we'll just BUY THEM OUT and give away loads of free movies to our customers!"???
Err, Sony is one of those "movie people". And I think they're part of the DVD technology cartel, so they've made their choice already: rather than give away free movies (which they can do if they want) they put copy protection into the DVD spec.
I'd also point out that last year AOL/Time Warner alone pulled down $38 billion US. Why in the world would you spend the kind of cash it would take to buy them out, just to give away the store? That's crazy talk. If they tried it their shareholders would have everyone on the board defenestrated.
I hadn't even thought about people who assemble their own PC's, but I was going to ask how any singular government could regulate PC's built in countries other than their own.
Import restrictions. The U.S. does it now with radio scanners - I'm not allowed to purchase a scanner that can recieve the cellular bands, although such things are built (and are legal) in other countries. Furthermore it's illegal to import a scanner that's easily modified to restore those bands.
(PS - anyone know of an internet source that doesn't ask questions?:-)
They might be able to add something into a specific hardware component, but not directly into the motheboard...
I guess you didn't hear about the CPU identifier Intel put in their Pentiums. A big row was raised about it, but maybe the MPAA, RIAA et al, with their lobbying money, can raise a bigger one.
And my Dell laptop has something in there, I think in the BIOS, that carries a Dell ID. I don't know if that's hackable or not.
A lot of DVD players are sold exactly because they allow you to mess with the region coding.
Oh absolutely - in fact I own an Aphex 600 for just such a reason. And IIRC the MPAA threatened to drop the million ton sledgehammer on Aphex if they didn't cut it out RIGHT NOW, and Aphex folded. (Yeah, I know you can get hacked flash updates, I imagine non-flashable, or only MPAA authentic flashable will be part of the spec too).
I'd also like to point out that we have DeCSS not because of some terribly clever hacker work, but (again IIRC) because some driver manufacturer didn't hide their key the way they should. Had that not happened you probably still wouldn't be able to watch DVDs under Linux.
Now I have full faith and confidence in the hacker community to get past this BS (eventually), but I also feel the challenges will get more and more difficult, alas.
What incentive could companies posisbly have to add this to their products?
What incentive is there to put region coding in a DVD player?
Oh, that's right - it's part of the spec. If you want to license the DVD technology you have to agree that you'll honor region coding.
There's your answer - the copy protection will be part and parcel of whatever new nifty whiz-bang thing that you can't continue living without (say, HDTV maybe) and the manufacturers won't have a choice.
And rest assured anything that ain't Wintel or Mac will surely get screwed.
[For the record, systems are in place to track usage, and people are punished for looking up porn n stuff... but there's no censorship or filtering.]
Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not picking up on the fine distinction between "no censorship" and "punishment if you look at the wrong stuff". It seems to me that the threat of punishment is the filter.
That's kinda like saying there's no speed limit on this road, but if we catch you going too fast we'll fine you.
I think you are missing the point. The point is that ATM processing is an order of magnitude lower than paper check processing.
If I'm missing the point then you're missing the big picture. Let's say it costs the bank $0.02 to process a check, and $0.0002 to process an ATM transaction. Now whack the customer two bucks for the ATM access, and - well DAMN! The bank seems to be making money hand over fist on the ATM!
The downside would be that it's a cost to the customer that the check doesn't carry, but the customers WILL pay! The convenience of being able to stick a plastic card into a slot at any time, pretty much any where, punch a few buttons and get some universally negotiable Federal Reserve Notes out another slot is worth the two bucks to most people.
P.S. We (speeders) also go well BELOW the speed limit during lower friction conditions (rain, snow), which is unlike the law-abiding citizens (ice on road but I don't care, its legal...)
Geebus, what state are you from? In Ohio there's this concept of "unsafe speed for the conditions" - which means your ass can be nailed for going the speed limit during rain/snow/ice/etc.
You just keep on speeding, and I'll keep cashing those fat car insurance dividend checks.
You've already made your decision obviously - what I object to is your rationalizing that because you can't get your anime fix it's perfectly acceptable and right that you should pirate it.
There is another answer, which is legal and moral: Get over it. The world does not owe you entertainment.
Yet, I can still buy paper checks for about $0.02 USD each and have unlimited free checking, but to use my ATM card it costs me $1.00 USD each time I use it + $ ?.?? USD from the bank who's ATM I'm using (some places as high as $5.00 USD) for each transaction I make with the silly thing.
You have "unlimited free checking" and you don't understand why the bank is charging you for using the ATM card?
If you use your card quite a bit you might want to find out how much a "free ATM" monthly-fee account would cost. You might save a couple bucks
TV, movie, and video producers - get your asses together and make your products available to anyone and everyone in the world at the same price simultaneously (within a week of each other),
Why? Their scheme is working beautifully! Let's say some anime you really liked was available in the US, but it costs 15% more than what the locals pay for it. Would you fork over the dough?
The market sets the price. I see no reason to expect that to change.
or quit your bitching. It ain't piracy if it ain't available in the first place.
Oh please. Lack of supply doesn't justify piracy any more than it justifies your going to Japan and holding up an anime store.
Unfortunately in the US, cretinous tinfoil-hat-wearers have decided that a speed camera infringes their privacy by taking a photo of them speeding, so the police can only use handheld cameras to catch speeders.
I don't know about speeding, but I understand why there's so much resentment to the stoplight cams that catch people running red lights: When they're installed at intersections the installer will set the yellow-light time from 3 seconds down to 2. So people who are used to the yellow light being on for 3 seconds will get a nasty surprise when the light turns red exactly at the moment their car crosses the line.
And the city (and the manufacturer of the device who gets a cut from every ticket) makes tons of money.
The media companies still have their heads in the sand, they need to wake up and see that the world's a small place now.
Ahh, but they do know this - that's why they put the region codes in there in the first place: different regions have different demand for U.S. content. So they have to sell low where there's not much demand, but they can crank up the price where there's a real craving. In order to keep the big-demand people from buying the low-demand (cheaper) disks, in go the region codes.
These media people are pricks, but they're smart pricks.
I doubt there's a correlation between speeding and insurance risk.
However, I am certain there's a correlation between bad driving skills and insurance risk. Pity it's a little tougher to test for that.
Part of being a skillfull driver is being constantly aware of conditions. Like, say, the speed limit for the stretch of road you're on. See, there is a correlation!
....how my browser is broken. I'm guessing it has something to do with the length of the URL in this snippet from the HTML:
<FONT SIZE="2"><B>from the complaints-department dept.</B></FONT><BR >Gryphon writes: <i>"The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a citizen <A HREF="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAM ArticleHTMLTemplate/C,B/20020221/wscoc2102?hub=hom eBN&tf=tgam%252Frealtime%252Ffullstory.html&cf=tga m/realtime/config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerato r&slug=wscoc2102&date=20020221&archive=RTGAM&site= Front&ad_page_name=breakingnews"></A> with the products or services of a company; in this case, an insurance company. This raises some interesting questions: does this extend to posting benchmarks of computer applications? Dissatisfaction with application security holes? Strike one for the little guy in Canada -- and maybe move here if you want to avoid the DMCA?;)"</i>
I'm using IE 6.blahblahblah.
You may now commence the heckling and finger wagging. And while you're at it, a link to a decent WinXP capable browser that can render this correctly would be darned decent of ya.
Of course, Robot Wars was adapted from robot combat sports that had already been going on in the US without TV broatcasts, but everything comes from something.
There are a good number of people who believe it wasn't so much "adapted" as shamelessly stolen.
Seeing as Battlebots was created by a couple of early US Robot Wars competitors, I think it's much closer to the roots. However, the English show has much charm, what with it's "house robots".
Where does the law allow Nintendo to make this demand?
Give me all your money now.
There. I've just made a demand of you. Where in the law does it say I'm not allowed to do this? Likewise, there's no law that keeps you from telling me to take a flying leap.
The cartridges are around $100 dollars each, but one 64Mbit Flash cartridge comes with the Flash Linker.
At first I thought that if NOA got $10/cart royalty maybe this whole thing could be made legit - then I realized you'd really only need one cartridge (or at most one of each "size") since you're storing the ROM images on your PC. It just a little PITA to have to connect to the PC every time you want to play a different game.
Can't say I blame NOA for getting pissed about this.
Because there's a great deal of risk involved in promoting musicians, the recording industry demands a very high rate of return.
I'm going to ask the very stupid but very obvious question: Why does the artist have to eat this risk? The artist's payoff (should the album be a huge success) doesn't seem to be worth the effort. There's no parity.
How about this model: I produce a CD full of songs. I sell a one year exclusive license to the record label to produce up to 100,000 copies of each song on this CD, for which they will pay me $200,000 dollars. The label can do with these copies whatever they want: sell them, give them away, put'em on e-Bay, drop'em in a landfill, I don't care. If they want to spend millions promoting their product (the CD), that's their business, their risk and their potential reward. I got my cash, I'm happy.
If I hack a ReplayTV (I'd want the larger hard drive), what's to keep them from detecting the hack and remotely disabling it. Leaving me with a $1K brick.
Why would they want to disable your hard drive? It's no skin of their corporate nose if you upgrade your unit. Keep in mind that PVRs aren't widely in use yet, they're very much an "early adopter" / geek item, and this is a delicate time for the companies. They don't want to turn off their hard-core customers, who will give word-of-mouth advertising for them.
What I'm worried about is sooner or later they're going to lose one of these lawsuits, and they'll be forced to disable 'net sharing and/or commercial skip. And possibly move against the hacks that are pulling shows off the unit (and then those shows get posted to Usenet)...
I predict one or more of these will happen in the next six months.
One question, what's the quality like on these thingsa? Is the picture the same? Worse? Sound?
There are different recording modes (like a VCR), from crappy to great. The less crap you want, the more hard drive space you burn.
The lowest quality is pretty good (IMO) except when there's a lot of movement on the screen - say, a shot of Niagra Falls, or a fast pan - then the artifacts break up the picture very badly.
However, most of the stuff I record on the Replay I'm gonna watch and then dump anyhow (Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars, Battlebots, etc). For this purpose - time shifting - I think the extended mode is just fine. If I recorded a movie I really liked I'd probably buy it on DVD anyway, to get a great copy.
Audio (again, at extented mode) is good enough for
"watching TV". I don't think I'd want to record a concert on it, though.
Slashdot Mirror
we'll just BUY THEM OUT and give away loads of free movies to our customers!"???
Err, Sony is one of those "movie people". And I think they're part of the DVD technology cartel, so they've made their choice already: rather than give away free movies (which they can do if they want) they put copy protection into the DVD spec.
I'd also point out that last year AOL/Time Warner alone pulled down $38 billion US. Why in the world would you spend the kind of cash it would take to buy them out, just to give away the store? That's crazy talk. If they tried it their shareholders would have everyone on the board defenestrated.
I hadn't even thought about people who assemble their own PC's, but I was going to ask how any singular government could regulate PC's built in countries other than their own.
:-)
Import restrictions. The U.S. does it now with radio scanners - I'm not allowed to purchase a scanner that can recieve the cellular bands, although such things are built (and are legal) in other countries. Furthermore it's illegal to import a scanner that's easily modified to restore those bands.
(PS - anyone know of an internet source that doesn't ask questions?
The thing is PCs are an open platform.
Today. What will they be like in ten years?
They might be able to add something into a specific hardware component, but not directly into the motheboard...
I guess you didn't hear about the CPU identifier Intel put in their Pentiums. A big row was raised about it, but maybe the MPAA, RIAA et al, with their lobbying money, can raise a bigger one.
And my Dell laptop has something in there, I think in the BIOS, that carries a Dell ID. I don't know if that's hackable or not.
A lot of DVD players are sold exactly because they allow you to mess with the region coding.
Oh absolutely - in fact I own an Aphex 600 for just such a reason. And IIRC the MPAA threatened to drop the million ton sledgehammer on Aphex if they didn't cut it out RIGHT NOW, and Aphex folded. (Yeah, I know you can get hacked flash updates, I imagine non-flashable, or only MPAA authentic flashable will be part of the spec too).
I'd also like to point out that we have DeCSS not because of some terribly clever hacker work, but (again IIRC) because some driver manufacturer didn't hide their key the way they should. Had that not happened you probably still wouldn't be able to watch DVDs under Linux.
Now I have full faith and confidence in the hacker community to get past this BS (eventually), but I also feel the challenges will get more and more difficult, alas.
And yet, here in Sweden at least, region-free DVD players are outselling those that honour region coding.
I don't think Sweden is quite under the oppressive yoke of the MPAA.
Yet.
What incentive could companies posisbly have to add this to their products?
What incentive is there to put region coding in a DVD player?
Oh, that's right - it's part of the spec. If you want to license the DVD technology you have to agree that you'll honor region coding.
There's your answer - the copy protection will be part and parcel of whatever new nifty whiz-bang thing that you can't continue living without (say, HDTV maybe) and the manufacturers won't have a choice.
And rest assured anything that ain't Wintel or Mac will surely get screwed.
[For the record, systems are in place to track usage, and people are punished for looking up porn n stuff... but there's no censorship or filtering.]
Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not picking up on the fine distinction between "no censorship" and "punishment if you look at the wrong stuff". It seems to me that the threat of punishment is the filter.
That's kinda like saying there's no speed limit on this road, but if we catch you going too fast we'll fine you.
I think you are missing the point. The point is that ATM processing is an order of magnitude lower than paper check processing.
If I'm missing the point then you're missing the big picture. Let's say it costs the bank $0.02 to process a check, and $0.0002 to process an ATM transaction. Now whack the customer two bucks for the ATM access, and - well DAMN! The bank seems to be making money hand over fist on the ATM!
The downside would be that it's a cost to the customer that the check doesn't carry, but the customers WILL pay! The convenience of being able to stick a plastic card into a slot at any time, pretty much any where, punch a few buttons and get some universally negotiable Federal Reserve Notes out another slot is worth the two bucks to most people.
So it's win-win all around.
P.S. We (speeders) also go well BELOW the speed limit during lower friction conditions (rain, snow), which is unlike the law-abiding citizens (ice on road but I don't care, its legal...)
Geebus, what state are you from? In Ohio there's this concept of "unsafe speed for the conditions" - which means your ass can be nailed for going the speed limit during rain/snow/ice/etc.
You just keep on speeding, and I'll keep cashing those fat car insurance dividend checks.
What to do, what to do...
You've already made your decision obviously - what I object to is your rationalizing that because you can't get your anime fix it's perfectly acceptable and right that you should pirate it.
There is another answer, which is legal and moral: Get over it. The world does not owe you entertainment.
Yet, I can still buy paper checks for about $0.02 USD each and have unlimited free checking, but to use my ATM card it costs me $1.00 USD each time I use it + $ ?.?? USD from the bank who's ATM I'm using (some places as high as $5.00 USD) for each transaction I make with the silly thing.
You have "unlimited free checking" and you don't understand why the bank is charging you for using the ATM card?
If you use your card quite a bit you might want to find out how much a "free ATM" monthly-fee account would cost. You might save a couple bucks
TV, movie, and video producers - get your asses together and make your products available to anyone and everyone in the world at the same price simultaneously (within a week of each other),
Why? Their scheme is working beautifully! Let's say some anime you really liked was available in the US, but it costs 15% more than what the locals pay for it. Would you fork over the dough?
The market sets the price. I see no reason to expect that to change.
or quit your bitching. It ain't piracy if it ain't available in the first place.
Oh please. Lack of supply doesn't justify piracy any more than it justifies your going to Japan and holding up an anime store.
The only reason the US has so many lawsuits is because it's populus is sue happy. Don't blame the messengers, they are just meeting the demand.
There's a very old saying: If a town has one lawyer, he'll go hungry. If it has two they'll be rich.
Unfortunately in the US, cretinous tinfoil-hat-wearers have decided that a speed camera infringes their privacy by taking a photo of them speeding, so the police can only use handheld cameras to catch speeders.
I don't know about speeding, but I understand why there's so much resentment to the stoplight cams that catch people running red lights: When they're installed at intersections the installer will set the yellow-light time from 3 seconds down to 2. So people who are used to the yellow light being on for 3 seconds will get a nasty surprise when the light turns red exactly at the moment their car crosses the line.
And the city (and the manufacturer of the device who gets a cut from every ticket) makes tons of money.
The media companies still have their heads in the sand, they need to wake up and see that the world's a small place now.
Ahh, but they do know this - that's why they put the region codes in there in the first place: different regions have different demand for U.S. content. So they have to sell low where there's not much demand, but they can crank up the price where there's a real craving. In order to keep the big-demand people from buying the low-demand (cheaper) disks, in go the region codes.
These media people are pricks, but they're smart pricks.
HDTV requires a similar level of investment to film in terms of props, costumes, sets, etc etc.
Makeup, too. HDTV is going to add years to a lot of faces.
I doubt there's a correlation between speeding and insurance risk.
However, I am certain there's a correlation between bad driving skills and insurance risk. Pity it's a little tougher to test for that.
Part of being a skillfull driver is being constantly aware of conditions. Like, say, the speed limit for the stretch of road you're on.
See, there is a correlation!
....how my browser is broken. I'm guessing it has something to do with the length of the URL in this snippet from the HTML:
M ArticleHTMLTemplate/C,B/20020221/wscoc2102?hub=hom eBN&tf=tgam%252Frealtime%252Ffullstory.html&cf=tga m/realtime/config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerato r&slug=wscoc2102&date=20020221&archive=RTGAM&site= Front&ad_page_name=breakingnews"></A> with the products or services of a company; in this case, an insurance company. This raises some interesting questions: does this extend to posting benchmarks of computer applications? Dissatisfaction with application security holes? Strike one for the little guy in Canada -- and maybe move here if you want to avoid the DMCA? ;)"</i>
<FONT SIZE="2"><B>from the complaints-department dept.</B></FONT><BR >Gryphon writes: <i>"The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a citizen <A HREF="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/RTGA
I'm using IE 6.blahblahblah.
You may now commence the heckling and finger wagging. And while you're at it, a link to a decent WinXP capable browser that can render this correctly would be darned decent of ya.
Of course, Robot Wars was adapted from robot combat sports that had already been going on in the US without TV broatcasts, but everything comes from something.
There are a good number of people who believe it wasn't so much "adapted" as shamelessly stolen.
Seeing as Battlebots was created by a couple of early US Robot Wars competitors, I think it's much closer to the roots. However, the English show has much charm, what with it's "house robots".
Where does the law allow Nintendo to make this demand?
Give me all your money now.
There. I've just made a demand of you. Where in the law does it say I'm not allowed to do this? Likewise, there's no law that keeps you from telling me to take a flying leap.
The cartridges are around $100 dollars each, but one 64Mbit Flash cartridge comes with the Flash Linker.
At first I thought that if NOA got $10/cart royalty maybe this whole thing could be made legit - then I realized you'd really only need one cartridge (or at most one of each "size") since you're storing the ROM images on your PC. It just a little PITA to have to connect to the PC every time you want to play a different game.
Can't say I blame NOA for getting pissed about this.
Because there's a great deal of risk involved in promoting musicians, the recording industry demands a very high rate of return.
I'm going to ask the very stupid but very obvious question: Why does the artist have to eat this risk? The artist's payoff (should the album be a huge success) doesn't seem to be worth the effort. There's no parity.
How about this model: I produce a CD full of songs. I sell a one year exclusive license to the record label to produce up to 100,000 copies of each song on this CD, for which they will pay me $200,000 dollars. The label can do with these copies whatever they want: sell them, give them away, put'em on e-Bay, drop'em in a landfill, I don't care. If they want to spend millions promoting their product (the CD), that's their business, their risk and their potential reward. I got my cash, I'm happy.
Doesn't that seem a lot more fair?
If I hack a ReplayTV (I'd want the larger hard drive), what's to keep them from detecting the hack and remotely disabling it. Leaving me with a $1K brick.
Why would they want to disable your hard drive? It's no skin of their corporate nose if you upgrade your unit. Keep in mind that PVRs aren't widely in use yet, they're very much an "early adopter" / geek item, and this is a delicate time for the companies. They don't want to turn off their hard-core customers, who will give word-of-mouth advertising for them.
What I'm worried about is sooner or later they're going to lose one of these lawsuits, and they'll be forced to disable 'net sharing and/or commercial skip. And possibly move against the hacks that are pulling shows off the unit (and then those shows get posted to Usenet)...
I predict one or more of these will happen in the next six months.
One question, what's the quality like on these thingsa? Is the picture the same? Worse? Sound?
There are different recording modes (like a VCR), from crappy to great. The less crap you want, the more hard drive space you burn.
The lowest quality is pretty good (IMO) except when there's a lot of movement on the screen - say, a shot of Niagra Falls, or a fast pan - then the artifacts break up the picture very badly.
However, most of the stuff I record on the Replay I'm gonna watch and then dump anyhow (Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars, Battlebots, etc). For this purpose - time shifting - I think the extended mode is just fine. If I recorded a movie I really liked I'd probably buy it on DVD anyway, to get a great copy.
Audio (again, at extented mode) is good enough for
"watching TV". I don't think I'd want to record a concert on it, though.
That's my two cents.
I'm an owner of a 3030 and they have effectivly STOPPED improving this model.
Do you believe that Replay/SonicBlue is somehow obligated to continue to upgrade their software?
Atleast tivo people might still get improvements to their software from time to time.
I'll bet most of them are still paying monthly subscription fees to underwrite those development costs. Replay doesn't have that luxury.