DRM Critique Airs On National Public Radio 353
An anonymous reader writes to point out that a critique of Digital Rights Management made it onto the mainstream media this morning. NPR's Marketplace Morning Report ran a piece noting that with the demise of the VHS format we risk losing fair-use rights since we now have only digital media. From the article: "As our country moves forward to regulate digital copying, I urge us all to bear in mind T. S. Eliot's famous saying. 'Good poets borrow; great poets steal.'"
Missed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they are looking at the past through rose-colored glasses a bit here. The owners of copyright material have always made efforts to restrict duplication, even in the not-so-good-ol-days of analog tape. Drop a quick "VHS copy protection" into Google and you will see countless references of the restrictive nature of that media, both on the audio and video tracks. Analog audio tapes included a pleasnt high-pitched screeching boobytrap (spoiler signal) for would-be copiers.
It is not the death of the analog media that represents the end of part of our culture--and the risk of lost rights--as the commentary claims. It is the lack of spine in our leaders to stand up for what is right. It is the lack of foresight and hindsight on the part of the copyright owners and the consumers that patronize them. Make some noise about that, NPR.
I would also like to point out the self-destructive nature of the analog media they are pining over. About one third of the VHS tapes that remain in my collection are playable. The first DVD I ever bought does not skip once.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Informative)
12/19/06 Marketplace Morning Report 2 [publicradio.org]
The segment is at 5:40 if you want to skip directly to it.
After all, it's produced using taxpayer money, it better be publicly accessible.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Informative)
Remember one thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now you can go back to playing with your Milton Friedman action figures.
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I don't think NPR stations have an advantage when it comes to cash given that they don't run commercials. (Yes I know they do run "This program supported by a grant from. .
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Technological: Get rid of old modulation systems and come up with a digital system that makes it easy to broadcast without stepping on anyone else. The TV becomes more like the Internet.
I don't really know what this would solve. The only reason TV remains superior to the Internet, especially in the days of simple rich-media ability in the hands of most anyone, is that the high barrier to entry and the limited spectrum available makes fewer overwhelming choice
public radio is not produced with taxpayer money (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything after that was wrong...
The threat to your "rights" and the rights of copyright holders is low cost digital duplication and distribution. Guess what, 100 years ago copying a book required that you buy the physical materials to print the book on and an expensive printer to print the book. It wasn't cheap. Enter VHS and VCRs... all of sudden where copyright holders had been protected by the high cost of copying their products they're now exposed to easy ultra-low cost duplication means. Enter p2p and you're totally fucked if you create ideas and content and hope to sell it.
The model has been that you create content that people are willing to pay for, and you limit the distribution of that content, and people buy it. If you kill off the ability to limit the distribution of that content then you've killed off the incentive to invest resources into commercial media.
Sure, you'll have all types of mix-ins and exciting mashups and derivative works for the first few years, but who is going to invest in the next Star Wars? The only people with money to invest in expensive media projects that will not return direct profits will be corporations and the rich. Star Wars... in a Ford Focus far far away...
Copyright is good. Protecting it is good. DRM is not inherently evil. Yeah, the media giants are a pain in the ass and generally despicable, but that doesn't make copyright bad and it doesn't mean that they aren't going to be forced to change over time.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Interesting)
What are you talking about? Since the inception of copyright you did not have the right to copy a copyrighted work and distribute it without permission. But, the costs made doing this in any large scale impractical and therefore made copyright infringement more uncommon and easier to identify and prosecute... and thereby protect the copyright holder. Low cost and readily available means of duplication and distribution completely blew that inherent protection out of the water. So now copyright is being infringed upon left-and-right.
The DMCA is inherently evil. The DMCA (or something like it) is the only way to protect the integrity of DRM, so DRM must also be evil. If DRM is the only way to protect copyright, then copyright must be evil.
Why is the DMCA inherently evil? The DMCA is NOT the only way to protect the integrity of DRM... and what kind of logical transference principles did you just manufacture here. DRM is not the only way to protect copyright (they've been doing that for years without it). Your logic is laughable and indicative of a anti-DRM fanboi.
Look... I understand that DRM can be used by copyright holders to limit the use of a piece of media and create all types of other fees and crap. I understand that and it's an issue that needs to be considered and looked into. That said... they still have a right to protect the content they've created or invested in. The law says they do... tossing out DRM and copyright all together isn't realistic.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
He said "book", not "copyrighted book". Further, his main point was that "fair use" becoming a widely available option to people, with the availability of digital content, was counteracted by the DMCA and DRM blocking the ability to legally (at least, questionably legally) exercise such "fair use".
Not exactly. Copyright came about precisely because it was so easy for publishers to print up "pirated" copies of works. In the American colonies, there were enough printing presses that a large share of the populace read daily newspapers. The fact that computers are now their own printing press certainly has greatly magnified that initial problem, but even today it's possible to track down the source of copyright infringement in many cases. The real problem is that there are so many infringers and that they don't have any direct commercial gain (even if it were merely the cost of the supplies to make the copies), that there's very little motivation to go after every last outfit that's mass copying works.
The DMCA is inherently evil because its vague wording could be taken to make computers illegal. More generally, it makes it illegal to use the key included with content or the hardware to use said content, except in a narrow scope of exceptions. Further, it is illegal to provide information to others the information to find or use said key, even if they use it only under the narrow scope of legal exceptions. Together, this greatly hinders the ability to speak and effectively cuts off the ability of a vast majority of people to fair use, as they are too computer illiterate to discover on their own the techniques necessary to exercise their rights, and it's not possible to directly teach them the information to take advantage of their rights.
From a practical standpoint, the DMCA isn't an effective way to protect the integrity of DRM as the same means that allows copyright infringement which DRM is meant to stop can be used to either (a) disseminate the cracked DRM-protected content or (b) disseminate the information to crack the DRM-protected content. From a legal standpoint, it provides further basis to punish copyright infringers as well as a stronger legal basis to shut down organizations that collaborate to break DRM schemes. From a technical standpoint, DRM is technologically flawed because it includes the key with the lock.
As stated, DRM is not an effective way to protect copyright. In reality, there's no means of protecting copyrighted works. From a legal perspective, DRM is superfluous, as copyright infringement is already illegal. However, also from a legal perspective, the DMCA provides a means of effectively banning all varieties of DRM-cracking technology so long as there exists as least one copyrighted work protected by said DRM scheme. As such, the DMCA provides a very effective legal blockade to greatly hinder the open operation of technology that would allow people to perform le
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Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Informative)
I would only add two mildly tangental comments.
1) They keep extending the length of copyright and somehow treat creative works as different than other inventions (patents have a much shorter period and may be much more valuable than a book).
2) The idea of copyright is changing. Up until 30 years ago it was very common for songs to "steal" melodies from each other (hell most of blues is based on a small number of stolen phrases and would not exist if the first song that invented them locked them down). Then suddenly they started suing over small sequences of notes. The net result is that an interesting set of (7? 11?) musical notes is basically locked down for over a hundred years now. It may be legal but I don't think it is moral.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
One new thing the DMCA and many similar laws introduced was a new "right" for the copyright holder, that of access. It is not really given as a new right, instead they are given the right to control the access but that is for the most part quite similar since it dissallows others the right to access. The right to access a work has not existed in most copyright laws before.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
God, apparently. That right is part of the right of free speech and press, which is inherent in humanity. Copyright is an infringement on this right, as it is a right by an author, not to create works (which he already had) but to deny other people their equally inherent right to copy them. It is an acceptable infringement under the right circumstances, but its true nature should not be forgotten. And under the wrong circumstances (i.e. bad, overexpansive copyright law) the artificial right of copyright is not an acceptable infringement on our natural rights.
The "Progress Clause" (Score:5, Interesting)
And in either case, you apparently do not have a Constitutionally protected right to copy media even under the First Amendment, because the Progress Clause grants "the exclusive right" to the creators. So, does the First Amendment override and destroy the Progress Clause? Or did the Founders understand the First Amendment to not cover copyright (which means there was a large hole knocked in it from the beginning)? I don't know the answer here, but there's troubling ambiguity even just from trying to figure out the original intent of the Constitution.
Dead Letter / Jefferson's Taper (Score:4, Interesting)
A letter by Jefferson [uchicago.edu] presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.
Re:Dead Letter / Jefferson's Taper (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some very ignorant (or possibly just plain malicious) people who have started attacking the liberal viewpoint over the living document position - I say ignorant not because the 'original intent' position is necessarily wrong, but because they have opposed it by making original intent something the court should guess at in a near vacuum. Only certain other documents are supposed to be relevant to helping determine intent, and often judges who refer to other documents, such as the letter you mention, are falsely characterized as liberal activist judges who are not sticking with original intent at all.
So you've given a very good arguement for the user's right to copy being a natural right, and creator copyright for a limited term being a gift of social law. It's actually an old style conservative arguement. At this point, it's not conservative enough for the 'right wing', and half the Fox comentators would call you a liberal. Now for the 64 dollar question. How do we fix the copyright system, if we let someone re-define the centrist position so that it's to the right of practically every poster to this thread.
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Exactly.
You know what the problem with a religion is? It's not that the advice it gives is good or bad, it's that the absence of the consideration of why it's good or bad that goes with wholesale acceptance of it leads people to not realize when the world has changed and the good advice is no longer good advice.
As a way to administer who in a pop
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please go study a bit of history. (You'll probably have to pay to do this, because you don't have the right to read it freely any more.)
JFMILLER
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Funny)
If the death of copyright means that the like of Episodes 1 & 2 will never occur again, I'm probably okay with that.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong. Copyright refers to copyright law. Copyright law WAS good at one point. It doesn't even remotely resemble what it used to be. So no, copyright is not good. Protecting it is not good. DRM may not be inherently evil, but that doesn't matter a bit since it has only been used to enforce the perversion of copyright law that exists now. Furthermore, the evil media giants will only be forced to change if we stop supporting this crap they're calling copyright law, and stop pretending that it's a good thing and that it deserves to be respected. They got greedy and deserve to be punished for it. Retroactive copyright extensions? Terms longer than a human lifespan? Where the hell did the bargain between artists and the public go? They were supposed to get protection for a limited time, and then the work was supposed to become part of the public domain, and free for all to do whatever they want with. Nothing that was copyrighted has passed into the public domain for decades. We're supposed to be OK with that? I'm certainly not. It's not going to get any better if everyone keeps accepting the status quo either.
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What I hate is when you see the grandson's family complaining that "oh, those nasty pirates are stealing our deserved income." What the hell? Since when do you deserve to get rich off something your grandfather created decades (centuries?) ago?
Copyright aside, DRM is inherently evil because it quite obviously has "sid
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife is a best-selling author, and depends on copyright for her living, so believe me when I say that we understand the importance of protecting her work. However, the point of copyright is to encourage new creation, which was intended to become part of the public domain. The public basically grants a short-term monopoloy on duplication in exchange for the eventual use of the product. This deal was fair and mutually beneficial.
Big business has bought the government, and the deal is altered past all bounds of recognition or sanity. DRM is the icing on the cake, insuring that even when our current insane copyright terms finally allow ancient works to fall into the public domain, they'll be 'protected' by additional restrictions, assuming terms aren't extended indefinitely.
Even people who need copyright to make a living are shaking their heads and wondering what flavor of Kool-Aid is being passed around the government. Artists don't need 200-year monopolies and draconion punishment of their audience to make a living. I'm not sure who these provisions are supposed to benefit. . . the great-great-great grandchildren of famous movie-makers maybe? Why should the public commons be eliminated for their sakes? Something's not right.
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I'll accept that without specifically endorsing the viewpoint. There were a lot of people even at the beginning of our country's history that didn't like copyright at all. It took... a few decades (someone may correct me if this thread isn't too old) before the United States even recognized foreign copyrights registered in the US. Americans made lots of money printing European books in the US, in violation of copyright. This is fairly normal practice for developing nation
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray. Commercial, one-way media of all kinds deserve to die, or at the very least stop multiplying like virii.
Some random thoughts on this topic:
Money encourages production, not creativity.
What is owned cannot be culture. For me that's an axiom.
Own it if you want, but don't pretend that its got anything to do with culture. If I have to ask someone's permission to use it, it isn't culture. Culture *is* that which can be freely shared.
If you pay me to say it, I'll eventually end up lying.
Money encourages production, but it often encourages the production of crap. The "market" doesn't impose any standard of quality on what gets produced.
The reason we give people a monopoly on copying is so that eventually we have lots of free stuff. Unless you can show that the benefit of increased production outweighs the harm of restricting freedom, don't dare talk about extending copyright in time or space. In fact, we should reduce the term and reach of copyright to the minimum level required to encourage production. *That* makes sense to me. The idea that all this shrink-wrapped blather is someone or other's private property seems to me to be a parlour game gone bad.
Creativity can be encouraged in many ways. In Canada, parents are paid to spend time (a year or something) with their newly born child. Why couldn't individuals be given sabbatical to produce something of cultural importance? If you don't produce, your time off is repaid from source deductions.
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Well, just don't forget that the reason a lot of people create things is to make money. Not to share culture, not to enter into some agreement, long ago cobbled together by people they didn't know and had no input to or representation with. DRM is bad - even evil - when it makes stuff you buy not work on equipment you own, or makes you unable to archive it; but optimism aside, if creating something doesn't
If Money Were No Issue... (Score:3, Informative)
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If you're currently writing stories and making no money at it, then money is not your motivating factor. It's a limiting one, but not a motivating one.
Re:Missed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to start realising that the third sentence here has nothing whatsoever to do with the first two sentences.
DRM, inherently evil? You bet it is. DRM is an imposition on the rights of the public way beyond the restrictions imposed by copyright. It's double-dipping.
Copyright is saying, "I own this, so you're not allowed to make money out of it"; DRM is saying, "It doesn't matter whether I own this or not, but if you do anything with it that I choose to prevent you from doing, you're a criminal."
Copyright is a compromise that in a reasonable world should promote creativity. DRM is designed precisely to impose obligations and restrictions on the public that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, but everything to do with greed and taking away legitimate rights.
Re:Missed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, what you are saying is that when the copyright social contract was made a few hundred years ago, the average Joe really didn't give up much because it was next to impossible for him to make a copy anyway. Joe gave away something of no value (the right to make copies that he couldn't possibly make in the first place) in exchange for encouraging creators to create.
So, now that any Joe can make as many copies as he wants for almost zero cost, don't you think it is time for the contract to be renegotiated? After all, what was a good deal for Joe 100 years is no longer a good deal anymore. Isn't that what a smart businessman would do in the same situation?
After all, copyright only exists at Joe's discretion anyway. If the public collectively decides that copyright is no longer a worthwhile bargain, well, that would be the end of copyright now wouldn't it?
playable dvds (Score:2)
I would also like to point out the self-destructive nature of the analog media they are pining over. About one third of the VHS tapes that remain in my collection are playable. The first DVD I ever bought does not skip once.
Unlike you I've had a number of dvds go bad on me whereas none of my tapes aren't playable. Currently my oldest tape is more than 15 years old and it still plays however I've bought brand new dvds I had to return because they wouldn't play. Now I'll admit my first dvd plays fine but
We lost our fair use rights years ago... (Score:5, Informative)
I forget how I got around it, but it was a pain in the ass. All for less than thirty seconds of fair-use footage for a damn high school project!
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Re:We lost our fair use rights years ago... (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia...
"The 1984 film "The Cotton Club" was the first videocassette to be encoded with the Macrovision technology when it was released in 1985"
"A VHS videotape or DVD (no laserdisc or video CD players implement it) or digital cable/satellite boxes receiving a data stream encoded with Macrovision will cause a VCR set to record it to fail (excluding very old models, modified VCRs, or those approved for "professional usage"). This is usually visible as a scrambled picture as if the tracking were incorrect, or the picture will fade between overly light and dark. A 6-head or 8-head VCR (most are 4-head) can minimize this fluctuation, so it is not as noticeable. A DVD recorder will simply display a message saying the source is copy-protected, and will pause the recording."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision [wikipedia.org]
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The irony here is that the people buying these laser record players [laser-vinyl.com] are the same ones complaining about how CD's sound "digital", and how vinyl is just so "warm"...while going out and buying a record player that basically turns their records into giant CD's.
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"Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction cha
Incorrect (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies have been preventing us from exercising them.
I know the difference is very subtle.
You must know this and get used to saying it bacause from a legal, and political view point, you still ahve those rights. SO when you say we 'lost our rights' it makes you look ignorant, and can be rubutted with "No we didn't you still ahve the right to do that."
Also, you can make the corporations l;ook bad and not the politicians, which is a better way of communicating with your elected
Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we lost them -- go read the DMCA. All the copyright holder has to do is say "this was ROT13 encrypted twice" and you have no Fair Use rights anymore.
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Seriously, though, you still have fair use rights. The DMCA blocks one possible avenue of exercising those rights, but there are others. You can't crack the encryption on a DVD to extract a clip for your review, but you can still connect the DVD player's analog output to a capture card, or point a camcorder at the screen.
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Oh, please. If I'm a writer and spend a year of 40+-hour weeks to write a book, should I not be able to profit from that effort if I choose? With no copyright law, I'm pretty much screwed once I show the book to any publisher or sell my first self-published copy to someone who decides to "share" because there's nothing illegal about
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Re:Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a right, but are prevented from using it, you really *don't* have that right anymore. Just being written down somewhere doesn't make a right a right. The written form is just the description of the right. A right is only a right when it can actually be exercised. Regarding the topic at hand, the corporations have actually taken away (violated) our right to fair use.
The flaw in your argument, as I see it, is the implicit assumption that only the government can take away or grant rights. In reality, it's those with power that grant or take away rights. It just so happens that usually it's the state that has ultimate power, but if the state leaves things to their own devices (ie: free market fundamentalism), all they have done is given the crown of ultimate power over to the next in line, which in the case of America, is the corporations (in other countries, the next in line might be corporations, organized crime organizations, warlords, etc).
Your argument, while it does make the corporations look bad, also absolves them of any legal (which for some, equates to moral) wrong-doing, and undermines efforts to have the government step in to protect our rights.
Fair use is a defence, not a right (Score:2)
You are under the mistaken assumption that the doctrine of Fair Use is a right. It is not, and never has been, a right. It is a defence to the charge of copyright infringement.
This legal distinction appears to be lost on most who contribute to the neverending copyright debate on slashdot.
Re:Fair use is a defence, not a right (Score:4, Informative)
First, that I am unaware of the actual legal standing of fair use.
Second, that it does not grant rights. It, in fact, does. I am allowed the *right* to copy copyrighted works, if my copying falls under fair use.
This *right* has been repeatedly affirmed by the courts.
Not in any generally meaningful way. While people do tend to misunderstand the details of fair use, the fact that it exists and allows for some rights for the consumer is both fact and law.
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Free speech is a right. Copyright is a restriction on that right. Fair use is a limitation to the scope of the restriction. It's not a right in itself, it's just that when fair use (or other limits to copyright, inclusive of even the furthest limits of its extent having to stop somewhere) applies, nothing restricts the underlying right of free speech anymore, and you can exercise your free speech by, say, copying works.
Re:Incorrect (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. Yes, it does. And before this degenerates into a 'yes it does, no it doesn't' slapfest, it might be best to analyze the underpinnings of the two sides.
The 'no' side is predicated upon the basic (and I believe ultimately erroneous) assumption that some rights are 'inherent'; that is, they literally inhere to (i.e. dwell within) certain classes of beings by virtue of those beings merely existing. This is the only way that one could argue that an unexerciseable right is still a right; it ontologically exists but is 'suppressed' in a manner of speaking by prevailing local conditions. It is certainly *possible* that this view is correct, but I think it problematic because it requires a large degree of epistemic faith, that is, that certain things exist of which we have absolutely no detectable evidence and yet are firmly believed must still exist. Such claims are always rooted in metaphysical arrogance and basically cash out as follows: "the world *must* work this way (despite lack of evidence that it does) because if it didn't, my word-view would collapse!" American society, and world-view, is predicated upon the inherency of certain rights, some of which are listed explicitly in black-and-white in the Declaration of Independence, and others are implied strongly in the Bill of Rights.
The 'yes' side posits the epistemologically more reasonable position that rights adhere to their subjects, and are created, maintained, divested, and destroyed by some agency independent of mere existence. That is, either the agent or some agency on behalf of the agent must use force (take action in any form) to guarantee that the 'right' adheres to the agent and has functional substance. Absent that force, the right dissipates. This seems much more in keeping with evidence observable through the course of human history.
Rights are only such if they can be cashed out into reality. Otherwise, they are just pretty words on paper. I agree with you on the very limited point that rights don't depend on just government, and so your statement "If your government doesn't protect your rights, it doesn't mean you don't still have them." is quite true. There are other means to project force to secure the practical adherence of a right beyond the reliance upon a government, and in fact it would be foolish in many cases to depend on the government to secure some of those rights. But, it does not then logically follow that, as you state, "everyone has rights". There are some people who do not use force and for whom no force is expended to adhere rights to them. Victims of genocide come to mind as the easiest example. They are deprived of rights; literally, they do not possess any.
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And when you say 'We did not loose fair rights' it just makes you look stupid.
demise of vhs? wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
VHS isn't dead, nor will it be for a very long time. There's a big difference between DRM supporting companies wishing it would die, and it actually dying.
Incidentally, we have a record shop in town that does a brisk trade in the vinyl media that *ahem* 'died' a few years back....
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Re:demise of vhs? wtf? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:demise of 8-track? Yes. (Score:2)
The real DRM of VHS and the others, was the degrading quality.
The quality degrades with watching it, degrades with copying it, degrades with time.
DVD's now have effectively no DRM.
CD's have no DRM.
MP3's have no DRM.
So the current effectively unencumbered base of digital media is DVD's
For HD-Blue-DVD to really replace DVD, it has to be effectively unencumbered as well. Until then people will buy DVD's because they are less li
The DMCA became law in 1998 (Score:3, Funny)
A thousand Slashdot readers curse T.S. Eliot.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Last week I went to a wedding. While there I stole a kiss from the bride. So why can I steal a kiss but I can't steal a poem?
I for
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Mainstream Media? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Mainstream Media? (Score:5, Funny)
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VHS has little to do with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
People are willing to sell away anything to get a lower initial price--they're willing to accept more restrictive use if it means saving a buck. It's not just media entertainment, but food, furniture, and almost anything that involves the exchange of money. They'll reserve the right to complain later, but the remedy of that complaint can NEVER be raising the prices to fix what consumers voluntarily sold off.
Yeah, we can sue McDonald's for making us fat, or we could stop thinking that paying $15 for a restaurant meal that won't kill you is some great injustice. We can complain all we want about outsourcing support jobs to wherever, but good god, don't charge us $20 more for our computers. We can balk at the several hundred dollar price of hardwood furniture and complain about deforestation, but IKEA still gets frowned upon for its "cheap" quality in comparison (when in fact, many of their products are surprisingly durable for being made of sawdust and paper).
Price is all-important, and anything that gets us a lower price is a good idea...until we realize that what we threw out the window to get there might actually have been important. Then we want it back, but we want someone else to eat the costs involved with bringing it back.
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Of course, the difference being, it really is more expensive to purchase better ingredients for better food, it really is more expensive to purchase hardwood than sawdust, and it really is more expensive to build a computer in the US than in China.
DRM actually would raise production costs-it would be more expensive to develop, program, test, and refine DRM systems, and then make deals to have them implemented in hardware, than to simply produce unencumbered media. The same would apply to leasing someone e
Re:VHS has little to do with it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The fewer rights you transfer from the owner, the lower the sale price of the artwork. Media price isn't tied to production costs (if it were, small indie artists would be much more expensive, because their relative costs per unit would be way higher than the "big" pop artists). Instead, it's tied to the level of the licensing. Copies for renting out or public performance are substantially more expensive than the "home use" versions (even dating back to VHS and vinyl), even though they contain the exact same product. Likewise, digital files contain the same content (ignoring the low quality currently offered) for a lower price because they are transfers of fewer rights. This isn't to say that the labels' pricing for mp3s isn't greedy; that's a separate issue, but the point is that the price is lower, and by enough that it's starting to make a difference.
It's not solely about materials cost, and it isn't in other markets, either. The ingredients McDonald's purchases aren't the big reason why the food's bad for you--it's the method. Same reason why good furniture is expensive: the wood is expensive, but so is the craftsmanship and the process.
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Most restaurant food out there is in the same range of unhealthiness as McDonalds food. And I'm not just talking about Denny's here. Practices such as glazing vegetables with fat are very common.
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Oops, premature posting. (Score:2)
We have been supplanted by the "fast food" and "Denny's/Applebee's/Friday's" consumers, who prefer the more convenient, cheaper alternatives even if it's actually worse in the long run. We stare in amazement at the mass market, but we're now the odd ones out,
A small nitpick... (Score:5, Informative)
Marketplace isn't an NPR program; the show is produced and distributed by American Public Media [publicradio.org]. Though many public radio stations air programs from both NPR and APM (as well as other orgnizations like Public Radio International), the two are distinct entities.
Yet another thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it's impossible to control people who aren't criminals. You see it on Law & Order all the time: If someone isn't cooperating, they threaten to enforce some other law unless the guy does cooperate. As shit laws like these pile up, the state becomes fascist through no particular malice or evil intent. You being a thorn in their side? Well, I'd sure hate to take your entire DVD collection to make sure they weren't pirated. And you better have receipts, too.
Dead serious: Before any new law may be passed, the legal code shall be reviewed in it's entirety and thoroughly checked for existing laws serving the same purpose. If any such law shall exist, the proposed law may not be passed. If multiple laws serving the same purpose are found, they shall be reconciled into one non-self-contradictory law with the eldest law taking precedence. Not only will Congress be too preoccupied by this to do any more damage, but eventually the legal code will become understandable again. Imagine... justice returns as rich/well-funded criminals can no longer appeal their sentences for 25 years before they go to jail. To help initial implementation, I suggest forming a "council" of 1000 lawyers covering every legal field, and directing them to find contradictory and/or redundant laws.
The problem is that as the legal code grows, the most general search becomes O(N^2) because you need to compare every law with every other law. This needs to happen before N becomes so large that the only way to finish before the End of Time is to completely reboot. Queue arguments that we're already there...
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Before any additional law (or tax, regulation, etc) two other laws must be canceled, until such a time as the general public has a firm understanding of all of the laws they are required to obey. At that point, every new law must cancel a previous law in order to be entered into the books. The end result should be a 200 page paper back book that is required reading for a high school student. Enforcement of the law should be done by the letter of the law and
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Seriously, though, the law we need is that all members of Congress must do their own taxes, handle their own insurance claims and every other piece of bureaucratic hoop-jumping they thoughtlessly pile on us at a whim.
Oh, an
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The law can't ever be made black and white, and even if there were just 200 pages of statutory law, case law would remain th
Re:Yet another thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, your idea is unworkable on its face: laws are lengthy and complex when there is a desire for certainty. When laws are short and simple, there is less certainty as to what they mean (which, incidentally, means that you want to use caselaw, since then the courts will be able to all agree and take a largely uniform approach, rather than varying wildly as they all take their best guess, which will differ).
Saying that the law should be as you describe is as stupid as if I said that the source code for an entire, fast, efficient, feature-packed OS, windowing UI, and apps (office suite, web browser, media player, etc.) should all fit, uncompressed, on a single floppy, and be human-readable, and easily understood by any average high school graduate. It would be nice, but it's a foolish demand to make, and probably can't even be done because some things are simply complicated, and that's how life is.
A legal system can be simple, consistant, just, and efficient, but not all at the same time. In our society, and pretty much every other civilized society, we've chosen to go for just and consistant and where possible, efficient. Most simple and efficient legal systems tend to be of the 'might makes right' or 'eye for an eye' variety, and usually are not very consistant or just.
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For more information on this, there is a fantastic Cato Book Forum [cato.org] on this s
Great Bootlegs... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe that's why the underground economy in China is so great.
Still not yelling loud enough. (Score:3, Informative)
As for the Real Media encoding from what I remember it was the only useable and widely accepted option around when NPR first started offing audio content online. Still, much better options abound these days. They should at least transition to them over a few weeks or months time if they're woried about pissing off listeners who are unaware and set in their ways. -C
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Bullshit.
QuickTime has *always* been better than anything Real has come up with, not to mention the fact that it's vastly cheaper, even if you use the Apple-branded version. To top it off, you can even use the open source Darwin Streaming Server if you are so inclined.
NPR used to offer all their content in QuickTime format, up until a couple of/fe
The choice is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
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If we all just stop going to movie theaters until they get rid of the commericals before the movie maybe we can get them gone for good.
Personally, I find it's much easier to get movies from... ahem... well anyway, to watch them in the comfort of my home on my 60" HDT
See, This is What Happens... (Score:5, Funny)
As long as we continue to have media outlets that are not owned by corporations, we will continue to have reports like this that fail to toe the corporatist line. Were it not for NPR, reports like this, critical of DRM, would be relegated to the backwater of Internet blogs and college-town weeklies. We have failed to completely destroy NPRs credibility as a media outlet despite our constant efforts. We must stamp it out altogether, or face continued non-corporate-approved reporting.
Who are the real thieves? They are! (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose that you buy a car on 'time' and agree to make five years worth of monthly payments. After five years (if you don't miss payments) then the car is yours. Suppose that after four years and six months, the finance company bribes the local legislature to extend the amount of time that you have to make payments for another five years. Emmimently fair for them; a rip-off for you. If you refuse to make another payment after the initial five years of payments have come to completion, they call you a thief and get the local law to take your car at gunpoint and put you in jail.
Copyright works the same way. Agreement is made to make payments for an agreed time period for the use of the films, books, or recordings. After that period is up, the films, books, and recordings are paid for and can be used by the public freely. The material enters the public domain.
Paying off politicians to extend this period is theft: it is theft of the public domain. The global media companies have relentlessly and successfully lobbied and bribed for 'extensions' of the copyright period in individual countries throughout the world. They keep extending the time period that the public must pay them in total violation of the spirit of the balance between copyright and public domain. They are the real thieves here, not someone burning a CD or downloading a movie. Never forget this.
Criminals don't get to chose which laws are enforced for all the rest of us. Nor do we have to pay serious attention to the justifications that they use to legitimize their criminal behavior.
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That doesn't mean that you have a legal right to copy copyrighted material. So you can feel free to ignore the law of "criminals" but the reality is that you could still be held accountable, regardless of your own justification.
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But it does make a pretty good argument for a moral right to copy copyrighted material.
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Ahh, the "they bought the law fair and square" argument. The point isn't that people violating the (bought and paid-for) la
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I support strong DRM and short copyrights, and a requirement to clearly and accurately communicate what rights are transferred to the purchaser at the point of purchase. In the short term, the big media morons will do all sorts of idiotic th
If it's property... (Score:5, Interesting)
This would limit copyright holders from hording just for the sake of hording, as they would have to pay for it. We would see large numbers of works currently under copyright, pushed out to the public domain as a tax savings. It would not prevent anyone that is currently making a profit from their works from continuing to do so as they would be encourage to declare a fair market value for their works to properly balance protection and tax liability. It would limit the outrageous lawsuits as the value of the work would be pre-determined.
DRM is completely unconstitutional (Score:3, Insightful)
This is most likely moot, because in order to properly test this in court, we'd need DRM-protected media of material with an expired copyright. That hasn't happened, and probably never will happen. Congress has asserted their right to extend copyright as much as they wish, and the Supreme Court has agreed - 1 day less than eternity is "limited."
As long as the ??AA funnels money to Congress, and as long as Congress accepts it, copyrights will never expire, and the Public Domain is effectively DEAD.
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Any Mozart CD's with DRM?
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His quote bears true... (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM will kill itself (Score:4, Interesting)
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What the fuck?! [wikisource.org]
I mean, couldn't you pull some bullshit Oscar Wilde [uncyclopedia.org] quote out of your ass instead? Surely you could make something up and make it stick to him better than you can claim it came from a poem about a Slashdotter trying to meet women!
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Why?
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