This matter really isn’t worthy of great debates.
One should be able to legally make a copy of a cd or dvd he owns. Period.
Everything else is chaff thrown around by the media conglomerates and their lackeys.
I see the basic problem of piracy in 3 basic levels.
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The true hackers and pirate. These people will defeat copyprotection in order to either make a buck selling copies on the street or online, or some will simply give it away for free on the net.
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The pirate user. Your average savvy computer person who for some reason or another uses pirated software/media, usually downloads stuff for free.
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The well meaning pirate. This is you average person who has learned to make copies of software/media and uses this ability to occasionally give out copies to a friend or family member who REALLY likes that movie you have, or REALLY needs a copy of that OS, or REALLY wants a mixed CD of that band, etc.
Then there’s the LEGITEMATE copy maker who only wants to be sure his investment is protected by making a copy to use while keeping the original safe.
Guess what happens when companies begin to make it more complicated for the LEGITEMATE back up person to make their legal copies?
I’ll brake it down:
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No copyprotection in the world has been able to stop the true hackers. They will be unharmed by this ‘solution’.
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Most importantly, the main result will be that more people in the LEGITEMATE branch of this will be pushed to either category 2 or category 3.
In effect, the industry is making things worse for themselves when they try to remove people’s legitemate right to making legal backup copies.
Recently, at a game developer meeting on this subject, this specific point was brought up by several game designers.
One used a simple story of you average household mom who wants to keep her kid’s DVD’s safe, and tries to make a backup copy to use. When she finds this is not as easy it it seems, and she begins to do some research, she quickly find out how to make those backups anyway. Along the way she also learns about all the wonderful ‘free’ movies and games online which come already stripped of their copy protection.
Copy protection harms NO ONE in the 3 piracy levels (As I see them), it only hurts the legitimate user trying to make a legal backup.
I think you’re making a huge assumption by stating that true pirates will find ways to break the copy protection. Maybe that’s true, but it’s an awfully big assumption.
We can’t just lump pirates into two categories: The completely competent ones, and those who aren’t competent. That’s called the fallacy of the excluded middle. There is a wide spectrum between those two extremes. I don’t doubt that there are some who would pirate DVDs, but who are less likely to do so if strenuous measures are in place.
Is this also an assumption? Admittedly so. However, it’s an assumption that’s consistent with human nature, and which does not fall prey to the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Pirates will find a way.
And they are not all pirates, but mostly very, very bright kids who like the challenge.
By the way there is free software on the net for copying your DVD’s.
It is kinda illegal, because you are not allowed to circumvent their protection, but there doesn’t seem to be another way to have backups.
Yes, it is an assumption, but one that has not yet been proven false. No copy protection used by either the music or game or movie industry has deterred pirates.
I remember a while back some gaming publishers makign a big deal out of a new version of their latest copy protection software being used in a few upcoming games. I laughed my ass off when I heard that one of those games was cracked and available online a couple of days BEFORE the game was in store shelves.
I separated them more interms of the purpose for which they pirate. Thos who pirate to put things on the web or to make money will de undeterred. Category 2 doesn’t care, he’s goignt o download it once it’s made available, and it wILL be made available. Category 3 might be put off, but it would be from lazyness. HE knows all it takes is a little effort. Perhaps a google search.
It has been true for every copy protection method ever invented. At this point, it’s a very safe assumption.
As a computer professional, I consider it a law of nature that anything you can watch, you can copy. If you sell someone a disc that contains encrypted content, he must have the key in order to play it, and if he has the key then he can decrypt it and do whatever he wants with it.
But even if you could somehow keep that key hidden from the person you sold it to, would it matter? He can always record the analog outputs, and once one person has done that and posted a copy on the internet, that’s it, your copy protection system is meaningless. Now the mom who wants to make backups of her kids’ movies can just download a copy from any P2P service, and while she’s there, maybe she’ll grab a copy of something else - something she never would’ve had the opportunity to do if she could easily make her own backup.
But the thing is, once the most skilled tinkerers find a way to break a particular form of copy protection, it’s only a matter of time before they refine their tools to the point where it’s easy enough for everyone else.
DVD copying wasn’t always easy. Not only are the discs encrypted, but most movies are too big to fit on a single layer DVD-R anyway. These were both problems for a while, but look at how quickly DVD copying has become something that any average Joe can do in an hour by downloading two free programs and clicking a few buttons.
That’s how it will always go for every new copy protection system. Today, your system is unbeatable and you’re on top of the world. Tomorrow, someone on a message board figures out how it works. Next week, any 12 year old kid can search Google and find a program that’ll let him make a perfect copy of his own.
Our original DVD player announced that it needed to be replaced by forgetting to drop the disks into the tray before ejecting, requiring someone to drag the disk out of the machine.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, only used on one or two occasions, developed a hairline fracture that extended about a centimetre from the centre hole and rendered the disk unreadable - and even undetectable - by any DVD player. We are still mystified as to how it happened as it was never mishandled.
(Non-DVD example) My brother’s copy of The Sims split in half in his CDROM drive about a month after he bought it. We think it was part of a faulty batch of disks, in part because the split was dead straight and dead centre. There wasn’t another mark on the disk. I believe a lot of software companies have a cheap replacement policy but he didn’t take them up on it because he was unaware of it. He didn’t return it to his place of purchase because he simply didn’t think they’d believe him (he could hardly believe it himself).
DVDs are a fragile medium. Even people who take care to look after their disks can still have them damaged in unexpected and unforseen ways. Simply fumbling and dropping a disk on a hard floor has the potential to do serious damage. Don’t imagine that a person who is always careful and cares for their DVDs will never have a circumstance beyond their control that will damage their disks.
Actually, I would like to see a specific EULA that prevents someone from making a backup copy of a specific movie, just as I would like to see a specific EULA that actually allows it. I would also like to see the law(s) that either allow this or prohibit it.
Other than that, offering an opinion without a legal basis to a very contentious issue is irrelevant. Period.
Yep, a lot of these fractures from the center are manufacturer problems, sometimes faulty disks, sometimes cheap disks lacking proper strength in that region.
No, it isn’t. All you can say is that some pirates – maybe even a large number of them – will go through the effort of defeating copy protection. This does not imply that all of them will go to that extent.
Hence the fallacy of the excluded middle, as I pointed out earlier.
It doesn’t matter. Once ONE pirate figures it out, and due to the modern miracle of the internet, they ALL figure it out.
I actually think that most times it isn’t the pirates that crack the copy protection, but just someone who really likes programming/hacking.
Most copy protections so far have been broken by 15 year old kids with too much time on their hands.
Pirates mostly use hardware copiers, which just bypass the copy protection by copying one-on-one.
That doesn’t logically follow. Sure, a good number of them will probably follow suit, but that doesn’t mean that they all will. Heck, I know people who used to pirate cassette tapes with impunity, but they didn’t start pirating CDS, MP3s or illegally downloaded movies. It all depends on how motivated a person is, and not all people are equally driven in that regard.
Ok so you are claiming that indeed copy proteciton works at some level since you believe not anyone is equally motivated, and therefore, some people will simply not bother?
If that’s true then what’s the record industry going on about? Why do I still see games freely available online a day after they are released (and occasionally, even before!) being downloaded by thousands upon thousands of people?
Logically your argument makes some sense, but in the real world somethign isn’t right.
I’m saying that it is a gross oversimplification to insist that copy protection will do nothign to thwart piracy. As I have repeatedly emphasized, it all depends on the extent to which one is determined to engage in piracy, and people’s motivation levels can vary tremendously.
I have said absolutely nothing about whether copy protection is the proper approach or not.
They don’t all have to. All copy protection starts out hard to defeat, until someone figures it out (which will always happen as long as there are smart people who own computers; it’s a fundamental flaw in the idea of trying to protect something without making it unusable) and develops a tool to make it a little easier, and as that tool and others are refined, eventually it becomes easy enough that anyone can do it.
That’s what has happened with PC games, DVDs, and protected audio “CDs”. If you want to make a backup of one of your DVDs, you don’t have to figure out how to crack CSS on your own; you just have to download a free, foolproof program that’ll do it for you. If you want to install a PC game so it’ll play from your hard drive without requiring the CD, you don’t have to go to the effort of learning what kind of copy protection it uses and how it works; you just have to go to a web site and find a patch for that game.
Do you really think it’s a question of motivation? The reason they don’t copy CDs or MP3s is that it’s harder than copying tapes? Most audio CDs have no copy protection, and none of them did until years after CD burners became available. The only effort required there is switching discs when the program asks you to.