New Bill Threatens to Plug "Analog Hole" 374
ThinSkin writes "In an effort to encourage consumers to embrace digital content, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting a bill that would restrict owners of analog devices from recording analog content. For instance, if a fan wishes to tape a Baseball game on his VCR, the VCR would re-encode the content of that game and convert it into a digital form, which would then be filled with right restrictions and so forth. The process would be driven by VRAM (Veil Rights Assertion Mark), a technology that stamps analog content with DRM schemes."
Dupity Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
To be debated yesterday... (Score:5, Informative)
So how about a news article discussing the first round of debates?
Here's a link to the bill [72.14.207.104].
More info from EFF (Score:4, Informative)
Re:First Post (Score:2, Informative)
Re:As a record store owner. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22My+bu
Re:To be debated yesterday... (Score:5, Informative)
They talk about the broadcast flag as well, but is from Thursday and about plugging the analog hole.
From http://judiciary.house.gov/Oversight.aspx?ID=202 [house.gov]
Re:put in copy prevention and lose copyright (Score:5, Informative)
They also got copyright's purpose wrong. You'd really think they'd teach people about the Constitution in law school.
Since apparently they don't, though, the writers of the Constitution were very clear on what copyright's purpose is, and they got it dead wrong. Here's the relevant portion:
"The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" -United States Constitution, Section 8 (emphasis mine)
Note two important things from that passage: Firstly, the purpose of copyrights is to promote the progress of science and art. (NOT the wealth of scientists and artists!) Since copyright and patents by definition restrict sharing and reuse of information, which is necessary for progress in science and art, they also put in another provision: such restrictions must be for a limited time. A period which someone born today will not outlive is not, for any intents or purposes, a "limited time," not in any meaningful sense. The "limited time" provision implies to me that it should be the minimum amount of time necessary to encourage creators to create-which is the time at which they can generally turn a profit. Since most copyrighted/patented material turns a profit within 5-10 years (or never will), and creators would keep creating even if that's all the time they got, why have it longer?
Copyright is not about the "interests" of creators, except so far as recognizing such interests encourage them to continue creating. Copyright and patent are for the benefit of the public-and when it fails any longer to serve the public, to the benefit of the rights holders, it fails to the extent it does so.
Also note that copyrights and patents are not treated like property. Congress may not seize your property for public use unless they pay you just compensation for it-that's right in the Constitution. Yet, they are REQUIRED to make it so that copyrights and patents are released to the public after a set period of time. Is there any clearer indication that the law does and should not consider such things "property"?
Re:Dupity Dupe (Score:3, Informative)
Honestly, there were campaigns to pay legal bills of hackers who use evil encryption and peer to peer. Why be silent and let the MPAA bankrupt these people just because they didn't know what they were doing?
Yeah it's a little off topic, but I wasn't using my kharma anyway.
Re:Dupity Dupe (Score:2, Informative)
Re:strange definition of "illegality" (Score:1, Informative)
Apparently so is getting video streams off a DVD. I got one of the new DVD camcorders for a present, recorded a few mini-DVDs worth of content, then learned that it's just about impossible to use the material that I recorded. I just wanted to bring the video into a common editing program. But I can't because media player software doesn't allow getting at the digital video. Since, somehow, that might be an illegal act, so it's generally prohibited or not even offered as an option. I learned it's called ripping.
The software that would allow me to get at my own video is third-party, or shareware. I have to download shareware to edit my video tracks? Do you know how expensive DVD cameras are, and I need to shareware to make it work properly?
I realized, too late, that there are already too many technological barriers, and I can't currently make a copy of my own video to share. The outputs are limited, no DVD player wants to make a copy, no software wants to allow access to the contents. Crap.
And so this camcorder is pretty much worthless to me. The poor DVD camera sits unused because I'm not interested in recording a DVD that can play back in a player but do absolutely nothing else. I'm happy I didn't eBay my Digital-8.
I get the feeling I'm going to be relying on older analog devices as the new ones make it harder and harder to do what you want to.