.
If it's the preferred form for modifying the source, you're ok. If you modify the code in another language and then give out.ASM files, you're not ok.
Re:Don't be so sure.
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes, it does:
'The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.'
Incomprehensible gobbledygook does not the preferred form make, any more than machine code.
What a lot of people appear to miss a lot of the time is that the GPL is _not_ one of those 'thrown together in a week' opensource licenses. It was developed over several years, and reviewed and rereviewed by the FSF legal counsel. It doesnt have holes like this.
Newbie lawyers looking at it for a few hours always misinterpret it. They dont have the technical savvy, nor the persistence to grasp the actual meaning and how thorough the GPL actually is when it comes to accomplishing its task.
The current MySQL AB/Nusphere legal issue isnt the first court case on the GPL because nobody has tried to violate the GPL before. It's because everyone else has realized they dont have a chance in court, and have given up rather than trying to persue a case which their lawyers have eventually realized they will lose.
Yes, it is possible, once you get an analog output somewhere.
But more and more equipment will go to fiber and digital transmission. Even things like speakers. Pure audio will be easier to record over an analog line; with video you already have Macrovision preventing PVR's from recording protected content today (this is possible to bypass tho, altho the de-macrovision devices are illegal).
But it's possible they'll go all the way and make any personal recording possibilities severly crippled through lower bitrates. That solves two problems for the entertainment industry; it wont be possible to make personal over-analog copies of good quality, nor will it be possible for artists or independent filmmakers to produce cheap good-quality songs, films or videos without signing with the big labels.
There are other options too tho; they could supply all legal recording devices with personal watermarking algorithms that would 'protect' your right to your own recordings (with the interesting side effect that it would be possible to trace illegal recordings back to you).
It will never become impossible to copy, but the idea is to make it close to impossible for the average consumer. And that can be done.
Yes, it's possible and quite simple. You just need the cooperation from several strong buisnesses to do it.
You have an OS that will refuse to boot without a cryptographic handshake with the BIOS. The BIOS verifies that the OS is untampered with, the OS verifies that the BIOS is legit. Then you have additional handshakes between CPU, BIOS and, for example, the northbridge on the motherboard. Again, any component fails its check and the computer wont boot. When you're booted up, you have handshakes and verification of legit drivers for the hardware, and additional checks that it hasnt been tampered with. And then the OS will simply refuse to duplicate, transmit, or do anything else with a file you cant prove you own. This will be followed by pay-per-play from the media industry.
It will be much harder to upgrade things, but most consumers dont really upgrade that often anyway.
Of course, it requires the will from the various involved parties to partake in such a system. But Microsoft will probably tag along (after all, that's a good way to kill off Linux), and they could easily pressure most hardware vendors to do so too (ship any unprotected hardware and we'll make sure windows doesnt run on your hardware at all).
There are ways around it, but they will probably involve the use of, by then, illegal and very expensive hardware.
Mr. Raskin needs to use a multiuser machine some time. On our machines *I* get *my* setup and skins and nobody else has any buisness logging in as me, or using a computer where I am logged in. And everyone else gets their own customized setup on their accounts.
An intuitive interface that solves that problem is easy to design. A big password box, and a big 'permission denied' and he wont be confused when he tries to use someone elses account.
DRM doesnt work that way. How are you going to 'crack' WinXP+1 when your hardware performs a cryptographic integrity check on it before it even starts booting? How are you going to flash a new bios that will boot the 'unlocked' WinXP+1 when your motherboards northbridge performs a cryptographic handshake with the BIOS to ensure it hasnt been illegally reflashed?
If this passes into law, it's the end. You'll have to friggin build your own computer from the friggin components to get a device that will even be able to boot Linux.
Needless to say, building your own computer, eventually down to designing your own motherboard and CPU is a bit out of most peoples (and small nations) league. If hardware vendors are forced to go the DRM route (which, needless to say, no consumers want), it's the end of computers as the flexible devices we know them today.
Well, that will pretty much be accomplished if this comes to pass. Mandatory copy protection equals you have to have integrity handshake between OS and hardware, which means no more user modifiable source code to the OS's...
Windows 2000 hasnt even been out long enough to be called 'stable'. Stable is when your machine is up for years. Years and years. Under heavy multiple application use. A few months isnt stable. A year between expected needed reboots is not acceptable either.
I dont know any decent MS admin who doesnt reboot the machines on schedules, or who consolidates multiple applications on a machine. You cant do it without risking random crashes, because W2K isnt even close to anything resembling 'stable'.
Yep, that's pretty much it. They ask Microsoft to implement it, then Microsoft refuses to ship windows to any hardware vendors who arent implementing (impossible to upgrade with unsigned) DRM Bioses on all their machines (to prevent copying of Windows, of course). The DRM bios will not boot an OS that cant give a cryptograpical integrity handshake and check at boot (no hacking your PC please). The DRM Windows OS wont play (much less allow copying of) copyprotected works, unless it can verify your ownership.
Goal achieved. The BIOSes wont let Linux boot on any PC available in a store anymore, you cant upgrade the BIOS to a non-DRM enabled one you'll fry the motherboard. Maybe you'll be able to find Linux-only motherboards from some unafraid manufacturer who isnt scared of getting killed off by MS, but they will probably be illegal anyway (DMCA copyright circumvention device).
Re:What about things that P2P doesn't make sense f
on
HTTP's Days Numbered
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· Score: 2
You have to take into account Microsofts vision of the internet being a Single System Image (running MS distributed Total World Domination protocol, of course), with nodes being partitioned on this single system image (this is their 10-20 year plan).
Permanent connection states are useful in that context. Over rpcish services, or http, it would be very difficult to gain the form of control over connecting machines that a single system image would require, since much of it by design is user request oriented. Two way RPC calls wont go through corporate firewalls in the necessary fashion. So they need to push into a different way of communication to loosen up the control that corporations want to retain over their networks and consumers to some extent want to retain over their PC's. Making p2p long-term connections ubiquitous would lay the ground for that in the way they need.
True, the blinking 12 problem wont really change, and it's not too bad; the non-working VCR is a bit worse and more insideous, I think. It affects people who arent usually put off by a manual. The problem here is that it isnt even documented.
Heck, I went through the same thing, and bought a new TV, since my old one got a really crappy picture when playing store-bought videos on my newer VCR. Even had the VCR in for service. Not even the techs there figured that one out... until I found out about Macrovision and realized I'd been screwed without anyone telling me.
The MPAA is without a doubt motivated by irrational fear, paranoia, greed and control need, but unless they're forced to disclose, through salesmen and things like being forced to put a big 'This Device Will Not Work With Your VCR" stickers on that, and it's discussed in media and with politicians, and they get regulated by the FCC and similar, I believe they are likely to get away with moving towards their pay-per-view goal this time.
Of course. It's probably quite easy. It's also, today, illegal. In a few years, with the amount of lobbying the RIAA/MPAA does, it will probably be considered a capital crime to own a device which can do this.
Wont it be fun to find yourself on the recieving end of 'the War on Piracy'?
Slashdot Mirror
You are mistaken.
Not duplicating anything clears you from copyright violation.
But nothing, ever, saves you from patent violations. You can live under a rock on Mars and invent something without even knowing of the existence of intelligent species on earth, and if it's patented, you're _still_ violating the patent. A patent forbids anyone else from even having the idea.
The BIOS, needless to say, wasnt patented, and you couldnt patent software anyway in those days. Much to the annoyance of IBM, I suppose, but much to the benefit of the rest of humanity (and economy).
Oh, sure. Instead they'll drive you out of buisness before you get started by suing you up your ears for violating _their_ patents (which may be close, or the _SAME_ as yours (the GIF compression algorithms are patented by at least 3 companies IIRC, altho only Unisys has been bitching about it)). On, and then they'll throw a bunch of lawyers on getting your patents overturned. Good luck surviving that.
What patents do today has nothing to do with protecting the 'little guy'. The 'big guy' will win either way, but the patent system also protects the 'big guy' from getting undercut or outinvented by the 'little guy' by giving them a perfect legal leverage for killing the 'little guy'.
Small companies who do design dont _have_ to have the resources to bring the design into being. Most large companies dont even do that. That's why you _buy_ the manufacturing. Pretty much every chip design company outsources manufacturing; it just isnt worthwhile to have your own plants for most companies.
Intel did use pretty much every resource at their disposal. Fortunately, Intel does not have a monopoly marketshare, and they had no choice but to give people an option when some segments just about quit buying Intel and turned to AMD instead. Had they been even more hardline and not sold ordinary SDRAM systems, they would have priced themselves completely out of the desktop segments.
Retraining isnt an argument. People learn to navigate websites, people easily learn to use games, and those are the most UI-divergent 'applications' in existence today, far more different than Windows-vs-GNOME/KDE. Not to mention you have to 'retrain' all those people every time you upgrade MS software anyway.
If they can handle all that, they can *easily* handle doing their basic job with Linux rather than Windows.
People arent *quite* as stupid as some UI experts would have us believe (well, most people at least. The helpdesk hoggers are another matter, but they call even if their desktop looks the same as it did yesterday). Most people can easily move from one piece of software to another. They do it every day.
There are a lot of buisness plans that work well with open source. However, making money by selling distributions isnt one of them. Especially not selling distributions in an market which is as crowded as this.
Any distribution created after Redhat is pretty much doomed. Redhat does the job well enough, it has the necessary marketshare and corporate mindshare, it has the best long-term chance of survival (of the commercial dists), and it's giving back enough to the community.
The fragmentation in the distribution market does little good for the community. There is room for maybe two or three distributions total, and those would, in my opinion, be primarily Debian and Redhat. One is a not-for-profit, and one is a commercial vendor who has, since the beginning, understood that they wont make money selling free software.
SuSE has been playing far too close to the line of proprietary to be well accepted among the Free Software people and, like it or not, those are often the ones who push linux internally in corporations, the market SuSE is after.
Mandrake is nice, but began as RedHat+KDE, which aint exactly a major selling point. It has since improved and diverged, but the very diverging that makes it not-redhat makes it not-supported-by-vendors for server use. For the desktop market, what is needed isnt another distribution, it's improvement of the existing distributions. Ximian got that one right, but it remains to be seen if they can capitalize on it.
The rest of the distributions have a snowballs chance in hell of ever making any money.
Well, here they at least pay the annual fee for our cards. Um, oh, yeah, and the company can apparently get the limits on the cards raised fairly easily (that was practical when we had employees stuck in the US after 9/11 who had to pay upwards $10K for tickets).
But they're not good for much else. The company-pays type cards are usually not something the average grunt (no matter how expensive grunt) will see in their lifetime.
The goal of the media giants has nothing to do with piracy really. They want the infrastructure for pay-per-view/play, which will make their profits skyrocket beyond comprehension. Watch that movie again? Pay again. Play that song twice? Pay twice.
Piracy is a good excuse. If they can use the 'piracy threat' to force DRM technology to be adapted, it opens the way for a pay-per-view model.
Not quite. There have been several cases on this, and as far as I remember, it has gone both ways.
You _may_ be able to get out of the license in court. Unless you're in a UCITA state, in which case your politicians have been looking out for your interests really well, and ensured that you dont have rights anymore.
Apparently the lawyers of every company that has ever gotten notice of GPL violations from the FSF disagree with you. The reason there are no precedents is that nobody has ever dared go up against the GPL in court. All cases have been resolved with the companies deciding to comply with the GPL.
'Look at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?' - Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal history at Columbia University Law School, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation.
Nope, EULA's go beyond copyright and may do other things. They can forbid you to disclose your opinions on the product, they can forbid you to disassemble the product and they can force you to wear noseglasses while using the product. None of the restrictions in an EULA are dependent on wether or not you want to do something restricted by copyright law. They are additional restrictions, and you are (maybe, depending on a courts point of view) bound by the license if you use the product at all.
For some good info on how GPL enforcement is usually done by the FSF, read this article.
'Look, at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?' - Professor Eben Moglen - FSF General Counsel
Actually, I think they all _are_ indicating something other than data. Somewhere around when we went from 300/300 baud modems, most manufacturers changed to indicate traffic activity rather than data, because it became hard to see low-level traffic. You can probably try pinging with different packet sizes over your equipment, or transmitting files with different content, for example all 1's or all 0's, and see if there is a marked difference in the reactions of the leds.
On the equipment I have, it's easy to compare the intensity of full-on leds with the transmission indication leds. If the actual data traffic was indicated on the leds, they'd have different intensity, due to them being only half-on. There is no difference in intensity, so the pulses likely indicate something else, with a delay-switchoff time.
Nah, not really these days. The few times I've checked, the LED indicators actually indicate something other than the actual data; a full packet, a certain number of bytes, a byte plus a switchoff delay time, because otherwise it has become a sortof weird indicator where you can barely see traffic if it's low density.
So I think the risks are a bit outdated.
If it's the preferred form for modifying the source, you're ok. If you modify the code in another language and then give out .ASM files, you're not ok.
Yes, it does:
'The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.'
Incomprehensible gobbledygook does not the preferred form make, any more than machine code.
What a lot of people appear to miss a lot of the time is that the GPL is _not_ one of those 'thrown together in a week' opensource licenses. It was developed over several years, and reviewed and rereviewed by the FSF legal counsel. It doesnt have holes like this.
Newbie lawyers looking at it for a few hours always misinterpret it. They dont have the technical savvy, nor the persistence to grasp the actual meaning and how thorough the GPL actually is when it comes to accomplishing its task.
The current MySQL AB/Nusphere legal issue isnt the first court case on the GPL because nobody has tried to violate the GPL before. It's because everyone else has realized they dont have a chance in court, and have given up rather than trying to persue a case which their lawyers have eventually realized they will lose.
Yes, it is possible, once you get an analog output somewhere.
But more and more equipment will go to fiber and digital transmission. Even things like speakers. Pure audio will be easier to record over an analog line; with video you already have Macrovision preventing PVR's from recording protected content today (this is possible to bypass tho, altho the de-macrovision devices are illegal).
But it's possible they'll go all the way and make any personal recording possibilities severly crippled through lower bitrates. That solves two problems for the entertainment industry; it wont be possible to make personal over-analog copies of good quality, nor will it be possible for artists or independent filmmakers to produce cheap good-quality songs, films or videos without signing with the big labels.
There are other options too tho; they could supply all legal recording devices with personal watermarking algorithms that would 'protect' your right to your own recordings (with the interesting side effect that it would be possible to trace illegal recordings back to you).
It will never become impossible to copy, but the idea is to make it close to impossible for the average consumer. And that can be done.
Yes, it's possible and quite simple. You just need the cooperation from several strong buisnesses to do it.
You have an OS that will refuse to boot without a cryptographic handshake with the BIOS. The BIOS verifies that the OS is untampered with, the OS verifies that the BIOS is legit. Then you have additional handshakes between CPU, BIOS and, for example, the northbridge on the motherboard. Again, any component fails its check and the computer wont boot. When you're booted up, you have handshakes and verification of legit drivers for the hardware, and additional checks that it hasnt been tampered with. And then the OS will simply refuse to duplicate, transmit, or do anything else with a file you cant prove you own. This will be followed by pay-per-play from the media industry.
It will be much harder to upgrade things, but most consumers dont really upgrade that often anyway.
Of course, it requires the will from the various involved parties to partake in such a system. But Microsoft will probably tag along (after all, that's a good way to kill off Linux), and they could easily pressure most hardware vendors to do so too (ship any unprotected hardware and we'll make sure windows doesnt run on your hardware at all).
There are ways around it, but they will probably involve the use of, by then, illegal and very expensive hardware.
Mr. Raskin needs to use a multiuser machine some time. On our machines *I* get *my* setup and skins and nobody else has any buisness logging in as me, or using a computer where I am logged in. And everyone else gets their own customized setup on their accounts.
An intuitive interface that solves that problem is easy to design. A big password box, and a big 'permission denied' and he wont be confused when he tries to use someone elses account.
DRM doesnt work that way. How are you going to 'crack' WinXP+1 when your hardware performs a cryptographic integrity check on it before it even starts booting? How are you going to flash a new bios that will boot the 'unlocked' WinXP+1 when your motherboards northbridge performs a cryptographic handshake with the BIOS to ensure it hasnt been illegally reflashed?
If this passes into law, it's the end. You'll have to friggin build your own computer from the friggin components to get a device that will even be able to boot Linux.
Needless to say, building your own computer, eventually down to designing your own motherboard and CPU is a bit out of most peoples (and small nations) league. If hardware vendors are forced to go the DRM route (which, needless to say, no consumers want), it's the end of computers as the flexible devices we know them today.
Well, that will pretty much be accomplished if this comes to pass. Mandatory copy protection equals you have to have integrity handshake between OS and hardware, which means no more user modifiable source code to the OS's...
Windows 2000 hasnt even been out long enough to be called 'stable'. Stable is when your machine is up for years. Years and years. Under heavy multiple application use. A few months isnt stable. A year between expected needed reboots is not acceptable either.
I dont know any decent MS admin who doesnt reboot the machines on schedules, or who consolidates multiple applications on a machine. You cant do it without risking random crashes, because W2K isnt even close to anything resembling 'stable'.
Yep, that's pretty much it. They ask Microsoft to implement it, then Microsoft refuses to ship windows to any hardware vendors who arent implementing (impossible to upgrade with unsigned) DRM Bioses on all their machines (to prevent copying of Windows, of course). The DRM bios will not boot an OS that cant give a cryptograpical integrity handshake and check at boot (no hacking your PC please). The DRM Windows OS wont play (much less allow copying of) copyprotected works, unless it can verify your ownership.
Goal achieved. The BIOSes wont let Linux boot on any PC available in a store anymore, you cant upgrade the BIOS to a non-DRM enabled one you'll fry the motherboard. Maybe you'll be able to find Linux-only motherboards from some unafraid manufacturer who isnt scared of getting killed off by MS, but they will probably be illegal anyway (DMCA copyright circumvention device).
You have to take into account Microsofts vision of the internet being a Single System Image (running MS distributed Total World Domination protocol, of course), with nodes being partitioned on this single system image (this is their 10-20 year plan).
Permanent connection states are useful in that context. Over rpcish services, or http, it would be very difficult to gain the form of control over connecting machines that a single system image would require, since much of it by design is user request oriented. Two way RPC calls wont go through corporate firewalls in the necessary fashion. So they need to push into a different way of communication to loosen up the control that corporations want to retain over their networks and consumers to some extent want to retain over their PC's. Making p2p long-term connections ubiquitous would lay the ground for that in the way they need.
True, the blinking 12 problem wont really change, and it's not too bad; the non-working VCR is a bit worse and more insideous, I think. It affects people who arent usually put off by a manual. The problem here is that it isnt even documented.
Heck, I went through the same thing, and bought a new TV, since my old one got a really crappy picture when playing store-bought videos on my newer VCR. Even had the VCR in for service. Not even the techs there figured that one out... until I found out about Macrovision and realized I'd been screwed without anyone telling me.
The MPAA is without a doubt motivated by irrational fear, paranoia, greed and control need, but unless they're forced to disclose, through salesmen and things like being forced to put a big 'This Device Will Not Work With Your VCR" stickers on that, and it's discussed in media and with politicians, and they get regulated by the FCC and similar, I believe they are likely to get away with moving towards their pay-per-view goal this time.
Of course. It's probably quite easy. It's also, today, illegal. In a few years, with the amount of lobbying the RIAA/MPAA does, it will probably be considered a capital crime to own a device which can do this.
Wont it be fun to find yourself on the recieving end of 'the War on Piracy'?