The RIAA's Halloween Tricks 670
deus42 writes "BoingBoing has an interesting article about a joint RIAA/MPAA move started yesterday on Capitol Hill. From the article: 'Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of Analog Hole legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.'"
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:5, Interesting)
Any Digitization (Score:3, Interesting)
Broadcast Flag On Steroids, But So What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a link to the EFF's Broadcast Flag work [eff.org].
Here's a PDF link to [then] Circuit Judge Edwards' decision [uscourts.gov] in ALA v. FCC.
Re:And no matter what they do... (Score:2, Interesting)
Assertive and inquisitive consumers are crucial to the economy, and assertive and inquisitive citizens are crucial to democratic society. This must be stopped.
They never got over Sony v. Betamax (Score:5, Interesting)
From my standpoint, they couldn't possibly poison the well any further. The day I give them any cash so they can use it to buy my representatives is the day Satan's snowplow crews start making money.
This will never get passed. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What will historians think..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh yes, the good 'ol "How History Repeats Itself" thing. Yup, I agree. We should learn from our mistakes yet we are told time and time again how this is so much better!
I went to see Good Night and Good Luck which was supposed to reiterate the importance of learning from history. I mentioned that I went to see it to my father. His response to me was: "Son, I lived through that fucking horseshit. I hated that reporter. Why would I want to relive all that shit again?"
Obviously my response fell upon deaf ears. *That* is why history continues to repeat itself. People are just UNWILLING to accept that they are wrong.
Re:A modest proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
A Modest Proposal [wikipedia.org] For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public: a satirical phamphlet written by Johnathan Swift in which the author (a persona, not Swift) advocates solving poverty by eating babies of poor people.
I'll leave it to you to figure out the grandparent's analogy (although I'm not sure it's quite what the grandparent really intended).
Re:"Analog signals" covers more than RIAA territor (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes.
What I don't get is that there is TONS of "analog signal" that is not RIAA-owned, so how can they legislate on it?
The idea is for the Music And Film Industry Associations to eventually own every slice of "signal" possible - creation of any non-static media will have to be okayed by the Man - for enough cash, of course.
Or perhaps they won't, but apparently they'll make it very difficult to use the required equipment. Make life difficult for students, and you're cutting off your source of income 20 years down the road..
20 years? These people can't see twenty weeks down the road...
Re:Digitize this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:5, Interesting)
A bit more detail, please (Score:4, Interesting)
And who brought it before the committee? Did a Representative actually introduce/sponsor this? If so, which representative(s)? Let's see... all representatives are elected every 2 years, next one in November 2006, exactly one year from now... An opponent could fry the person responsible, if they could just communicate to the public what this scoundrel tried to get passed...
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:3, Interesting)
At least not until all electronic parts vendors require all purchases of each part to be bought in $1000 bulk purchases. And it's already happening: the only local vendor for a part to fix the power connector on my Joust machine would only sell to me if I bought $1000 worth of the part.
The parts will be kept in the hands of those trusted to assemble them into compliant devices. Individuals will still be able to get soldering irons and solder; just not anything to solder with them. (It will become harder and harder to harvest parts from existing devices as well. Entire circuit boards will be covered in black epoxy.)
Outrageous measures require outrageous responses. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or we stop being "consumers", NOW. Starve the fuckers.
Don't buy any more CDs. Ever.
Don't buy any more DVDs. Ever.
Don't go to any movies in the theatres, attend any concerts, patronize iTunes or Napster, play any MP3s, watch any TV, visit ANY web sites with ANY advertising. If your favorite indie bands or filmmakers get hurt too, that's their problem.
Learn to read and have conversations. Play your own instruments. Have a lot of sex.
Strike. Now.
Re:See what happens when they "get it" (Score:5, Interesting)
Same with movies. If I owned a film copy of a movie, there is nothing that could stop me from splicing it together to make funny edits, have someone talking to themselves, flipping the picture backwards, etc.
Yet the *IAA want to prevent you from doing just exactly that. They want to force you to watch the commercials during broadcasts, and not do anything whatsoever with their material that they don't approve.
Freedom of expression - art made of books for instance - gives Americans the rights to do just exactly these things. In fact, we have the right to go taket the Harley, modify it, and sell it at a profit if we wish. CDs and DVDs come with printing on them that they may not be re-sold for any reason now. Not only can we not utilize a CD in art, we can't edit it to a new form and re-sell it with the same profit rules that we apply to any other physical property. How exactly is this fair?
Contact your local congressmen and senators. This is insidious and gives new meaning to underhanded tactics.
Information wants to be free. (Score:2, Interesting)
disease (Score:2, Interesting)
"Im so sick of their bullshit; (that goes for the MPAA And the RIAA).
Rather than using their brains and attempting to understand and possibly even benefit from something they are not going to be able to control they act like crazed luddites with fascistrabies (i'm convinced this disease exists and is running rampant in the US. -
Everytime we hear something from these tools it's more outlandish and restrictive than the last lame ass legislation they've tried to induce via whatever backdoor lophole extralegal method they haven't yet exhausted. "
- but instead I think I will just laugh at the futility and desparateness of every move they make. The only thing that stops my laughter from continuing is when I think about the general caliber of person in Government in the US. Then I realize that it is possible that they might get one of these things passed and life would suck for the short amount of time it took for the market and the public to respond to the digital handcuffs on their devices.
A common ploy! (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of going with their original plan, they came up with an absurd proposition that is bound to get thrown out. The next bill they suggest will appear resonable in comparison to the banning of all equipmentment capable of exploting the a-hole. "Well if you don't let us have this one, I GUESS we'll settle for this second one."
Typical persuasion tactics.
Re:Digitize this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just a reminder (Score:2, Interesting)
While technically true, it does not work that way in practice. Both the drug pushers and the "enterntainment industry" managed to create a situation where vast hordes of people who do not know any better are addicted to their respective brain-damaging merchandise. The only, small, difference in favour of RIAA is that their "products" do not directly manipulate brain chemistry of the victims. The resulting effect though is nearly identical as the "enterntainment industry" managed to make itself an indispensable part of the "american lifestyle". Remove the TV and most supposedly wealthy "mainstream" Americans would find out the sad truth: their lives are miserable, meaningles and empty and the TV is the mesmerising "drug" to relieve that condition.
So am I now a criminal (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but I find Life south of the border is getting loonier by the minute. Please remind me who won the cold war? I think Stalin is laughing in his grave.
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:3, Interesting)
if you actually READ the Running Man...... (Score:3, Interesting)
it's pretty good.
Among the other 'worlds gone to shit' elements are 'freevee' which is tv, which by law, must be on 24 hours a day in every household..
(I think there was even allusion to requirements that the volume be above 0 a certain number of hours per day, but I can't remember for sure)
I read the article at boing, and couldn't help but think freevee was next....
it'll never happen, you'll have to excuse me now, I gotta go to the store and get some more mokie-cokes....
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:2, Interesting)
No, because only one person in the entire world has to bother to rip the video/audio. Once one person does that and puts it online, no-one else has to. They just download it off the net like any other file.
Which is why the whole thing is so futile. Even if you "raise the bar" so that 99.9% of the people no longer rip video or audio, the other 0.1% is all that is needed to "seed" a P2P network with an already-ripped, ready-to-play copy. At which point it just spreads as if the "raised bar" never existed in the first place. And if people used to buy DVDs/CDs to rip them into a more convenient format and the "raised bar" means they no longer can, they're just going to hop online and get the version someone else already ripped in the format they want...
It's left as an exercise to the reader to guess whether or not those people will bother buying the original DVD/CD at that point.
The Blame Game (Score:2, Interesting)
There will always be a music industry, because despite some artists distributing music for free, it will never be the norm, because in our society, while information might be easy to distribute, material goods like equipment, housing, clothes, food, sadly are not, therefore anyone with talent will use that talent to make money. Anyone with a talent for business will use that talented artist to make them money. In short, there will never be this amazing revolutionary new business model that allows people to get free music and all the artists, musicians, producers and studio technicians to make a nice living.
I'll quickly get to my point. The industry has already made a legal alternative to downloading music. Okay, they were forced to, and that is a good thing. Downloading music is very convenient, and fast. However, the justification for piracy is gone, and any reasonable person will see all that remains is the desire to "get something for nothing". The courts recognise this, the law recognises this, and the government recognises this. As a result, the industry will succeed in using the law against pirates. A good thing I say. However, it has a major downside, which I predicted many years ago.
Because the basic contention of the industry is correct, i.e. "hey, that's our work, you're not supposed to be getting it without paying for it" is a correct one, they will succeed in any legal cases they bring. The only time they might lose is (as in any other legal matter) if they did something illegal to get there (i.e. monitoring somebody's computer files without permission).
In the end, this will only result in the law focusing more and more on software and networks like edonkey and bittorrent, and it will not be good for us. They will create stupider and stupider laws that harm aspects of the internet that have nothing to do with the piracy issue, because they don't understand it, and won't.
The best thing we as geeks could do is discourage piracy, the decent and intelligent among us know its wrong, and those of us from the napster era are smart enough to know that it couldn't last forever. We all know there are always new technological ways to pirate stuff, but those can be made null and void by just a couple of stupid catch-all laws. If we want the RIAA\MPAA to stop trying to influence our wonderful technology we need to stop scumbags abusing our wonderful technology for nefarious purposes...even if we once did it ourselves. The end result is obvious.
Reminds me of... (Score:2, Interesting)
So what cookies are they eyeing?
Marihuana Act (Score:3, Interesting)
They'd already labeled blacks as "Negro Cocaine Fiends"
http://www.google.com/search?q="negro+cocaine+fie
Re:I don't know which is more ridiculous... (Score:2, Interesting)
Bingo!
Like I said, you'd have to implement absolutely draconian measures to close this hole. You'd have to ban A/D converters... but those have huge uses outside of the music/movie industry. You'd have to ban software... but those have huge uses outside of the music/movie industry.
Simply, there's no way for the **AA to achieve what it wants through legislation. Technology has made them obsolete and technology will run over and flatten legislation every time.
Perhaps they should ban boolian algebra textbooks (Score:2, Interesting)
I took several digital electronic classes at a junior college back in the early 1990's. We learned how to use boolian algebra to design the simplest possible circuit that will do what we wanted. We designed and built our own simple digital circuts. We would select a few inexpensive jellybean parts from the back room and then snap them into a breadboard (with no solder) and then watch which LED's would light up to see if we were getting the correct output. In another class we used some old DOS based CAD software for designing our own circuit boards for digital electronics. We were not electronic engineers, we were just ordinary college freshmen at a small junior college. At one time our instructor had taught electronics to black kids at an inner city high school. I bet they could do much of this same stuff. I was really surprised at how easy it was to design and build simple digital circuits with so little training.
I never went on to get a degree in that field and am not an expert. But even so, I have some minimal basic electonic skills from those classes and what I had to learn about radio circuits to get my general class ham radio licence. With a little bit of effort and study, if I was so inclined, I suspect I could probably modify or create something that could get around their analog hole restrictions. Not that I am advocating that, I am just speculating about what many people whould be able to do. Of course many of us already own various devices which are not crippled. Will the use of those devices be grandfathered in and still be legal?
Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA should make boolian algebra texbooks illegal. Perhaps they shold also make breadboards illegal. I doubt that they would ever make all the various electronic parts illegal but if they did people would probably start collecting and saving parts from old electronic devices that are being thrown away. When I was in grade school back in the 1960s their was the one geek in the 6th grade who collected resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, chokes and other parts from scrap equipment. While eating lunch at school he would proudly show us the latest parts that he had found. Perhaps someday there will be a generation of hardware hackers who collect forbidden parts from old electronic devices and secretly share their secret plans and their banned boolean algebra textbooks. I believe there will always be significant numbers of poeple still using the analog hole no matter what laws the RIAA/MPAA pushes politicians to pass. Hollywood is totally underestimating what the next generation of kids will be able to do. Nearly every generation of young people has found its way of being cool by rebeling against the establishment. Less techie type people will likely be able to quietly buy limited production non-DRM-comlient homemade black market electronic items from friends. The analog hole will never be closed.
Re:Remember the jurisdiction (Score:1, Interesting)
So basically this means that things like DVD burners are okay, but systems that encourage (indirectly) copyright violation like napster, kazaa, etc, would not be.
Some Random Thoughts from a Lurking Layman (Score:1, Interesting)
(1) The pace of technology always insures that someone will always come up with a means of thwarting any such scheme within weeks. I used to work in inventory and loss-control, and I always laughed at the frustration of companies that would spend zillions of bucks on every new anti-shoplifting device that would come on the market, only to see their shrinkage remain more or less constant. It's a losing battle.
(2) Nothing unilaterally done by the U.S. government will have any effect on the rest of the world where the majority of hard-core piracy takes place.
(3) Anyone could stockpile current unmodified analog equipment and play with it to their heart's content for years to come. Used equipment will always line the shelves of pawn shops, thrift stores and garage sales.
(4) Most TV content will be available in analog form for many years to come -- the Broadcast Flag applies to BROADCAST signals and over-the-air TV signals are a tiny percentage of what is available. And cable companies will make analog versions of those signals available anyway as long as there are still millions of paying customers with older TVs.
(5) The vast majority of Americans care not a whit about high-definition digital video -- geeks and videophiles and people with money to burn are the primary cheerleaders for it. A plain old-fashioned 525-line NTSC analog picture is satisfactory to most folks. When I watch a football game, I only need to be able to see the uniform numbers, follow the ball, and keep track of the score -- I don't need to see every bead of sweat on a player's nose.
(6) Concurrently, there will always be lo-tech or piecemeal means of producing video that most people will accept as viewable. How about a modern-day twist on the kinescope -- point a quality camcorder at a sharp flat-screen display and record the image along with open-mike audio? It would still produce an acceptable image to the average layperson. Or, what would keep someone from taking a still screen shot of every frame, animate it, then synch the soundtrack to it? A lot of work, but a determined fanatic could still do it.
(7) No legislation that prevents Aunt Sallie from putting her old 8mm movies on DVD or a newleywed couple from freely sharing their wedding videos with friends stands a snowball's chance in hell of passing and/or surviving. If DRM gets so intrusive as to keep the average American (not just the savvy Slashdot geek) from doing average, everyday things with their video, then there will be an outcry. Right now, most Americans don't care about all of this because it doesn't yet affect them.
(8) When all else fails, give up and just read a book instead. You'll probably be better off for it.
WTF? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you are not constrained by the limitations of breadboard, then you can go for something much less messy. But I think it's important to get the point across that it's possible to build A-to-D and D-to-A from some really low-tech stuff -- well, not exactly bronze age, but certainly within the grasp of anyone who knows the way to their nearest Maplin store.