Hollywood vs. Your PC / Corporate Copyright Posse [merged thred] (1 Viewer)

[JJR512]

A Corporate Posse for Copyright Thieves?
That's how a tough new bill proposes to stop movie and music pirates.
Kevin McKean
From the November 2002 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Like a frontier judge, California Representative Howard Berman believes that when there's trouble on the range upright citizens should be able to take the law into their own hands. And the range, in this case, is the peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that flourish on the Internet.
Berman, a Los Angeles-based Democrat, wants to end rampant illegal file sharing on P2P venues like those reached through Grokster, Kazaa, and Morpheus. His solution? Make it legal for entertainment industry minions to hack into such networks in order to block the transfer, copy, or display of stolen works. (For more, see "Hollywood vs. Your PC" on page 127.)
This aim is laudable. Writers, composers, filmmakers, and others depend on fair and enforceable intellectual property laws for their livelihood.

The FULL article is available here at PC World.com

 

[JJR512]

Hollywood vs. Your PC
Movie and music moguls are hopping mad over the new technologies that are transforming digital entertainment. Washington is listening. what's at risk? Your ability to enjoy DVDs and CDs you've bought, your privacy-even your control over your PC.
Dylan F. Tweney
From the November 2002 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Some PCs crashed. Macs locked up and were impossible to reboot, in some cases requiring dealer repairs, according to Apple.
A nefarious new virus? Guess again. The culprit was the European release of the latest Celine Dion CD, which used copy protection to render the disc unplayable on anything but a stereo.
Meanwhile, stateside PC users who like a little background music have been stymied by recent CDs from Charley Pride, 'NSync, and others. Few PCs crashed, but the copy protection on the discs sometimes prevented CD players or car stereos from playing them, as well.
And Hollywood's recent campaign against digital copyright infringement is not limited to music CDs; it affects the way you use your PC as well as the devices that talk to it.
Videotapes, DVDs, and many set-top cable boxes already have copy protection. New bills backed by the $68 billion movie and music industry would extend that and put copy protection hardware on all new PCs and consumer electronics devices, such as stereos and personal video recorders like TiVo (see " Following the Money Trail,"). Also in the works: new laws targeting peer-to-peer file sharing networks like Kazaa, and possible prosecution of individual file sharers.

The FULL article is available here at PC World.com.
(Sorry, wasn't certain if this belonged in this forum or the computer forum.)

 

[Carl Johnson]

I don't have to read the whole article to say that this will never work. First off I think the chances of a law like that passing are slim. Even if it were passed and the industry shut down the current file sharing services new ones would spring up, offshore if necessary.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

Yeah they did this quite awhile ago in Europe. The funny thing is that all of this high tech copy protection can be circumvented with a simple mark by one of these:
Link Removed
No one controls the way I want to view media that I pay for, and NO ONE f**ks with my pc.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

And I'm hoping that any firewall program can stop an intrusion.

Since these are done P2P, allowing only the other point in through a firewall would be easy to do. Their other problem is that if I copied a song from my CD to my PC, and they thought it was illegal and wiped it, they could have a suit on their hands.

This whole thing will never fly. We're talking illegal searches without warrants.

If they think that they are losing money they should just compare it to the start of the VHS recorders and examine how their income jumped.

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

I think we are confusing two subjects here. One is the completely ubsurd law that is trying to be passed to allow the RIAA or copyright owner to go into our pc's and remove copyrighted material.
The other is a new technology that first came about on the Celine Dion cd earlier this year in Europe. It had a protection device on it that wouldn't allow it to play in anything but a stereo. If you tried it on your pc it would crash it which this article is mostly about. They made a cd that was only playable in a standard stereo. If your stereo is your pc, well sorry but it won't play.
That is why I posted the marker. You can defeat that so called copy protection with a marker so you can play it on your pc without having it crash it or cause damage.
So this whole is not only are they trying to keep you from swapping files, but now they are trying to make it so that you can't even play the legal versions you buy from a store on your pc.

 

[Mark Kalzer]

Aren't they violating some part of the Compact Disc "spec"? By default, any cd with the "COMPACT disc" logo on it should play in EVERYTHING with that logo on it. With this copy protection, they are blantantly violating this.

I myself think it's just plain stupid to make a CD that only works in SOME CD players.

 

[Benson R]

I believe Philips was actually considering action to have the cd logo removed from these releases. That was a while ago so I guess nothing came of it.

I find this all absurd. The record companies must be puttin a lot of money into this and what is the result. They stopped a few people from playing the album on their computer but the people who share anything and everything have no problem defeating this and are still able to record the album with the line in in analog. Also people that sell bootlegs are still able to make copies.

Seems to me that the only thing that was accomplished was to piss off the paying customers. With descisions like this in the music industry I am actually surprised that their sales aren't falling faster.

 

[Thomas Newton]

If a local supermarket thinks that you, or someone in your neighborhood, might have been the person who stole a loaf of bread, they do not have the right to break into your house, to nail the doors shut, or to block all the public roads leading up to it.

Even the police would require a search warrant to break into your house to look for allegedly stolen groceries. A warrant which they wouldn't get unless they had more to present to a judge (checks and balances, what a concept!) than a mere suspicion.

Berman's bill is an attack on your right to be secure in your own property, and your neighbor's right to be secure in his or her own property. All in the name of securing artificial monopolies that already enjoy substantial legal protection. No, Congressman, it is not OK to run the Fourth Amendment through the paper shredder.

 

[Thomas Newton]

I think we are confusing two subjects here.

More than two. The second article that Justin posted made an oblique reference to the SSSCA/CBDTPA, a.k.a. mandatory policeware/censorware in every computer ("digital printing press").

That proposal is so blatantly unConstitutional that it is probably just a stalking horse for some other piece of garbage that will be sold as a "compromise". (Funny how these "compromises" keep coming out of the public hide, with each new "compromise" being a starting point for the next unilateral concession.)

 

[Iain Lambert]

More than two. The second article that Justin posted made an oblique reference to the SSSCA/CBDTPA, a.k.a. mandatory policeware/censorware in every computer ("digital printing press").

Last time I saw that proposed legislation it was so badly worded as to require that every single A/D or D/A circuit be able to identify copyright material and act accordingly. This is clearly insane, unless you seriously believe that your car should be able to inform the authorities if the level of fuel in the tank is moving up and down in such a way as to resemble, for example, 'pure phase' by Spiritualized (which isn't outside the bounds of reason, frankly). They want every 5 cent D/A chip to have 20 dollars worth of additional logic attached to it!