Paramount boards the BD+ bus... (1 Viewer)

[bob kaplan]

After they have paid for the initial copy, i think most people (people "a") would agree that it is their right to copy any "work" and do with that copy whatever they please. i imagine that would include the right for others (people "b") to copy those works that they (people "a") authored/manufactured/produced and distributed into the market place as well.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Some interesting points Ryan, but surely you are not suggesting that it is OK to offer copies for sale.

 

[Nick Martin]

I suppose this specific discussion is irrelevant to both Lew and myself. Neither of us is in the U.S.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Point taken, even though the international protection afforded by copyright laws are mostly honored in the breech in my neck of the woods.

Nonetheless (and aside from the use you cite in your post) I have found very few of those who actually create things (music, videos, movies, software, books or short stories) to support copyright violations.

 

[Ryan-G]

Of course not, that would be illegal. The only point it isn't is if it's for self-consumption of something you purchased.

Any copying for gain is illegal, any copying and sharing for free is technically illegal.

 

[AaronMK]

Well said! I think that sums up the current state of copyright law quite nicely!

I remember some threads shortly before Blu-ray was released where everything DRM (morals, DMCA, reasonable expectations for both purchasers and copyright holders in the current climate, etc) was discussed at length. I think a lot of this will turn into a retread of those threads.

On the other hand, a lot has happened since then. Hard drive space, home networking, and the capabilities of portable electronic devices and those networked in the home have improved significantly, possibly influencing people's reasonable expectations of what they should be allowed to do with their media purchases.

DRM has effectively become a thing of the past in legal music distribution, but is still inescapable in legal film distribution. Thus, it might be interesting to compare and contrast the innovation that has occurred for allowing people to make the most of their purchases, the general legal framework regarding use of those purchases, the ability to enforce copyright law, and etc. in those two markets.

 

[Ryan-G]

IMO it is a symptom of a problem no one has yet attempted to touch, P2P. I mean, I really don't think the studios are all that worried about you letting a friend borrow your disc, they're worried about the hundreds of thousands of copies being shared, sometimes millions.

IMO, there's been alot of dancing around the issue over the last few years, but no actually tackling of the problem.

In honesty, DRM exists solely as a result of P2P.

As far as the end result? We don't need to compare and contrast anything, we've already got a ready example of the end result. PC gaming.

PC Gaming has been hit by the P2P bug for as long as the other media types, and in alot of cases has had virtually no copy protection whatsoever.

P2P and lack of DRM have done horrible things to the market. I remember one instance where a game, Pinball IIRC, had sold only 600 copies. But was pirated several thousand times on one tracker.

Another ready example is the game Titan Quest, which was heavily pirated. It ended up with a reputation for being "Bugridden". The bug was that the game would appear to work in a pirated version, then crash without warning. A legal version had no issues. The company went under. Not because the game was bad, nor because people weren't playing it. It was popular.

Companies have pulled out left and right from the PC market because of piracy, even the granddaddy of them all, ID Software, has made the choice to develop for consoles because of it.

Unrestrained, it'll happen here too. Movies, Books, Music, Games, they're all parallel markets. The end result on one is what the others face.

We require restrictions on P2P. It is not hard. The studio can submit a copy of a given film, which we could hash out a portion of it's frames, and randomly compare a subset of those frames to each upload. Get the same result, stall the upload and flag for manual review or automatically block it. Given a hash of sufficient size, the odds of a misidentify are pretty low. Problem solved. Can't pad the frames or pull the frames since it's random. Heck, could even do a straight comparision between the data contained in a number of random frames without going through the hassal of hashing.

I mean, we all know it's illegal, we all know it has some impact on sales, why screw around? Technology caused the problem, and it can easily solve it. DRM is unnecessary, if lawmakers got off their butts and actually tackled the topic of P2P and copyrighted material.

Thing is, I don't think lawmakers actually want to solve the problem.

 

[ATimson]

All that would need to be done to defeat this is to put the video file in a password-encoded ZIP file.

Besides, the US courts have historically held that just because something has an infringing use, as long as there is non-substantial infringing use there's no problem. (See the Betamax ruling.) P2P has substantial non-infringing use, so there's no reason any such restrictions should be imposed on it.