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| Author |
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| 25 new of 143 responses total. |
gull
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response 89 of 143:
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May 2 19:35 UTC 2001 |
If it's going to cost the same, I sure as heck want the physical disk. Why
should I pay the same amount for the privilage of supplying my own media?
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dbratman
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response 90 of 143:
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May 2 21:14 UTC 2001 |
If a Napster usage drop of 36% is an RIAA victory, then CD sales -
which dropped a barely accurately measurable 5% or so, and only in some
localities - were never in danger from Napster.
resp:89 - really good point, and one reason I've never bothered to use
any of these services, even at less than equal cost. It's also why I
bought a CD player for my car: I was tired of making tapes.
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lasar
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response 91 of 143:
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May 2 22:28 UTC 2001 |
To make this a real victory, we would have to hear news of 36% better CD sales
in the near future, right?
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dbratman
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response 92 of 143:
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May 3 00:43 UTC 2001 |
No, only 5%.
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mwg
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response 93 of 143:
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May 3 01:58 UTC 2001 |
I see this whole thing as a form of suicide on the part of the
entertainment industries. Looking about at the world, it seems to me that
the popularity of any given entertainment item (and thus the monetary
potential thereof) is related fairly directly to how easy it is to copy
said item.
To be blunt, I am of the opinion that the huge profits in the
entertainment business are basically feeding of the backwash of piracy,
and actually coming up with a working copy protection system would do more
damage to profits than if there were actually any validity to their
phantom loss figures.
I am now of the habit of not buying into new entertainment technologies
until the controls are effectively broken. The fact that I'm off
broadcast TV for other reasons (logos) means I won't be aggravated in the
least by the delay between deployment and breaking of the copyguards.
You did know that the FCC has mandated copyguards be built into all new
digital TV equipment, right?
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gull
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response 94 of 143:
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May 3 02:30 UTC 2001 |
Yup. Videotaping your favorite shows may be a thing of the past, soon.
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krj
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response 95 of 143:
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May 3 22:19 UTC 2001 |
The move to restrict consumer copying capability rolls on. Here's a CNET
story about chip manufacturers looking at building anti-recording
functionality in home stereos.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5813283.html?tag=tp_pr
Quote: "Also built into chips now rolling off of Cirrus' and other
manufacturers' assembly lines are controversial copy protections, or
'digital rights management' technologies. As these chips become more
widely used, consumers could find for the first time their own home
stereos blocking them from making tapes or other copies.... Analysts
say that it's still far from a sure thing that products that limit
people's use of their own music will be accepted, even if copy-protection
support becomes a basic feature of stereo systems."
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russ
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response 96 of 143:
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May 8 03:40 UTC 2001 |
The film studios are working very hard to avoid what happened
to the record companies. They want to make it IMPOSSIBLE for
the consumer (that's you) to get ahold of the raw digital bit
stream of video (movies, TV programs, just about anything) so
that you can put it in your computer and do what you want with
it. The only things they want to have access to video data are
gadgets that will keep the raw data away from you; if you want
to do something that they've decided is verboten, like taking
a 5-second clip of last night's show and mailing it to your
mom, tough luck.
In other words, every piece of digital video equipment will be part
of a conspiracy to let you have access to YOUR data only on the most
grudging of terms, and some things will be totally forbidden. You
may have to kiss time-shifting and archiving goodbye.
They've got a proposal for doing this, encrypting everything that
goes across a wire. It was leaked to cryptome.org; read it there:
http://cryptome.org/hdcp-v1.htm
It's really dry stuff, but it ought to scare you.
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scg
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response 97 of 143:
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May 8 05:50 UTC 2001 |
How does this relate to fair use law? Is fair use something you only have
a right to if you have the means to make a copy, such that the means to make
a copy can be regulated separately?
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other
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response 98 of 143:
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May 8 17:58 UTC 2001 |
Fair use doctrine is a very complex system of exceptions to copyright
protection. It does not guarantee the right of access to materials, but
rather protects appropriate free speech rights in context of references
to other copyrighted materials.
Fair use is an attempt to balance the extremes of first amendment and
copyright laws. The whole concept of legal protection of technical
schemes which prevent access to original materials is not addressed in
fair use. Such laws throw off the balance in favor of copyright but not
by compromising fair use, just by going around it.
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other
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response 99 of 143:
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May 8 18:00 UTC 2001 |
One of the best sites I found in some extensive research on fair use is:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
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krj
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response 100 of 143:
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May 8 18:14 UTC 2001 |
The simple answer to scg's question in resp:97 is that the courts
are rejecting "fair use" as a principal to invalidate the DMCA's
prohibitions on breaking encryption. If the copyright holder encrypts
it, they are allowed to do anything they want to control access and
the law will back them up. It also appears that the "First Sale
Doctrine," which allows a second-hand market in books/cds/videos/whatever,
is likely to get tossed out in the new era.
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russ
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response 101 of 143:
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May 9 04:35 UTC 2001 |
Re #97: To elaborate on Ken's explanation, the push appears to be to
make fair use impossible to exercise by outlawing every tool you might
use to achieve it. Fair use may entitle you to quote from a work, to
make archival copies of a work you own (so long as you do not sell any
of them apart from the work itself), to view it as you see fit (e.g.
magnifying the text and projecting it on the wall to make it easier for
a person with limited vision to read it) and to make any other use of it
that does not infringe on the owner's ability to profit from the right
to make and sell copies.... if you can do it without breaking the law.
The media companies are most definitely trying to make fair use
impossible to achieve in practice, via technical means which prohibit
you from e.g. quoting a work, making an archive copy, altering how the
work is displayed (like skipping the ads they put in your DVD)... The
problem with the DMCA is that it backs up the media companies in their
attempt to eliminate fair use, and the beknighted courts have been all
too willing to throw out the long-established principle of fair use to
uphold the DMCA.
I'm starting to agree with the WTO protestors, that corporations have
achieved far too much power over the laws which are meant to be to the
benefit of people in general. They're all take and no give. The
current terms and conditions of copy"right" aren't right, they are
blatant theft from the public domain.
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dbratman
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response 102 of 143:
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May 9 21:45 UTC 2001 |
I'm trying to think of pre-digital attempts to restrict fair use. One
that I can come up with from my college days in the '70s: the firm that
sold course notes at U.C. Berkeley distributed them dittoed in faint
green ink. This was (supposedly) impossible to photocopy.
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scg
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response 103 of 143:
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May 9 22:49 UTC 2001 |
I remember supposedly non-reproducable blue ink in software manuals from the
1980s. The approach seemed to be that you might be able to copy the disks,
but you had to buy the software to get the manual.
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gull
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response 104 of 143:
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May 9 23:03 UTC 2001 |
The RIAA tried to ban cassette recorders, as a way to restrict fair use.
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i
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response 105 of 143:
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May 10 00:27 UTC 2001 |
Weren't 'most all attempts to prevent copying by technical means in the
field of PC software defeated by the 100%-legal, low-tech strategy of
people not buying the copy-protected software?
It the problem that consumers are way too addicted to the music, video,
etc. that the mega-media companies are pushing to ever use that strategy?
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russ
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response 106 of 143:
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May 10 01:30 UTC 2001 |
Re #102: Except that the kind of use frustrated by un-copyable ink
is typically wholesale copying, which is not fair use. If you want
to look back to attempts to restrict fair use, you should think of the
attempts of publishers to prevent the re-sale of used books; this
led to the first sale doctrine, which is (not coincidentally) under
attack in the new media as well.
Richard Stallman has some words that ought to horrify you:
And this changing context changes the way copyright law works. You
see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is
now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a
restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical
purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.
Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial. It didn't
restrict the general public. Now that's not true. If you have a
computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest
priority.
http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/copyright/index_transcript.html
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scg
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response 107 of 143:
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May 10 02:08 UTC 2001 |
To be fair, it is most likely wholesale copying they are trying to prevent,
while the rest is "colateral damage."
DIVX certianly appears to have been killed by market pressure. Software copy
protection seems more likely to have gotten killed by the growing size of
software, and the evolution of PC technology such that people started running
programs off hard drives, rather than off the software publisher supplied
removable media. If you couldn't copy software off an installation disk, or
if you had to keep track of the installation disk so you could occasionally
insert it in the disk drive (what disk drive?) to show that you still had it,
the software would become pretty useless to modern computer users.
I think the big problem with the music industry's current copyright fight is
that it's now much easier to get an illegal copy of some music than a legal
one. If there's some piece of music I decide I want to listen to right now,
I can either walk to a record store a half hour walk away, sit in a traffic
jam for half an hour to get to a music store with nearby parking, or sit on
a train for half an hour to get to one of the downtown San Francisco music
stores. On the other hand, I can go online and find an illegal copy within
a couple of minutes. If I want to listen to something a lot, I buy the CD.
If I want to listen to something once, it's really not worth it. If there
were a legal way to download the music, and maybe even pay for it, I'd gladly
do so. I'd probably do so considerably more often than I buy CDs.
I get the impression the music industry is finally realizing they need to do
something to make money from on-line music downloads. What they don't seem
to realize is that people might actually obey they copyright law on their own,
if it were easy to do so.
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dbratman
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response 108 of 143:
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May 11 22:41 UTC 2001 |
resp: 106, Russ Cage: The green ink, if it prevented photocopying at
all, prevented the making of one photocopy just as efficiently as a
hundred. Indeed, it was single photocopying, rather than mass copying,
that the notes firm said it was concerned to prevent: if you wanted
their notes, you had to buy their copies, individual by individual.
That was what they said. A hypothetical person trying to go into
business by unethically mass-reproducing the notes was not their
concern. He would have a heck of a time recouping expenses, epsecially
given the notes' time value.
The rhetoric may be different, but the digital anti-copying devices
would prevent you from making a copy for your own use just as
efficiently as preventing you from putting it on Napster.
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russ
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response 109 of 143:
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May 12 02:35 UTC 2001 |
Re #33: You mistake the issue, sir.
De minimis copying of a course pack printed in uncopyable ink is easy.
You can copy lines, paragraphs and even a small number of pages by keying
them by hand or even writing them longhand. This is the kind of thing
you would do for fair use. Dropping the entire course pack into a
hopper-feeder and pressing "copy" is not; it would be infringement if
you transferred the copy to another person. (It would not infringe if
you kept both copies, of course.)
The problem with the DMCA and the like is that even de minimis copying,
such as quotes of a few seconds from a film for the purpose of criticism
or analysis, require tools which are presumptively illegal under the
current interpretation of the law. I can only hope that the appeals
court will find that the trial court erred in its interpretation, or
declares those sections of the DMCA unconstitutional.
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scott
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response 110 of 143:
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May 12 12:20 UTC 2001 |
Hmm.... Now I'm starting to put my creative hat on with this. What would be
the "copy a few lines longhand" version of taking a film clip? How about
re-enacting the scene? I could imagine this taking on a life and a style of
its own pretty quickly. :)
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remmers
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response 111 of 143:
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May 14 02:46 UTC 2001 |
(Reminds me of a movie I saw once where a guy did on on-stage
reenactment of the crop-dusting scene from "North by Northwest".
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dbratman
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response 112 of 143:
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May 16 20:42 UTC 2001 |
resp: 109 - typing or handwriting out something is not easy to do.
That's why fair use cases of this kind (as opposed to plagiarism, etc.)
essentially didn't exist before the photocopier. By creating
uncopyable print, the college notes service made a practical stop to
copying of this kind.
Hand-copying isn't as difficult as the equivalent work-around for
uncopyable sound recordings, which is to play the recording while
keeping a microphone up near the speaker. That may sound funny, but I
audio-recorded a fair number of tv shows that way before the days of
the commercial VCR. I wonder if you could use a camcorder that way too.
Of course the quality would be seriously degraded. But not as badly as
it was in the days I actually did that; and if you think the quality of
hand-copied text doesn't degrade, you'd be mistaken.
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krj
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response 113 of 143:
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May 17 15:47 UTC 2001 |
More weblog stuff...
From many sources: a news report that Napster, Inc, is seeking beta
testers for the for-pay secure Napster service which is supposed to
debut in July.
from http://www.zdnet.com : "No Free Ride for MP3Pro," the upgrade to the
MP3 format. The holders of the MP3 patents want more money for the use
of the new format, but it has to compete with Windows Media Audio which
some say is gaining market share even though it includes copy-prevention
stuff.
http://www.latimes.com/business/20010516/t000041036.html
reports that "the majority of TV makers" are prepared to include the
new anti-copying stuff in their digital TVs. "Some manufacturers,
including Sony Corp. and Mitsubishi Group, have already begun production
of the new sets, which are expected to arrive on store shelves later
this year.
"The technology, known as IEEE 1394, I.Link or FireWire, is a data
networking standard with tough security features... The technology
gives program producers, rather than consumers, the power to decide what
can and cannot be copied digitally..."
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