It's official: BOTH Blu-ray and HD-DVD downrez component (1 Viewer)

[Kelly Grannell]

It's not free. If you factor in the risk of being caught + electricity + wewar and tear on your PC + (mostly) poor quality of downloadable movies (illegal or otherwise), an empty DVD case, blank media etc, it will be cheaper to pay US$5 for the legitimate movie. That is how they curb local music piracy in Indonesia and have succeded in a big way. Not 100% effective, of course, but I see tripling in my royalties income and quadruple of the number of album sold. It's been going on for thte past 8 years and still going on. This is fact that my husband and I personally experienced. Selling the legitimate album real cheap will IN FACT curb most piracy problem.

The reason they can only do this with local music and video industry is because the amount of dollars demanded by non-local music and movie industries (ie US, Canadian, UK) are too high making price cut virtually impossible.

So... sorry Steve, your statements are unfounded. At least my statement is based on actual sales figures (which directly translates to my household income).

 

[Kelly Grannell]

Not including video conferencing? I thought that's maxing out upload and download bandwidth at all time. We use that at least one hour (total) each day (about 20 minutes per conversation)... and this is not between myself and clients, just myself and my friends and relatives around the world.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I'm going to have to disagree with Nils a bit here.

It's perfectly legal to back up your car. Many people do it. I'm not trying to be funny, I'm talking about comprehensive insurance policies and extended warranties which are supposed to replace the car if it fails before the end of its service life. Now, the DVD doesn't have a limited service life, and it's the uniqueness of its content, rather than a physical characteristic, which makes it worth the money -- as a previous poster commented, if he only wanted discs, and not movies, he could buy blanks far cheaper. From this aspect, it's less like an ordinary car, which is expected to wear out an can be replaced by a similar, non-identical item, than it is like a classic collector's car. It's not unheard of for car collectors to make fibreglas layups of their automobile bodies in case somethng happens to them.
Since DVD insurance which will pay full replacement cost even for out-of-print discs does not seem to be readily available, can we be certain that the only way the consumer has of protecting himself against unanticipated failure is to buy two copies? It would be ridiculous to say that the risk of accident requires everyone to buy two cars at a time.

In a deeper sense, the analogy if flawed. It is impossible to buy a "blank car" for $1, and then alter it so it mimics exactly the characteristics of your existing car. It will remain impossible, until and unless steel falls to a penny a tonne and electricity to three cents per gigawatt-hour. This is because it is the physicality of the car which is its important characteristic.
It is even impossible, really, to use a blank book which one can buy commercially to duplicate an existing book, with its binding, typesetting, composition, and all.

It is really only the CD and the DVD which are articles of such a kind that a reasonably exact duplicate, by transfer of information to a blank medium, is possible; and that is possible precisely because the information is the valuable part, and that information is stored in the digital format which can be read out and replicated exactly.
It is reasonable that the laws governing such products should be different from the laws governing ordinary products, but the nature of such differences is very much a matter of debate. Is it not also possible that the ethics of ownership and use -- ot the fundamental principles, but rather the application to cases -- should be different? One can kill a man quite easily with a car, not with a DVD; one can copy a DVD quite easily, not so a car: the two classes of article are subject to different standards and practices of judgement.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

P2P has an infinite combination of upload/download profiles. Nearly every P2P program allows you to adjust the max upload and download allowed from your system. You can disable upload altogether, or just limit it to 2KB. It is rare to have a maxed out upload and download on P2P. Then you have all of the disconnects, users dropping out, new users coming on, that the actual usage shown will look more like a heart rate monitor.

Online gaming on the otherhand will normally push your broadband to the limits depending on the game and if you are hosting. Hell I'm looking to switch from cable to DSL because my upload is capped too low and it is causing lag in certain online games. But again, it won't be a solid steady down/up profile. It will vary all over the place.

So in other words, you can't profile someone as a pirate just by looking at their broadband usage.

BTW, weren't all of the lawsuits filed by the RIAA and MPAA for people that were uploading the files, not downloading?

Back ontopic, it would be quite ironic if the only way for an HDTV owner like myself to enjoy prerecorded HD movies was to get the pirated version since some Studios are considering not even offering it.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

Also, I think that would be interpreted as an illegal search if this was not done with a warrant.

This was ruled in a case with lighting use with home-growers, where IR equipment was used to detect large amounts of lighting inside a residence, clearly used in an illegal growing operation. This was ruled an illegal search because no warrant was obtained. I would think that a similar concept would apply to network usage.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

Good point Chris. Of course, we've seen how much these companies care about the law when it is not in their favor.

 

[AaronMK]

In all fairness, we've also seen how much many consumers care about the law when it is not in their favor and can be broken with slim to zero probability of getting caught.

Quite frankly, I would see breaking copy protection to enable activities that would otherwise be legal as the appropriate civil disobedience. So how much respect do I have for the law? Probably a bit more than those who upload and download copyrighted material at will from P2P networks, but still. :frowning:

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

By the way, does anyone care that the frequently invoked doctrine of "fair use" has absolutely nothing to do with making back-up copies of complete works? There may or may not be a legal loophole that allows for back-ups of DVDs, but "fair use" - which is restricted to partial uses of copyrighted material for purposes of reviews, academic criticism and parody - isn't it.

I always laugh when people who use the words "fair use" like a mystical incantation that allows them to do any damned thing they want with copyrighted works accuse other people of being ignorant of the law.

Stanford University Libraries - Copyright & Fair Use

Regards,

Joe

 

[FrancisP]

Go tell that to the Supreme Court. They extended the doctrine of fair use to copying a copyrighted work off of tv for personal use. I guess they're just ignorant of the law.

 

[Ryan-G]

They went after the biggest sources in order to scare people. You'll notice, they went after people with hundreds of unique Movies/Songs shared, in order to hit the worst offenders.

But they didn't go after them exclusively, Loki Torrent for one turned over all of their user logs as a plea bargain last year, which clearly identifies both uploaders and downloaders. They can easily use those to sue anyone listed in there any time they choose, and they will win. It's incontroversial proof that's easily corroberated by the ISPs logs.

I'm going to sign off this arguement here. I'm just repeating my posts over and over because some people don't understand how P2P and internet traffic work, and have some pretty fuzzy math on how much can be downloaded in a month. Jason's arguements approached the heart of the matter and brought up salient points, but the other is just reaching.

 

[Kelly Grannell]

Wow, I guess KCI (Indonesia equivalent to ASCAP and BMI), my accountant, my bank statement that my royalty earnings and the income of my DVD store in Indonesia is wrong. I'm sorry then. Would you like to be my accountant? Obviously they are morons and you're smarter than them.

 

[Kelly Grannell]

So it's impossible for someone to do video conferencing AND downloading through FTP the 20 Gb file my husband uploaded earlier? or you control that too?

 

[Kelly Grannell]

Actually, that's exactly how much an illegal copy is sold in Indonesia and $5 is also exactly how much a legal copy is being sold. Are you going to argue with an 8 year-old (and counting) sales trend? Then all Indonesian music and video producers are stupid and you're the only smart one then.

I'm not saying that you're wrong in your assumption. I'm just saying you're GROSSLY wrong.

The point is that within the population of 200 million, where money is actually much tighter ($4 difference actually means more to them than us), selling the legit content for $5 vs the illegal for $1 (which you also found to be the approx cost of downloading), legitimate albums and video sales quadrupled. Again, I'm not claiming that this will 100% curb piracy, but it's more than enough to kill the big-fish pirates.

 

[george kaplan]

Francis,

You point out a very interesting provision in the law regarding the legality of back-ups. I'm sure that one of the posters here who claim that the law is 100% irrefutably clear on the illegality of a consumer making a back-up will chime in here with a legal analysis of why the distinction between illegally accessessing and legally copying in the law means that backups are illegal.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Well, in at least one thing here you are mistaken. The quote you listed is not actually in the DMCA law, it is an interpretation/summary. In all fairness, though, that's nitpicking: it's a summary by the Copyright Office, who should know what they're talking about.

This distinction is important, and does alter the debate somewhat. By this interpretation, it's still illegal to create or disseminate DeCSS or other similar code, and also illegal to use it, as it circumvents measures which prevent access to the work. However (and this is important), it does not appear to be illegal to make a bit-for-bit copy for fair use purposes as long as the CSS protection scheme is left intact.

This is still quite dumb, as it can make watching a real, purchased disk in Linux illegal (if it has to break CSS to watch it), while making it legal to copy the disk to your hard drive, as long as you're using authorized player software to unlock the CSS and watch it.

It's been years since I tinkered with this stuff... when you copy a DVD to hard drive and use, say, the Daemon tools to mount it as a virtual drive, do you copy CSS intact? If so, then that's essentially a license to have a media server full of DVDs, as long as CSS is not stripped out or otherwise bypassed during playback.

Well done, Francis. You may have indeed identified a loophole if, as I pointed out, CSS is left intact and unbypassed.

George,
I'm sorry you think I take gleeful joy in declaring things illegal. I hate this legislative regime around DRM and copyrights, and only try to help people understand what they're up against. Hopefully this was an open-minded enough response for you.

 

[FrancisP]

To rewrite this using the definition of circumvention would read "section 1201 does not prohibit the act of getting around a technological measure that prevents copying." That sounds like a lot more than making a exact copy. Access does not enter into the dvd debate.
The x-box case does suggest that the government believes that a commercial or financial gain must be present for a violation to occur.

To a degree it could be a practical matter for them to ignore back-up copying. Which costs studios more? Illegal downloads or back-up copies? If the traffic on these download sites are as big as some suggest then it would behoove the government to go after download sites directly and get more bang for the buck. Imagine that you were troubled by bees. It would make more sense to get rid of the hive than to try and catch each bee individually.

There is nothing in this document that causes me to believe that making a back-up copy for my personal use is illegal. Unless the government or the courts clarify it then I don't plan to change anything. If the studios refuse to give me what I want then I'll stick with what I have.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Well, that's the entire point of the matter, when you boil it all down. You don't like what they're selling, don't buy. If you can live with the restrictions, make a purchase.

Me, I'm saving up some cash for a second generation BD or HD-DVD player.

 

[george kaplan]

I'd disagree with your interpretation of the interpretation. It seems that it's illegal to create a way around CSS if that is to be used to access prohibited material. It doesn't seem to me to be illegal by that interpretation to create a way around CSS if it's to be used to make copies.

There are lots of things that are illegal to use in some ways, but not in others, and this appears to be the case here.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

But CSS doesn't prohibit the making of copies (I just made a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD to my hard drive), just access to the content, so "creating a way around it" to do so is not required.

Hence the only use DeCSS could have-- access to the content-- is illegal.

At this point, the argument is becoming more and more semantic, and therefore more and more boring. I've conceded that the Copyright Office interprets the law to mean you can make backup copies, just that you can't strip off protection entirely while doing so. We could go back and forth on this all day, but there's no purpose to it, so I'll drop it.

 

[JeremyErwin]

Aaron, can you play that bit-for-bit copy?