Mark Cuban to fund Grokster vs. MGM case. 246
Deadric writes "According to Mark Cuban's latest blog entry, he will help fund the Grokster vs. MGM case, which threatens to destroy the Betamax shield."
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.
Mark Cuban (Score:5, Interesting)
Its nice to see him getting in on this. He might be goofy and really into himself, but he is good at winning.
The "Betamax shield" may not fit anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
With P2P, there are no generational losses and it doesn't require any money other than a working computer and an internet connection to distribute as many infringing copies as the user likes.
He's gotta be strong, & he's gotta be larger t (Score:4, Interesting)
So , the real reason of this blog. To let everyone know that the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. So now the truth has been told. This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. Its about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. its that simple
Dood wants to be a Hero - the Benefactor, the Mavericks, this guy is desperate for attention - not that I don't mind his neurosis helping protect my freedoms.
Kitchen knives (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The "Betamax shield" may not fit anyway. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, the Betamax shield is not at risk at all, the question is whether it is relevant which is entirely different. There is absolutely no risk that the SCOTUS is going to prohibit VHS recorders, DVD recorders or for that matter DVRs. It is almost certain that a DVR with a firewire port to plug in extra hard drives gets through.
The question in Grokster is whether there are genuine, substantial non-infringing uses or whether the theoretical and hypothetical uses being proposed are spurious and the only substantial use is to pirate stuff. Grockster can cease to exist tommorow and none of the copyright use I do is threatened in the least.
I think that it is very likely that either SCOTUS decides that pirate-to-pirate networks are illegal or Congress does. The RIAA and MPAA bought Orin Hatch long ago.
When you are dealling with a bunch of corrupt skunks like Hatch and co it is a good idea to choose something other that a sewer to stand in. Expecting to be able to get any music you want for free is simply not a reasonable or sustainable demand.
I don't think the RIAA demands are fair or reasonable, but they are sustainable. If people want to prevent the RIAA and MPAA getting away with more corrupt copyright grabs they better choose a more realistic set of demands.
Re:Guy who rode the boom (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is what could *start* with this case (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but suppose this case did go the wrong way for P2P. We can probably assume that shortly after the SCOTUS "vindicated" the media industry position, we'd see H.R. 666, a.k.a. the Piracy To Piracy Solicits Users' Extreme Zero Royalties Zero Payments Acts or P2P Sux0rz Pact for short.
Seriously, I'm pretty sure P2P use in the US would die out real fast if all ISPs were required by law to disclose the name and address of any users whose computers are involved in sending or receiving data on some arbitrary set of ports, to be specified and updated by some government agency without further changes in the law. (Notice that if they managed to get that open-ended concept into the law, on the no unreasonable basis that P2P would just switch to use another port otherwise, then there would be serious implications for any use of the Internet.) Couple that with, say, an automatic $10k fine or 6 month prison sentence for anyone convicted, and it would just be too risky for most people to bother, and without the volume of users P2P is dead.
It would be a very bad day for a promising range of new technologies if something like this happened, which is why it's so important to separate the technology from the acts of the user in law. The argument is just as valid here as it is when you protect car makers, knife makers, etc.
Strangely, the media industry actually did seem to have come around to doing this until this case, going after those who were clearly distributing copyright material illegally. I would have thought bringing this case, which apparently could give permanent legal support to P2P networks that might be used as a defence in lesser cases in future, was a big risk. Then again, IANAL and neither do I know which big names the industry does and doesn't directly influence over in the US.
Same argument applies to the whole internet, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that the same applies to the Internet itself, and to a plethora of its components: Routers, TCP, FTP, cabling, webservers, etc.
There is good reason to believe that a vast majority of the traffic on the Internet is "pirated" copyrighted material. If the movie, music, and broadcast industry conglomerates can use a "mostly used for piracy" argument to shut down one application or one protocol, they can use the same argument to shut down ANY or ALL of them.
The entertainment conglomerates would LOVE to have the Internet go away. (Some of them even flamed it systematically as it was catching on. Some of them still do.) It pulls eyeballs from their products and is thus perceived as cutting into their revenue.
Remember that the Internet itself was designed as a peer-to-peer system - an interconnection of a vast network of endpoints that exchange information. The perception of it as a client-server, vendor-customer network (like, say, a broadcast medium) is an illusion, created by three factors:
- The enormous success of a few client-server apps, such as the web, (where the servers are usually run by a corp or institution),
- the rise of ISPs (with terms of service discouraging consumer-grade customers from hosting servers), and
- the shortage of IPv4 address (leading to workarounds such as dynamic address allocation and NAT, which also impeed hosting a server on a consumer-grade connection).
Anyone remember that Ampex invented the VTR? (Score:3, Interesting)
The myth of digital "immunity" to degredation. (Score:2, Interesting)
Digital data does not degrade the same way that for example, generational VCR-dubbing degrades a signal (four generations is pretty crappy on VCRs), but there are similar gremlins which make it much less bulletproof than popular belief holds.
Take your average 1 gigabyte video file from the net.
Once you convert the thing into a compressed movie file (that's two generations of loss, first the a/d conversion then the first compression process.. three if you are cracking a typical DVD since you typically recompress afterwards to get smaller) the file is ready to go. Now, here's where people want you to think the losses stop. And they are right, under ideal conditions, namely you copying the file to another spot on your own hard drive. The probability of incorrectly copying without loss is pretty low in that case, unless you have a broken hard drive, which unfortunately, Joe Public who bought his PC at a department store, usually has because the manufacturers of those things use low bid hard drives.
Anyway, once you start transmitting that gigantic file over the internet, you introduce transmission errors, especially when the transfer is interrupted and restarted several times. Not all file transfer software *correctly* resumes files. Most assumes that the last byte recieved was in fact whole, when in fact it could have been less than all 8 bits....you have to use rollback to be *sure*.
Optical media such as CDs and DVDs are in fact an analog medium, in that the data is stored as a sequence of dots burned on the surface of the disk. If you *lose* some of that surface, you lose the file. (yes, you can pull most of it off with the right tools, but most people don't know Norton utilities from their ass)
I don't know about you, but my ten year old CD-Rs that I burned in 1995 are getting CD rot pretty bad. Some of them have the foil flaking off. I lost my original OEM Windows 98 CD to CD rot as well. There is a pinhead sized hole on the surface of the cd where the data layer flaked off. Naturally, that hole is right in the middle of a cab file, and well, you get the picture.
My twenty year old video tapes may be a little fuzzier than they were when they were new, but they are still watchable.
Also, if you burn at higher speeds, and most people do, the error rate for the data written to the cd is much higher. That means that as the CD ages and God knows what the color change chemicals on the data layer do over time, the error bits on the CD will protect your data much less of the time.
Formats such as video cd and DVD are more error tolerant because if a chunk of the data is missing or unreadable the playback device can happily corrupt the display until it hits the next keyframe in the file it is playing....becuase the encoding method is relatively simple.
More complicated compression formats are smaller, but not so error tolerant, hence you get things like those divx green-screen ghost-trip video files that are found on the p2p networks. Those can be repaired sometimes, but since the file format is corrupt most player software poops out when regular people try to watch.
IIRC, the video-cd and video-DVD formats actually use the error correction bits on the disc to store more movie data, because it's considered to be no big deal if the picture is fubared for a second or two. (that's what causes those rainbow squares and pauses on a mildly scratched DVD)
And I don't even want to go into all the things people do to video files to make them fit on media that is too small, like truncation and recompression.
The bottom line is that while yes, under the right conditions you can make perfect copies of video data after the initial two generations of loss, the media on which you usually store them is *less reliable* than video cassette....