Interesting… not the responses I was expecting, either.
Does it matter if I actually sell the glasses? That is, if I paint the mural but don’t provide any means of decoding it (perhaps expecting to sell them in the future), is it still wrong to decode it without my permission?
Gee, I don’t know. This whole business is complicated and I think it all depends on the particular circumstances.
I seem to remember from a law class years ago that if you accidently lose something, say your wallet, you don’t lose title to it. If someone finds it, they don’t own it and can’t legally keep it. I don’t think the fact that whoever finds it might very well keep it changes the legality.
However, if you intentionally drop your bill fold in a public place and walk away you have abandoned it and it’s finders keepers.
That’s what I’m trying to get at by saying that the satellite company hasn’t abandoned their signal and the proof of this is that they have taken measures to protect it by coding.
It seems to me that those who claim they are entitled to decode and use the signal because it is on their property are misunderstanding the meaning of “free enterprise.”
Over to you, lawyers.
I realize this in and of itself does not mean its ok, but it does make it completely different from climbing the pole and stealing cable. It is a completely and utterly passive act. Decrypt or not, nothing else in the universe will be physically affected.
Within reason, yes on the first and no on the second. And I think this is within reason.
Let me be clear. I don’t get off on the whole ‘stick it to the man’ aspect of this or think that DirecTV prices are too high. But having previously done this nothing involved in getting free DTV made me feel like a criminal. The information is out there and it was all freely & independently developed for the fun and challenge of doing it. Not to sell (which is why it isn’t). So my attitude was if this is all that’s involved, sure.
And eventually DTV upped their security and made it not so easy so it wasn’t worth the effort and I subscribed (which BTW I never would have done had I not first gotten it free). And that’s how it should work. Make it so difficult that subscribing is easier (and cheaper) than watching for free.
You do not just one day have the King proclaim that:
From this day hence, thou’st is forbidden to tinker with thyne satellite equipment lest thee release the comely lasses with nay payment!
That’s not the American way.
But they have no intention of stopping by later to retrieve the signal, so they have in fact abandoned it. Or more correctly, they have given it away to everyone within in range. They give it away with the full intent of charging anyone who wants to make use of the signal for a key to decrypt it.
Hail Ants, do you realize that their upped security worked in conjunction with the law to get you to subscribe? The illegality forced you to go underground for parts and service making it more inconvenient, which caused you to decide to sign up. The primary effect of the law is NOT to get people arrested, it’s to drive the ‘pirates’ underground and minimize their effect on the market. Do you think it would still be inconvenient if it were not illegal?
It’s the difference between having Sony brand decryptors on the shelf at Circut City and having them sold via a 2 line ad in the back of Popular Mechanics.
As I said before, the whole point of the law is the same as Copyright law. Offer a reasonable restriction on what the populace can do with the product (no copying CDs, no decrypting) so that the producers of the product can operate a business, ensuring that the product is widely available.
I think you’d have to show that illegal decoders hurt your business. If you have concrete plans to sell them in the near future, then I think decoding the mural is a theft of your merchandise.
That is a possible interpretation and, again, that is probably why the industry wanted a law. It protects them from having to go to court in separate cases and rely on the vagaries of the various points of view.
I think *cheesesteak’s comparison to the copywrite law is probably the best analogy in the thread so far.
I think people get agitated about this because of the perceived erosion of their property rights. As a bystander, neither a customer nor an employee of DirectTV, I get slightly reduced property rights, and absolutely nothing in return. We’ve been making a lot of tiny concessions in our property rights for the good of large corporations lately. It’s true that most of them, like this one, are miniscule, but I think it’s the principle that is so unacceptable.
Several people have mentioned that the DirectTV signals are on their property uninvited. I’m surprised no one has pointed out that they’re also in your body uninvited. It’s a trivial thing that doesn’t effect my day-to-day life at all, yet it feels very wrong to conceed that some of the electromagnetic energy coursing through my very brain is legally off-limits.
Lagged, I appreciate that point. This type of law results in a concession from the general public. Something which is freely available is off limits to your use without a subscription. I only support concessions like this when they confer a distinct benefit to society as a whole. If the beneficiaries were ONLY the corporation, I would agree with you.
Allow me to elaborate:
I have described this TV law as similar in nature to copyright law. It’s a restriction on your rights to use an available resource as you see fit in order to allow a company to profit from it. You may not decrypt signals, or make 500 copies of a CD you own. I approve of both these laws, in principle, because they spur innovation, and make products available to everyone, by offering the innovator a carrot of profit. On the other hand, I find the recent copyright extensions reprehensible. They are a benefit only to the owners of current copyright (mostly Disney, to be honest) and do NOT spur innovation or make new products available. The new copyright concession does not benefit society, and I am against it. The Sat TV concession does benefit society, and I support it.
Well, this may really be an entirely seprate argument, but how can a subscription-only service benefit society as a whole? Specifically, how does it benefit me and the other 4+ billion non-subscribers in the world? How does it benefit the 200+ million non-subscribers in the US?
Your line of reasoning - “for the good of society as a whole” - is a fine defense of implementing some type of regulation of the radio spectrum, as the FCC has done for years. That type of regulation gives free access to radio and television for everyone, arguably benefiting “society as a whole.” In exchange for the right to broadcast, the companies doing the broadcasting agree to abide by certain rules about what they broadcast. The regulations exist primarily to do two things: To organize the broadcasts (to avoid airwave anarchy, which would benefit no one) and to ensure there is an element of public service (public service announcements) to them. The old-fashioned regulations limit the actions of broadcasters, for the good of the public.
Where I start to feel uncomfortable is when a public resource (like the airwaves) is partitioned into public and private segments. It’s akin to selling a national forest to Disney so they can build an amusement park - and then claiming that being allowed to pay $40 to watch a guy march around in a mouse suit on formerly-public land is somehow “for the good of society.” These regulations are used to limit the actions of the public, for the good of the broadcaster’s business model.
I’ll freely conceed that this is a grayish area, and that I’m not sure exactly what The Right Thing is in this case. But this is why I’m uncomfortable with these rules.
Maybe this is a total copout, but I agree that you can’t really not have it be illegal to do this, but only as a deterent. Because if you go ahead and try and prosecute those doing it I feel the laws should be deemed unconstitutional.
Look at the situation in Canada for example:
DirecTV wanted to offer subsciptions to Canadians (their signal reaches most of southern Canada). However the Canadian govt wouldn’t allow it. They wanted their country’s satellite TV system to have exclusive rights in Canada. However, their company sucked. The programing, availability and service were lousy. Plus they were plauged with govt regulations & restrictions such as CanCon, or Canadian content. Worried that they would lose their identity due to the US entertainment industry juggernaut there’s a law which requires Canadian media outlets to carry at least 20% original Canadian programming. Obviously DirecTV couldn’t do this.
So even though it was not really legal to subscribe to DirecTV in Canada people did anyway. And DirecTV knew this because the credit cards were being drawn on Canadian banks. They just told them that as long as they had a US address to send the bill to they didn’t care. Mail forwarding businesses even sprang up just for this purpose.
Many in the (socialist leaning) Canadian govt constantly pursued prosecuting citizens for this. However at one point a Canadian judge ruled in favor of the Canadian grey-market sat TV industry saying essentially that since you couldn’t legally subscribe, “You can’t steal what you can’t buy”. Later rulings were made against them however.
My point is that DTV actually encouraged piracy to some degree north of the border because it was in their interest to do so. For technical reasons you still needed to maintain at least a basic subscription to pirate at all, so every Canadian pirater also payed for a DTV basic subscription. If Canadian pirating were eliminated most of that revenue would also disappear.
And to some degree this was true in the US as well. Many people who pirated also had a basic sub and would have canceled completely if they no longer could hack. So in that sense anyway, piracy actually increased DTV revenue. As long as it didn’t get out of control and become too easy.