You are missing the point. The point isn't that e-mail isn't a secure form of communication. The point is the NSA is capturing ALL of it and storing it in massive data stores. The NSA can search through ALL of the captured data at will. That US Federal government have the e-mails. There is really nothing in place that prevents the government from search through the stored data time and time again for years, except for some "rules".
The fact the government CAN search through your e-mails at will is what PJ is concerned about. She a very bright person. She's gone over the issue in her mind. She realizes all of the ramifications of the government capabilities of the NSA. And it scares the hell out of her. It's created a chilling effect on First Amendment rights. Lavabit, Circle Mail, Groklaw are just the first visiable causalities of this chilling effect on free speech. And it's going to get worse and worse as more people realize the full impact of what the Snowden leaks are telling us.
Not really. A Facebook account is used for expressions of speech, so the first amendment comes into force. A court can no more order the deletion of a personal Facebook account than it can order the burning of letters or books that I have written. The courts in the US treat first amendment rights as so important, they one has standing to sue is a law or regulation could possibly be affected negatively. Usually one only has standing to bring a lawsuit only if they have been injure in someway by a law/regulation.
If this comtempt charge is appealed (and I do hope the girl does appeal), the appeals court will slap that judge silly for issuing such an order.
No, I disagree. What the litigants go the court of public opinion (should) have nothing to do with what the jurors hears in the court room. Jurors are instructed to not seek outside information about cases, they are told not to discuss the case with anyone (not even among one another after the trial concluded and jury deliberation starts. The jurors are supposed to avoid anything outside to the courtroom which might sway their opinions of the case
But in the case in particular, Apple has been talking with the media about the case with zeal. Samsung from my view of the trial has been relatively quiet about it. Samsung has been taking a beating in the court of public opinion. So the lawyer hit back in a very precise and calculated statements to the press. As I said before, the jury won't be affected, because they are supposed to avoid it. If the courts can't trusts jurors, they might as well go home or sequester the jury.
The bottom line is that hearing aids today are sophisticated high tech miniature devices, and not a massive market of 100s of millions potential purchasers. Every patient's pattern of hearing loss is unique. As suck, hearing aid designs has evolved along the lines of being customizable for the patient's hearing loss patterns. The hearing aids can be programmed to amplify the frequency bands which the patient is weak in. And they are very good at selectively only amplifying the desired sounds but hardly ideal in the regards.
Those patients have only have small percentages of useable hearing frequency. Even selective amplifying won't help those type of patient all that much. So the latest generation of hearing add are able to digitally compress frequencies ranges the patient can't hear hearing down into the frequency range the patient can hear. Yes computer and electronics can be cheap and mass produced. But for thes type of hearing aided to be useable, they have to small, light, comfortable to wear, sophisticated enough to be customized to the patient's needs and needs to run for long periods of time on very small batteries.
And on a linear note, hearing aids are getting smaller and smaller. The smallest ones can fit directly in the ear canal. Just think of putting a computer with enough processing power to be able to digitize sounds and do frequency compression, and have a sound system to play it back in a package that fits in your ear canal. Think of the engineering and manufacturing challenges.Do you see a mass market of 100s of millions to prices down to $150?... I didn't think so
No. The fact that is an employer/employee type setup doesn't change a thing. An employee violating a company policy in regards to accessing information they are authorized to to access via their computer credentials isn't a violation of the CFAA. Let's take another CFAA case involving the Social Security Adminstration. Certain employees in the SSA have access to personal information of people in regards to SSN payroll deductions, benefit payouts, etc. They have authorization via their computer credentials to look at virtually anyone's personal information. But the SSA has policies in place they speel out when it is proper to access that personal information. When an employee is working a case that is assignment to them, they policies says they can access personal information about persons related to that case as an example.
Now if an SSA employee starts to just access information about celebrities or other persons in the new just because they are curious. They would be a clear violation of SSA policy. Remember that the employee's credentials allow access to virtually anyone. The employee used their assignen credentials to access the information. They didn't breach any technological measure to access the measure. They didn't "hack" to gain access to the information. Their access is a violation of SSA policies, may be violations of criminal statutes of misusing government data, violations of the Privacy Act, etc. But their access was not a violation of the CFAA. That was what the 9th Circuit ruled on.
The 9th Circuit got this one right. Yes, I'm shocked as much as you are. If this ruling goes to the US Supreme Court, I don't think it'll be overruled.
No. The feds can ask for a en banc (full court) review of the case. If that doesn't go their way they can request for cert at the Supreme Court. Or they could go straight to the Supreme Court. With the Appeals Court ruling mere hours after the hearing, I think the odds of a successful reversal are slim to none.
No that's isn't reasonable. A person does have some expectation of privacy from the government. It's abhorrent to think that the government can have casual access to my location over long periods of time. Note: I use the term casual. Using a lot of manpower to keep a a 24 hour surveillance on me isn't casual. Having to go before a judge to request a search warrant to install a GPS tracker isn't casual. Those are sufficient deterrent from letting the government go Big Brother on the population 24x7.
Also from the article, they has a reasonable suspicion the guy was committing fraud. That's a slam dunk for getting a search warrant. It would not have taken that much effort for an agent to full out the paperwork and submit it to the Court.. I do hope the SCOTUS slaps the government silly when it hands down it's ruling in the GPS case. The Feds in general try sqeeze an extra light year when you give 'em an inch. That trends needs to stop.
It's a little hard to imagine a cognitive assessment tool that doesn't include orientation or short-term memory recall questions, so this will strongly discourage progress in the field. Perhaps one of the Alzheimer's advocacy groups will take notice and defend researchers trying to advance the state of the art.
Good grief! That confirms what I previously posted. The tests are embodiments of methodologies that have been developed in the field over the years. Unless the Sweet 16 test lifted entire sections, MMSE has absolutely no copyright infringement case against the Sweet 16 test. You can't use copyright law to protect method. That is what patent law is for.
But PAR is a licensee of the MMSE test, MMSE's coporation might have recourse via the license terms.
The Linux Kernel source code is an expression of logic which is copyrightable..
Your example would be a derivative work which would be infringing. And debatable whether it qualified for copyright protection itself. It's a mechanically created rendition lacking any creativity.
No you can't copyright logic. Nor can you copyright a thought. Nor can you copyright a plot. Copyright protects the expression of logic, thoughts, plots, et. al. So you can't copyright a plot, but you can copyright a screenplay which is an expression of a plot. You can't a thought, you can copyright a poem which expresses that thought. And you can't copyright the idea of a way to testing cognitive functioning, but you can copyright a standardized test to test cognitive functioning
The only way the Sweet 16 test could me infringing is if it's a derivative of the MMSE test. And I would suspect the creator of the Sweet 16 explicitly avoided that particular trap. It sounds like she created her own test using the general methodology used by the MMSE. Hmmm. Why does that sounds familiar...protection of methodology? Because that's the realm of patents. That's the only thing that the Sweet 16 test could be infringing. But any possible patent protection for the MMSE test has long since expired.
Because when light travels through a medium it's speed is slower than c. And different mediums tend to have different speeds of light . The speed f light differences is what what light refraction across two dissimilar mediums. For example, a stick being apparently bent when stuck into a glass of water.
A perfect vacuum has no matter therefore nothing to slow down light.. So the speed of light through pure vacuum is absolutely as fast as you can travel in the universe. That speed is denoted with the symbol - 'c'. As in E=mc^2.
answers to lawsuits are hardly ever short and never cheap. But I hope he gets to countersue for vexatious litigation and recoup at least 100% of his lawyer's fees.
They don't have to countersue for vexation litigation. USC section on Copyright is one of the few area of the law where you can make a claim for expenses in defending against a copyright lawsuit. The case should be over and done with a summary judgment for the defendants.
Groklaw isn't going away. All that's happening is that PJ (Pamela Jones) is retiring aka stepping away from Groklaw to pursuit other things. Groklaw has consumed her life for the past 9 years.
I don't know what Groklaw will morph into w/o PJ at the helm. But PJ (aka the team of IBM laywers;) ) says the site will be in good hands after she steps down.
Even 1 could be enough for ruling to stop competitive company products being sold.
Not really. There has been a court case (too lazy to look it up) which has greatly gutted the threat having products recalled, seized, etc. and/or huge amounts of damages if the product has violated a patent. It boils down to how much of the patent the products has violated and how essential the violated invention is to the entirety of the product. If, for example, a smartphone violated 1 claim in a patent on how menus are displayed/formatted that is a very small part of the overall product so the court would over all of the phones to be seize or rewards a bazillion $$$. More likely the penalty would be a small amount of $$ for each manufactured smartphone
On the other hand, it would be enough for the FTC to block the importation of that smartphone into the US before the dispute has been heard and tried by a court.
It needs to go further then that. A judge needs to be able to rule that a litigant is vexatious and say:
"This was an utter waste of the courts time again, you are barred from suing for the next 5 (or so) years, now get out of my court."
Being declared a vexatious litigator has an extremely hurdle to overcome. And that hurdle being the constitutional right of access to the courts. One frivolous lawsuit would not be nearly enough to be declared vexatious. It would take dozens of such cases.
The EFF will be all over this case in one way or another. This is a nearly a ideal case for them. I can't see it not getting to court short of Sony dropping the case. And they have way to much invested to do that.
Something I forgot. There is also a lot of work being done on X for the future, like being able to seemly move an application windows from one device to another. Imagine you have a Photo Album or Media application running on you smart phone. With a gesture or couple of touch, you are able to seamlessly move that application window to your large screen TV in your living room. That's the kind of future that I want to see. Discarding X and programs that use X keeps us stuck in the cable connected quagmire we are in now.
It's also wrong. X will always be present. If they don't have X, you are shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka. Without X, they loose a vast amount of software. And they loose all of the advantages of X.
Also I think that people still have an outdated view of X being a bloated monolithic mess. That's no longer the case. Since the migration from XFree code base to the X.org code base, X has been slimming down and improving drastically but slowly. They aren't making huge sweeping changes so they don't break things for a lot of people. For example, all of the bloat of xlib is being examined and excised a bit at a time. If they remove something and people complain about it, it gets put back in.
It's also interesting when you got multiple boiler plates on e-mails. For example, those going through a very active mailing list. Which disclaimer applies? And to top things off one mailing list (the Mimedefang list) adds this to each outgoing post.
______________________________________________
NOTE: If there is a disclaimer or other legal boilerplate in the above
message, it is NULL AND VOID. You may ignore it.
I think I hear the sound of many a lawyer's head going *POP*.
No conspiracy is needed. . Oracle sees Android == Java, Android != Java SE.; therefore, Oracle wants $$$. It's as simple as that.
Sun wanted the same thing but didn't have the money reserves to push things in court. And it wasn't in the corporate culture to really do so either. Oracle is the polar opposite of Sun in both regards. So Oracle filed suit. I see a long, hard battle in court. Google winning in circuit court. Oracle appealing the case. And thatings are too hazy after that.
I doubt the movie industry would have died regardless of what form copy devices took. But to address the VHS/Betamax question, the answer is copy degradation. Video tape is an analog media. A copy loses a bit of definition. Every generation of copy from a master gets worse and worse nosier and grainier. The movie industry did like video to be copyable, but after the Sony Betmax SCOTUS decision, they could live with it.
That all changed when "they" introduced the CD and DVD formats. Those are digital. Unlike analog mediea every copy of a digital data is perfect. It doesn't matter how many generation a copy is removed from the source master. It's just as pristine as the original source.
At first it wasn't any problems so they though. Initial costs of the equipment players and especially duplicators may them limited their spread. But when duplicators/copies/burners became prevently, "they" throught their control of the copy media was enough. The sector of a CD which determined their type (i.e. Audio or Data CD) wasn't accessible via a CD burner. Burn an Audio CD, you have to pay "us". And the DVD keys section which video DVDs depend on was off limits as well. So no duplicated DVDs won't play on a player. And their draconian licensing terms ensured that the critical keys are kept off limits. And their walled garden was supposed to keep things looked away. But their wall garden had a dual weaknesses:. their lousy encryption scheme and PC CD/DVD burners and software players.
Technology kept advancing and even traveled around the CD Audio wall. Read the audio tracks as data and play back the data via software. And we all know the story about DVD Videos. A sloppy software player left their key inside. First new software players used that key. The it was found the encryption scheme was weak and it was eventually broken. and ultimately DeCSS.
As others have pointed out. the ultimate problem with copy protection is that it eventually has to be read/viewed/heard by us humans in the analog realm. And things can't be tied to having 'Net access all of the time. So that means they they have to give out the keys that go with the locks they have. It doesn't matter, as this HDCP kerfluffle illustrates, how convoluted you make the unlock process. The end users have the keys. And if I have the keys, I can easily open the locks.
In the end, the downfall of the music industry giants is them failing to adapted to the new reality, and them trying to enforce the old regimes. They days as the gateways of music is over. Technology and the Internet has open the world to budding musicians.
And I think that the movie industry gaints are coming to a similar reality as well. Technology especially in the realm of CGI is advancing at a breakneck pace. It's getting better and cheaper all of the time. The tools are available to everyone. And even the renders are becoming photorealistic. I've seen CGI people that make me think they are real. I've have to second look to make sure they are CGI. And huge studios and sets no longer needed. Bluescreen/greenscreening can put actors into any place imaginable. A lot of fan films are making huge strides in their production values. They are reaching the levels of exceeding the B movies I've seen.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and the contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by the statue nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come to court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." —Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line" 1939
So apropos for this so called proposal. And what's truly remarkable is that it is from seventy one years ago. 71 years!
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing the point. The point isn't that e-mail isn't a secure form of communication. The point is the NSA is capturing ALL of it and storing it in massive data stores. The NSA can search through ALL of the captured data at will. That US Federal government have the e-mails. There is really nothing in place that prevents the government from search through the stored data time and time again for years, except for some "rules".
The fact the government CAN search through your e-mails at will is what PJ is concerned about. She a very bright person. She's gone over the issue in her mind. She realizes all of the ramifications of the government capabilities of the NSA. And it scares the hell out of her. It's created a chilling effect on First Amendment rights. Lavabit, Circle Mail, Groklaw are just the first visiable causalities of this chilling effect on free speech. And it's going to get worse and worse as more people realize the full impact of what the Snowden leaks are telling us.
Not really. A Facebook account is used for expressions of speech, so the first amendment comes into force. A court can no more order the deletion of a personal Facebook account than it can order the burning of letters or books that I have written. The courts in the US treat first amendment rights as so important, they one has standing to sue is a law or regulation could possibly be affected negatively. Usually one only has standing to bring a lawsuit only if they have been injure in someway by a law/regulation.
If this comtempt charge is appealed (and I do hope the girl does appeal), the appeals court will slap that judge silly for issuing such an order.
And another point I forgot to made. If Samsung shouldn't be talking about the trial, neither should Apple. especially Apple.
No, I disagree. What the litigants go the court of public opinion (should) have nothing to do with what the jurors hears in the court room. Jurors are instructed to not seek outside information about cases, they are told not to discuss the case with anyone (not even among one another after the trial concluded and jury deliberation starts. The jurors are supposed to avoid anything outside to the courtroom which might sway their opinions of the case
But in the case in particular, Apple has been talking with the media about the case with zeal. Samsung from my view of the trial has been relatively quiet about it. Samsung has been taking a beating in the court of public opinion. So the lawyer hit back in a very precise and calculated statements to the press. As I said before, the jury won't be affected, because they are supposed to avoid it. If the courts can't trusts jurors, they might as well go home or sequester the jury.
The bottom line is that hearing aids today are sophisticated high tech miniature devices, and not a massive market of 100s of millions potential purchasers. Every patient's pattern of hearing loss is unique. As suck, hearing aid designs has evolved along the lines of being customizable for the patient's hearing loss patterns. The hearing aids can be programmed to amplify the frequency bands which the patient is weak in. And they are very good at selectively only amplifying the desired sounds but hardly ideal in the regards.
Those patients have only have small percentages of useable hearing frequency. Even selective amplifying won't help those type of patient all that much. So the latest generation of hearing add are able to digitally compress frequencies ranges the patient can't hear hearing down into the frequency range the patient can hear. Yes computer and electronics can be cheap and mass produced. But for thes type of hearing aided to be useable, they have to small, light, comfortable to wear, sophisticated enough to be customized to the patient's needs and needs to run for long periods of time on very small batteries.
And on a linear note, hearing aids are getting smaller and smaller. The smallest ones can fit directly in the ear canal. Just think of putting a computer with enough processing power to be able to digitize sounds and do frequency compression, and have a sound system to play it back in a package that fits in your ear canal. Think of the engineering and manufacturing challenges.Do you see a mass market of 100s of millions to prices down to $150? ... I didn't think so
No. The fact that is an employer/employee type setup doesn't change a thing. An employee violating a company policy in regards to accessing information they are authorized to to access via their computer credentials isn't a violation of the CFAA. Let's take another CFAA case involving the Social Security Adminstration. Certain employees in the SSA have access to personal information of people in regards to SSN payroll deductions, benefit payouts, etc. They have authorization via their computer credentials to look at virtually anyone's personal information. But the SSA has policies in place they speel out when it is proper to access that personal information. When an employee is working a case that is assignment to them, they policies says they can access personal information about persons related to that case as an example.
Now if an SSA employee starts to just access information about celebrities or other persons in the new just because they are curious. They would be a clear violation of SSA policy. Remember that the employee's credentials allow access to virtually anyone. The employee used their assignen credentials to access the information. They didn't breach any technological measure to access the measure. They didn't "hack" to gain access to the information. Their access is a violation of SSA policies, may be violations of criminal statutes of misusing government data, violations of the Privacy Act, etc. But their access was not a violation of the CFAA. That was what the 9th Circuit ruled on.
The 9th Circuit got this one right. Yes, I'm shocked as much as you are. If this ruling goes to the US Supreme Court, I don't think it'll be overruled.
No. The feds can ask for a en banc (full court) review of the case. If that doesn't go their way they can request for cert at the Supreme Court. Or they could go straight to the Supreme Court. With the Appeals Court ruling mere hours after the hearing, I think the odds of a successful reversal are slim to none.
No that's isn't reasonable. A person does have some expectation of privacy from the government. It's abhorrent to think that the government can have casual access to my location over long periods of time. Note: I use the term casual. Using a lot of manpower to keep a a 24 hour surveillance on me isn't casual. Having to go before a judge to request a search warrant to install a GPS tracker isn't casual. Those are sufficient deterrent from letting the government go Big Brother on the population 24x7.
Also from the article, they has a reasonable suspicion the guy was committing fraud. That's a slam dunk for getting a search warrant. It would not have taken that much effort for an agent to full out the paperwork and submit it to the Court.. I do hope the SCOTUS slaps the government silly when it hands down it's ruling in the GPS case. The Feds in general try sqeeze an extra light year when you give 'em an inch. That trends needs to stop.
It's a little hard to imagine a cognitive assessment tool that doesn't include orientation or short-term memory recall questions, so this will strongly discourage progress in the field. Perhaps one of the Alzheimer's advocacy groups will take notice and defend researchers trying to advance the state of the art.
Good grief! That confirms what I previously posted. The tests are embodiments of methodologies that have been developed in the field over the years. Unless the Sweet 16 test lifted entire sections, MMSE has absolutely no copyright infringement case against the Sweet 16 test. You can't use copyright law to protect method. That is what patent law is for. But PAR is a licensee of the MMSE test, MMSE's coporation might have recourse via the license terms.
The Linux Kernel source code is an expression of logic which is copyrightable..
Your example would be a derivative work which would be infringing. And debatable whether it qualified for copyright protection itself. It's a mechanically created rendition lacking any creativity.
No you can't copyright logic. Nor can you copyright a thought. Nor can you copyright a plot. Copyright protects the expression of logic, thoughts, plots, et. al. So you can't copyright a plot, but you can copyright a screenplay which is an expression of a plot. You can't a thought, you can copyright a poem which expresses that thought. And you can't copyright the idea of a way to testing cognitive functioning, but you can copyright a standardized test to test cognitive functioning
The only way the Sweet 16 test could me infringing is if it's a derivative of the MMSE test. And I would suspect the creator of the Sweet 16 explicitly avoided that particular trap. It sounds like she created her own test using the general methodology used by the MMSE. Hmmm. Why does that sounds familiar...protection of methodology? Because that's the realm of patents. That's the only thing that the Sweet 16 test could be infringing. But any possible patent protection for the MMSE test has long since expired.
Because when light travels through a medium it's speed is slower than c. And different mediums tend to have different speeds of light . The speed f light differences is what what light refraction across two dissimilar mediums. For example, a stick being apparently bent when stuck into a glass of water.
A perfect vacuum has no matter therefore nothing to slow down light.. So the speed of light through pure vacuum is absolutely as fast as you can travel in the universe. That speed is denoted with the symbol - 'c'. As in E=mc^2.
answers to lawsuits are hardly ever short and never cheap. But I hope he gets to countersue for vexatious litigation and recoup at least 100% of his lawyer's fees.
They don't have to countersue for vexation litigation. USC section on Copyright is one of the few area of the law where you can make a claim for expenses in defending against a copyright lawsuit. The case should be over and done with a summary judgment for the defendants.
Like getting life sentence w/o the possibility of parole for shoplifting a DVD?
Eyes the various 3-strikes laws
Donations to a the campaign of an Federal Judge who is appointed for life?
I don' thin' so.
Groklaw isn't going away. All that's happening is that PJ (Pamela Jones) is retiring aka stepping away from Groklaw to pursuit other things. Groklaw has consumed her life for the past 9 years.
I don't know what Groklaw will morph into w/o PJ at the helm. But PJ (aka the team of IBM laywers ;) ) says the site will be in good hands after she steps down.
Even 1 could be enough for ruling to stop competitive company products being sold.
Not really. There has been a court case (too lazy to look it up) which has greatly gutted the threat having products recalled, seized, etc. and/or huge amounts of damages if the product has violated a patent. It boils down to how much of the patent the products has violated and how essential the violated invention is to the entirety of the product. If, for example, a smartphone violated 1 claim in a patent on how menus are displayed/formatted that is a very small part of the overall product so the court would over all of the phones to be seize or rewards a bazillion $$$. More likely the penalty would be a small amount of $$ for each manufactured smartphone
On the other hand, it would be enough for the FTC to block the importation of that smartphone into the US before the dispute has been heard and tried by a court.
It needs to go further then that. A judge needs to be able to rule that a litigant is vexatious and say: "This was an utter waste of the courts time again, you are barred from suing for the next 5 (or so) years, now get out of my court."
Being declared a vexatious litigator has an extremely hurdle to overcome. And that hurdle being the constitutional right of access to the courts. One frivolous lawsuit would not be nearly enough to be declared vexatious. It would take dozens of such cases.
The EFF will be all over this case in one way or another. This is a nearly a ideal case for them. I can't see it not getting to court short of Sony dropping the case. And they have way to much invested to do that.
Something I forgot. There is also a lot of work being done on X for the future, like being able to seemly move an application windows from one device to another. Imagine you have a Photo Album or Media application running on you smart phone. With a gesture or couple of touch, you are able to seamlessly move that application window to your large screen TV in your living room. That's the kind of future that I want to see. Discarding X and programs that use X keeps us stuck in the cable connected quagmire we are in now.
It's also wrong. X will always be present. If they don't have X, you are shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka. Without X, they loose a vast amount of software. And they loose all of the advantages of X.
Also I think that people still have an outdated view of X being a bloated monolithic mess. That's no longer the case. Since the migration from XFree code base to the X.org code base, X has been slimming down and improving drastically but slowly. They aren't making huge sweeping changes so they don't break things for a lot of people. For example, all of the bloat of xlib is being examined and excised a bit at a time. If they remove something and people complain about it, it gets put back in.
It's also interesting when you got multiple boiler plates on e-mails. For example, those going through a very active mailing list. Which disclaimer applies? And to top things off one mailing list (the Mimedefang list) adds this to each outgoing post.
______________________________________________
NOTE: If there is a disclaimer or other legal boilerplate in the above
message, it is NULL AND VOID. You may ignore it.
I think I hear the sound of many a lawyer's head going *POP*.
No conspiracy is needed. . Oracle sees Android == Java, Android != Java SE.; therefore, Oracle wants $$$. It's as simple as that.
Sun wanted the same thing but didn't have the money reserves to push things in court. And it wasn't in the corporate culture to really do so either. Oracle is the polar opposite of Sun in both regards. So Oracle filed suit. I see a long, hard battle in court. Google winning in circuit court. Oracle appealing the case. And thatings are too hazy after that.
I doubt the movie industry would have died regardless of what form copy devices took. But to address the VHS/Betamax question, the answer is copy degradation. Video tape is an analog media. A copy loses a bit of definition. Every generation of copy from a master gets worse and worse nosier and grainier. The movie industry did like video to be copyable, but after the Sony Betmax SCOTUS decision, they could live with it.
That all changed when "they" introduced the CD and DVD formats. Those are digital. Unlike analog mediea every copy of a digital data is perfect. It doesn't matter how many generation a copy is removed from the source master. It's just as pristine as the original source.
At first it wasn't any problems so they though. Initial costs of the equipment players and especially duplicators may them limited their spread. But when duplicators/copies/burners became prevently, "they" throught their control of the copy media was enough. The sector of a CD which determined their type (i.e. Audio or Data CD) wasn't accessible via a CD burner. Burn an Audio CD, you have to pay "us". And the DVD keys section which video DVDs depend on was off limits as well. So no duplicated DVDs won't play on a player. And their draconian licensing terms ensured that the critical keys are kept off limits. And their walled garden was supposed to keep things looked away. But their wall garden had a dual weaknesses:. their lousy encryption scheme and PC CD/DVD burners and software players.
Technology kept advancing and even traveled around the CD Audio wall. Read the audio tracks as data and play back the data via software. And we all know the story about DVD Videos. A sloppy software player left their key inside. First new software players used that key. The it was found the encryption scheme was weak and it was eventually broken. and ultimately DeCSS.
As others have pointed out. the ultimate problem with copy protection is that it eventually has to be read/viewed/heard by us humans in the analog realm. And things can't be tied to having 'Net access all of the time. So that means they they have to give out the keys that go with the locks they have. It doesn't matter, as this HDCP kerfluffle illustrates, how convoluted you make the unlock process. The end users have the keys. And if I have the keys, I can easily open the locks.
In the end, the downfall of the music industry giants is them failing to adapted to the new reality, and them trying to enforce the old regimes. They days as the gateways of music is over. Technology and the Internet has open the world to budding musicians.
And I think that the movie industry gaints are coming to a similar reality as well. Technology especially in the realm of CGI is advancing at a breakneck pace. It's getting better and cheaper all of the time. The tools are available to everyone. And even the renders are becoming photorealistic. I've seen CGI people that make me think they are real. I've have to second look to make sure they are CGI. And huge studios and sets no longer needed. Bluescreen/greenscreening can put actors into any place imaginable. A lot of fan films are making huge strides in their production values. They are reaching the levels of exceeding the B movies I've seen.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and the contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by the statue nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come to court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." —Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line" 1939
So apropos for this so called proposal. And what's truly remarkable is that it is from seventy one years ago. 71 years!