[QUOTE=Mr2001]
Yes, and what is the fruit of that time, talent, skill, effort, etc.? A piece of information. A novel is a sequence of words, a painting is an arrangement of colors in a two-dimensional space, and so on. That’s information, and that’s what gets copyrighted.
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Yes, and that piece of information is also the fruit of the time, talent, skill, effort, and the all-important etcetera that an artist exerts. Literally speaking you’re both right, but I think the point that was being made is that the decision to refer to somebody’s two years of hard work as ‘information’, as if it were nothing more than a random pile of bits or a xerox of the times tables, is a pretty dismissive way to refer to the time and human effort that went into making that piece of easily duplicatable entertainment, without with that entertainment wouldn’t exist.
[QUOTE=Mr2001]
There is no such thing and I don’t believe there ever will be.
First off, if you give someone a disc and the player, the player must be able to get the information off of the disc to play it. A clever hacker can tap into the mechanism of the player to intercept the data as it’s read from the disc. Most folks won’t have the skill to do that, but it only has to be done once, by one person anywhere on earth, before the system is broken.
Second, even if the player is unhackable (maybe it’s rigged with explosives?) and it’s impossible for anyone to construct another device that can read the media (maybe it needs chips made out of enriched uranium and methamphetamine?), there’s still the “analog hole”. That is, movies and music still need to be delivered to human eyes and ears, which means displaying images on a screen and playing sound through speakers. At that point, anyone can make a copy by pointing a camcorder at the screen. It won’t be the best copy, but (1) with enough preparation, it can be pretty good, and (2) most people don’t care anyway, as shown by the popularity of bootleg movies made with camcorders in the cinema.
The very concept of DRM is flawed from the ground up. You can give someone an encrypted disc, but if you want them to be able to watch or listen to it, you have to give them the keys to decrypt it, too. And once they have those, you can’t control what they do with the decrypted data. The hungry market for technology that can make bits uncopyable is similar to the hungry market for perpetual motion machines - of course people want it, but that doesn’t mean it’s possible. I’m sure we’ll see all kinds of startups with technology they claim can make bits uncopyable, but they’ll all turn out to be either mistaken or fraudulent.
And then we’ll see a shift away from casual copying done in the home, toward copying done once by professionals in underground bunkers, who then distribute the data over the internet to average consumers. This is already what happens with hard-to-copy media like PC games, GameCube games, and cartridge games.
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I think what people are telling you here is that is if the rippers make the market harsh for the content producers, the content producers are going to team up with the hardware producers and rise to the challenge. That doesn’t seem at all unlikely; they already own each other, after all.
It’s not even that hard to imagine a scenario for it. Here’s one: the major studios make a command decision to start making most or all of their movies in 3D. Even assuming no advances in technology they could use dual polarized images as the base technology.
The christmas after the big summer release, they start selling a line of projectors for these movies. Dual projecting lenses built into the unit, which has the player built in. It plays special double-sided blue-ray disks, “to hold both images at once”. The two sides have to be perfectly aligned to play properly. No dual-sided blue-ray readers or writers are ever sold; the disks are also made overlarge for a standard blue-ray drive (though the unit will still play the older DVD formats well enough). Aside from the inherently complicated reader and projector systems, all internal circuts and computers are built into one solid opaque block of tamper-resistant material that has a tendency to shatter if struck hard enough to crack. This block is superglued to both the top and bottom of the unit, as well as the reader unit. The unit has the standard audio outputs and no data or video inputs or outputs.
This could be made NOW. They could have the units designed by the end of the year and have produced them in quantity by the time Star Wars 7, Harry Potter 5, the Hobbit, and the X-Men/Spider Man crossover movie released next Christmas. It would be very expensive to design and make and they would likely have to sell it at a loss, but they could make up the difference in movie sales thereafter. (Even double-sided, the media would be comparatively cheap to produce.) A unit like this would trivially solve the analog problem, since polarized 3d cannot be captured by a camcorder; it would strongly resist the direct copying of the media to the computer by even the most elite hardware haxxor, and most importantly it would totally prevent the average person from playing back any copies sent out by that elite haxxor, especially on the original unit (without which you would at best get a 2-d result). In short this doodad would blow the crap out of the illegal copying and distribution of movies. And it only took me five minutes to think of this. Imagine what they could come up with if they really tried!
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