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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/12/09
Oh, the almighty dollar.
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08/12/09
Yes. Yes I think that accurately summarizes how royally screwed up this mess is.
08/12/09
Anywho, it should be completely legal to make copies for your own personal backup and use (like it supposedly is) and be legal to use the tools to do so. They will never ever ever be able to stop people from pirating and bootlegging DVD's so they may as well make it easier on the rest of us.
08/12/09
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08/12/09
Also, unnecessary much?
08/12/09
At the same time, congress needs to revisit the DMCA. Folks ought to have a right to view content on whatever device they see fit, and not be locked into a particular format. Let's get some consumer protection up in that DMCA for a change.
08/12/09
The judge is simply interpreting the law as it is written; he has no power to change it.
Blame the legislators for passing such terrible laws in the first place, and demand that they fix it.
08/12/09
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08/12/09
Users: "we want to be able to copy the content we purchase, regardless of encryption"
Big Media: "They want to anally rape your mother!"
Consider this: It is still illegal for blind people to circumvent encryption in e-books so they can use text-to-speech. A blind person can, however, develop their own software to do this. It is a known fact that blind people are masters of breaking encryption schemes.
If the freakin blind don't get a break, I don't expect we will.
08/12/09
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08/12/09
We as nerds might have convinced ourselves that backing up movies and stuff is more common than it is. I don't think that's true, at least not outside of the subset of the population that is ALREADY enraged over the DMCA.
08/12/09
My point was that Joe Sixpack isn't even aware that the DMCA effectively differentiates your consumer rights on one 12cm silver disc vs. another. Movies effectively get more protection. If the studios started suing people for personal backups, the news stories might finally get people to notice. "Wait, you mean I can't copy a movie like I can a CD? Why the heck not?" You'd likely see stories about the cool things you can't do with movies that you have been able to do for years with music because of the law. As digital movie downloads and streaming start to become more common, people would wonder why they can't just use the disc they already paid for to put content on their portable device (especially as small HDD and SSD sizes grow).
By flying under the radar as it relates to consumer usage, the studios are avoiding further scrutiny of the special protection the DMCA gives them. It's a smart strategy because, as of now, the vast majority of people don't even know that there is a legal difference. At worst, they think that companies like Apple are trying to get them to buy downloaded movies from ITMS by not making DVD rips available in iTunes. They don't even realize what's behind it. I have no doubt that lawsuits against users would indeed get enough folks to stand up and take notice.
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08/12/09
@danger the pirate (now with google voice!): It's marijana.
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04/03/09
Perhaps Mr. Obama is more tech savvy than we gave him credit for and all of this (the RIAA lawyers, the wrong region DVDs, the iffyness of the iPod) is simply a scheme to get the current system thrown out.
By hiring the RIAA lawyers he's ensured they can't argue against him. And with his "gifts" he's illustrating how anti-consumer the current policies are... and since the gifts are to people in the UK there's not much worry about an international incident.
[/conspiracy]
04/03/09
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04/03/09
Clown'll eat me...