Not to mention the biggest reason - component failure!
When my VCR goes out, I can swap another one in and keep going. Same with a TV or a DVD player or a stereo or whatever. With a nifty all-in-one box, however, if my "super entertainment confluence" is at Sony or JVC awaiting desperately needed repairs due to the forced introduction of a peanut butter sandwich into the heads or something... then what am I doing in the meantime?
Other posters have spoken to the problems with vertical integration (i.e., that the manufacturer gains all sorts of abilities to discourage you from using standardized components, as they can make their main box compatible only with proprietary hardware).
We always laugh when we see one of those (or, even better, a server that states "to remain online, you must not work for law enforcement or a commercial company or tell them anything about what you see here".)
Not worth the electricity used to bring it up on the monitor, guys, for the same reason you can't put a sign outside your restaurant saying "no police allowed" to protect your back-room gambling operation. If you admit the public, you admit -the public-, not "the public minus anybody that might report me".
Remember that in any legal test of these things, you have to go in front of a judge... who is likely to take a dim view to your choice of restriction. ^_^
It's NOT just the MPAA. My company is a small movie producer/distributor that is not an MPAA member, and we've looked at doing exactly the same thing that's described in this article (well, okay, not targeting Gnutella specifically), and if we had the personnel to do it, we'd have gone ahead with it already.
We don't like getting our stuff pirated any more than the MPAA, and it hurts us a lot more; we're not a billion-dollar company that can eat the loss.
Have you even read the DMCA?
First, the MPAA does have to go to court to get identification of particular users - a subpoena is required.
A big part of the idea behind this is specifically that your identity is NOT protected when you're breaking (normal!) copyright law. They might have to jump through hoops to link Joe Fileserv at 333 Goina Way with "phatpirate24", but it should at least be possible.
If the MPAA sues for infringement and loses, guess who pays the defendant's lawyer fees? The MPAA! It's provided for under the same provision, which is a bit unusual, but what hey, it's consumer protection.
The entire point behind this, however, is NOT to sue. That's expensive, and 99.99% of the pirates out there don't have the assets to pay. But getting an ISP to enforce its terms of service, that's not expensive, and it's not "evil" in that you're putting somebody in the poorhouse. It's not like the ISP is going to complain - after all, if you're running a fileserver, you're sucking up valuable bandwidth with illegal activities.
I'm no fan of the first two sections of the DMCA, but this one was written out fairly well, and there are a lot of protections against abuse built-in.
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Not to mention the biggest reason - component failure!
When my VCR goes out, I can swap another one in and keep going. Same with a TV or a DVD player or a stereo or whatever. With a nifty all-in-one box, however, if my "super entertainment confluence" is at Sony or JVC awaiting desperately needed repairs due to the forced introduction of a peanut butter sandwich into the heads or something... then what am I doing in the meantime?
Other posters have spoken to the problems with vertical integration (i.e., that the manufacturer gains all sorts of abilities to discourage you from using standardized components, as they can make their main box compatible only with proprietary hardware).
We always laugh when we see one of those (or, even better, a server that states "to remain online, you must not work for law enforcement or a commercial company or tell them anything about what you see here".)
Not worth the electricity used to bring it up on the monitor, guys, for the same reason you can't put a sign outside your restaurant saying "no police allowed" to protect your back-room gambling operation. If you admit the public, you admit -the public-, not "the public minus anybody that might report me".
Remember that in any legal test of these things, you have to go in front of a judge... who is likely to take a dim view to your choice of restriction. ^_^
Granted - that is silly.
It's NOT just the MPAA. My company is a small movie producer/distributor that is not an MPAA member, and we've looked at doing exactly the same thing that's described in this article (well, okay, not targeting Gnutella specifically), and if we had the personnel to do it, we'd have gone ahead with it already.
We don't like getting our stuff pirated any more than the MPAA, and it hurts us a lot more; we're not a billion-dollar company that can eat the loss.
AvatarADV
Figured out the HTML tags
Have you even read the DMCA? First, the MPAA does have to go to court to get identification of particular users - a subpoena is required. A big part of the idea behind this is specifically that your identity is NOT protected when you're breaking (normal!) copyright law. They might have to jump through hoops to link Joe Fileserv at 333 Goina Way with "phatpirate24", but it should at least be possible. If the MPAA sues for infringement and loses, guess who pays the defendant's lawyer fees? The MPAA! It's provided for under the same provision, which is a bit unusual, but what hey, it's consumer protection. The entire point behind this, however, is NOT to sue. That's expensive, and 99.99% of the pirates out there don't have the assets to pay. But getting an ISP to enforce its terms of service, that's not expensive, and it's not "evil" in that you're putting somebody in the poorhouse. It's not like the ISP is going to complain - after all, if you're running a fileserver, you're sucking up valuable bandwidth with illegal activities. I'm no fan of the first two sections of the DMCA, but this one was written out fairly well, and there are a lot of protections against abuse built-in.