My completely unmodified Playstation2 just played a burned DVD (from an outdoorsy retreat place advertising their wonderful accomodations) on Saturday. Dadsix had to borrow the PS2 to watch this DVD because he does not have a DVD player of his own.
I had no idea they wouldn’t play burned DVDs.
Yes, that’s precisely what I meant: a bit-for-bit copy, changing nothing. If you decrypt it or re-author it, it’s changed.
Actually, that clears things up. I was under the mistaken impression that there was some clear legal precedent that back up copies were not covered by fair use and were illegal violations of copyright. You’ve demonstrated that back up copies are covered by a vague and very poorly defined area of law.
I’m still unclear on how the DMCA happened. Sure, there must have been lobbying groups with boatloads of cash. But as you say, the DMCA infringes on the rights of the people. How in the hell was it passed?
WAG-It was an earlier time. Many people didn’t know how to get around Macrovision and copy videotapes. The notice assured these people that they wouldn’t be prosecuted, or lose their software registration and tech suppport, or cheating the company by making a back up copy. It was also a time when some people were making Red Boxes so that they could cheat Ma Bell, and setting up bulletinboards to share bootlegged software. The notice assured this group of people that they were allowed to copy only for back up purposes, and that the company would prosecute people giving out free copies.
Huh. I’ll have to ask my friend about this. Either I’m thinking of the wrong console, or something strange is going on.
My completely original-equipment Playstation 2 plays burned DVD’s with gay abandon. Their are other issues at play. My PS2 likes some brands of DVD-R’s better than it does others. It is a factor of the dyes used, I expect.
Deep pockets and good lobbyists, as you suggest. The whole thing is, however, in a constant state of flux, as evidenced by the recent industry submission that i referred to above. The actual workings of the DMCA are still being negotiated, and relevant cases are still making their way through the court system.
The technology, and the methods for copying and distributing copyrighted works, are changing faster than the law can keep up. Legislators, helped along by industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA, are erring on the side of protection and are, in the process, undermining the principles of fair use.
I’m still optimistic about the future, though. A lot of the copy-protection schemes implemented in new technology, and some of the provisos of the DMCA, are effectively punishing honest consumers while proving to be no barrier to pirates who copy and sell this stuff for money.
The recent debacle over Sony’s self-installing rootkit is just one example of a copy protection technology that doesn’t stop the experts, but that proves a major annoyance for honest consumers. And people are getting pissed off about it. Despite RIAA/MPAA spin, this is not a black-and-white case, with industry companies and honest consumers on one side, and evil pirates on the other. Many honest people who have no interest in file-sharing or illegal distribution still want to be able to make back-ups of their DVDs or rip their CDs to their compuers or iPods.
That might be the disc. My stand alone DVD recorder will only record to DVD-R discs, and will only play DVD-R and DVD-RAM. It won’t play a disc recorded from another source in DVD+R. This was a pain for me because prior to purchasing the recorder, I had burned some home videos onto DVD+R discs. Surprising, another DVD player by the same manufacturer will play these discs, but that one doesn’t record.
DVD+R, DVD-R and DVD-RAM are all competing formats, and I don’t know which ones the Sony Playstation 2 may or may not play.
If it makes you feel any better, my car stereo is rather picky about which burned CDs it will play. Any discs I know won’t play I give to the kids to burn their iTunes songs onto. 
Is it really?
Remember, the copy protection on DVDs has never stopped any movie from appearing on P2P networks. Using a handful of freely available programs, it’s trivial to decrypt a DVD, compress it into an easily shareable format, and put it on the internet. DVD copy protection does nothing to stop serious pirates; it only makes casual copying slightly harder, but I suspect most of the casual copying that it stops is the kind of perfectly justified copying you had in mind.
No, it isn’t the right term. The right term in this case is “copyright”. “Intellectual property” is a misleading phrase used by people who are trying to make you think (1) copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets are all part of the same thing, or (2) copyright is a form of ownership.
Well, no offense, but you might garner more sympathy if you’d get that stick out of your ass.
Maybe it’s time to change your mind about siding with them, huh?
Open your eyes: they don’t just want to stop the kind of copying where you get a song or a movie without paying for it. They also want to stop the kind of copying where you make a backup to protect against damage, and the kind of copying where you transfer something to a more convenient format. They want you to buy a new disc if your kid steps on the original, and they want you to buy one copy for your PC, another copy for your CD player, another copy for your iPod, etc.
And then they want to control how you enjoy the stuff you paid for. Bought a DVD from a foreign country? Sorry, it won’t play on your American DVD player. Want to skip the 5 minutes of commercials at the beginning of a movie? Tough. Want to play that song you bought from iTunes on an MP3 player that doesn’t have a picture of an apple on it? Ha, good luck.
BTW, most tech companies aren’t on the movie companies’ side on this issue. Anyone who works with technology realizes how futile it is to try to prevent bits from being copied, which is why Slashdot is the easiest place to find people opposed to DRM (or even copyright in general).
This is another area where the content providers have been extremely inconsistent, even hypocritical.
A few years ago, when there was a big brouhaha over the price of CDs, the record companies defended themselves by saying that you aren’t just paying for a piece of plastic when you buy a CD, you’re effectively paying for a license to listen to the music whenever you want. And that license fee goes pays the income of the artists themselves, as well as sound engineers, publicists, and all the other people involved in bringing an album to market.
The studios also argued that the price of the physical disc was negligible, and that most of your money goes to pay for all that other stuff.
Fair enough.
But then, if what we are really paying for is not the physical disc, but all that other licensing stuff, shouldn’t we be able to get a replacement disc basically for free, or at least very cheaply, if we accidentally break one of our discs? After all, we’ve already paid all the licensing fees by buying the disc once. Shouldn’t they provide us with a replacement as long as we pay a nominal charge for the new disc, and for shipping and handling?
Same for shifting formats. After all, if i bought a vinyl copy of Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, then i paid all those licensing and associated fees when i purchased the album. Shouldn’t i be able to take that album to a record store and exchange it for a new disc, with maybe a couple of bucks to cover new materials and shipping?
Of course, none of this is ever going to happen. But it is, in my opinion, another example of the way that the RIAA and MPAA shift the goalposts in this debate whenever it suits them to do so. When it’s convenient for them, purchasing a CD is really like buying a license. But then, when we argue that buying a license should allow us to use the product how we want, the big issue is suddenly the evils of format shifting.
This stuff drives me to distraction, and it’s another example of how they penalize their honest customers. If i put a DVD in my player, i can’t fast-forward through the stupid FBI warnings. Hell, on some i can’t even click through the trailers for other movies.
But if a pirate wants to copy and distribute the movie, it is a trivial process for him to rip out those warnings and the mechanisms that prevent fast-forwarding. Once again, only the honest consumers are inconvenienced.
Same with the stupid fucking warnings they sometimes play in the movie theaters. Hey, morons, i’ve paid my 10 bucks and i’m sitting in the fucking theater; i don’t appreciate a lecture that implies that i’m a thief.
You can also buy blank CDs marketed specifically for the copying of music. They’re physically the same as the ones in the package marked data CDs. But, they cost more. The explanation was that the cost goes to pay royalties etc for the music you’re copying. If they’ve already accepted your money in exchange for your copying music, you have either the right to copy music or a refund.
Well, they’re not exactly the same. They have a flag that lets a standalone CD burner know you paid more for the discs; such burners won’t work with regular CD media. You can copy music CDs legally this way under the Audio Home Recording Act.
Except that, since the DMCA, if the CD you’re trying to copy has any “technological measure that effectively controls access to a work,” then it is an offense to circumvent that measure, even though the AHRA allows for copying of your music.
Access controls are different from copy protection measures. I don’t believe the copy protection on any audio CD would count as an access control, since you can easily access the music just by putting it in a CD player.
After all, the judge in the Lexmark case found that the code in a printer’s ROM chip wasn’t protected by an access control because once you bought the printer, you could remove the chip and use electronics tools to read its contents.
Don’t you think it ironic that the Google ads are :-
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Especially since we’d incur the wrath of the mods if we linked to any of those sites ourselves. Of course, we only pay an annual subscription fee… Google pays per click. :rolleyes:
Well, you might be right, but i’m not sure.
After all, you could make the same argument about a DVD. Sure, it might have encryption to prevent copying, but you can still access the movie by putting it in a DVD player. Yet every interpretation i’ve read of the DMCA says that “ripping” protected movies to your hard drive violates the DMCA.
I would be interested to know if there is a legal difference, under the DMCA, between the following two procedures:
a) I insert the CD into my computer’s disc drive and copy it to the hard drive using a program that disables or gets around the copy protection.
b) I insert a CD into my disc drive, play the CD, and use my sound card and audio software to record the output to my disc drive.
The very fact that this stuff is all still the subject of such conjecture, and that even intelligent people acting in good faith can’t always work out what the law requires, suggests that some radical overhaul to the system is needed, IMO.
From the DMCA: a technological measure ‘‘effectively controls access to a work’’ if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
I’d say the difference here is that you need a player key to decrypt a DVD (unless you break the encryption) - your access to the video stream depends on something more than just owning the disc. Those keys are distributed under the authority of the copyright holders, more or less, and a DVD player manufacturer who wants a key must agree to implement other restrictions like Macrovision, region coding, and prohibited user ops. But you could access the music on a CD using nothing more than a powerful microscope and the publically available information from the CD spec, if you really wanted to.
Definitely.
At first, this only bugged me a little. Now, it pisses me off.
What if the music I’m copying is in the public domain?
What if I’ve already paid the royalties directly to the artist (EG ‘The CD I bought from you is great. Friend wants one. Rather than spend money on shipping, I have used Paypal to give you the $10 for another copy and will burn it myself’)
What if the copyright owners do not belong to any of the groups this extra charge for a music CD is supposed to go to? Every city has local bands who are not yet signed with any record company. How can a CD include an extra charge for royalties that do not belong to anybody the extra money goes to?
What if I own the royalties? Let’s say that you hadn’t told me about the flag on the CDs. Let’s further say that I start a band Doc Cathode And The Atomic Supermen. After some time on the local circuit, we put together a debut album “Pepper In God’s Lo Mein”. Demand is very high. We buy a stand alone burner to keep up with the demand. We then find that we, who wrote and performed all the music ourselves, cannot make copies without buying special disks which include a surcharge intended to provide royalties to the copyright holders- us.
How can you raise the banner of “legally entitled to do” when discussing the breaking of the law?
In other words, you hold up making copies under fair use as “legally entitled,” but you dismiss the legal limits imposed by the DMCA. Why is are the “fair use” provisions valid law but the DMCA an invalid law?
Was the DMCA enacted to limit fair use? If that is not it’s intention then by limiting a perfectly legal activity it is invalid.
To quote from the page I linked to earlier :-