eldavojohn writes "RealNetworks' product that allows one to copy a DVD containing a movie has been pulled. You may recall us discussing RealDVD and its legal implications." According to the linked BBC report, "RealNetworks — the firm behind the software — has responded to restraining order issued by a US court stopped selling the RealDVD software [sic]. Six major movie studios jointly sued the company on 30 September — the day the software was launched."
There is other software -- DVD Decrypter was one popular piece of software. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter [wikipedia.org] ) In the US, it may or may not be illegal under the DMCA to use such programs to back up your own DVDs. The only controlling legal authority I'm aware of said that doing so was legal, provided it was for personal use, but that distributing software to make this possible was illegal.
In the US, it may or may not be illegal under the DMCA to use such programs to back up your own DVDs.
This is not an open question.
The only controlling legal authority I'm aware of said that doing so was legal, provided it was for personal use, but that distributing software to make this possible was illegal.
This is correct--and the controlling legal authority is not a case, but the DMCA itself. You cannot circumvent protection to gain "access" to a work, but you can circumvent protection for "use" of a work provided you gained access (i.e. purchased the work) legally.
The problem being that you cannot "traffic in" tools designed to circumvent protection at all. So you likely can't buy, sell, or give away programs designed to help people take advantage of this subtle difference. You have to know how to circumvent the protection all by yourself.
Ironically, the area of law where this is not clear is whether it is legal to teach someone how to circumvent protection "on their own." Likely the First Amendment would preclude such a sweeping definition of "traffic in," but there are no test cases on this that I'm aware of. Certainly more perplexing conclusions have been reached before...
There is an obvious logical disconnect in allowing people under one section of the law to do certain things that the vast majority will be unable to do because of provisions in another section of the law. The rationale is that tools enabling DRM-circumventing "use" will naturally also enable DRM-circumventing "access," which is a no-no.
Just one more good example of how copyright law is suppressing the usefulness technology. But because this is copyright rather than patent law, the "useful article" doctrine fails to apply.
The foregoing is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer. However I am a law student and have made extensive study of the subject.
Sorry, I wrote that too fast. "Useful article" doctrine is not the phrase I was looking for. The "substantial non-infringing use" analysis, which is a part of copyright law, is where circumvention devices might be exempt from the DMCA, under its own provisions.
Please just ignore the second sentence of the second-to-last paragraph. I blame mornings.
but you can circumvent protection for "use" of a work provided you gained access (i.e. purchased the work) legally.
What part of DMCA [cornell.edu] exempts that? I don't see anything in there about legally gained access. Is it one of the Librarian of Congress exemptions?
1201(a)(1)(a) says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." (emphasis added)
So circumvention for access is explicitly forbidden, except under the Library of Congress exemptions.
1201(b) adds that "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof," that is primarily designed for, marketed for, or has limited use other than to circumvent protection.
So, circumvention for access is forbidden, and trafficking in circumvetion tools is forbidden. Notice what is omitted here. Nowhere does the DMCA forbid circumvention for use. Thus it was that the Supreme Court observed in U.S. v. Elcom (the Dmitri Skylarov case, which I feel was wrongly decided for other reasons we needn't go into):
Congress did not ban the act of circumventing the use restrictions. Instead, Congress banned only the trafficking in and marketing of devices primarily designed to circumvent the use restriction protective technologies. Congress did not prohibit the act of circumvention because it sought to preserve the fair use rights of persons who had lawfully acquired a work.
There is no part of the DMCA that "exempts" circumvention for use--because there is no part of the DMCA that makes it illegal.
I love the phrases "Congress banned..." and "Congress did not prohibit...". Congress would be quite interested to hear that. Congress is made of people, after all, and they almost never have the tiniest clue as to how their laws will be interpreted by trained nit-pickers. The idea that they did any of this intentionally is farcical. A more realistic phrase would be something like "Due to a bizarre, completely unanticipated technicality in over-analysed legalese, we are not allowed to..."
Well, look, you are free to suggest that Congress wrote this badly, but the quote I provided from U.S. v. Elcom cites directly to the congressional record. This isn't just some random law student's interpretation of a confusingly written law. This is how the DMCA was apparently intended to function, and how the courts have interpreted it to function (though, arguably, only in dicta).
Well, every time you use a licensed player to play a DVD, you (legally) circumvent or bypass the encryption (otherwise, you could not view the DVD you paid for)
It comes down to the term "circumvent", which is defined in the DMCA as:
"...to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner..."
I call your attention to the phrase "descramble a scrambled work...without the authority of the copyright owner" in the above quote.
Does viewing a DVD under Linux, for example, using a non-approved decrypter, constitute circumvention, or, have you, by virtue of your purchase of the DVD, received an implicit license from the copyright owner to view the content? Did you receive a license to view the content *only* on licensed playback devices? If so, where is that restriction listed on the media you purchased?
Some code snippets for you. (from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/) #!/usr/bin/perl # 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <sipb-iap-dvd@mit.edu> # MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout. # usage: perl -I <k1>:<k2>:<k3>:<k4>:<k5> qrpff # where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order
Isn't there other software that allows you to copy/rip DVDs ?
Not commercial. There are open source tools that you can accomplish this with and there are certainly shady products you can find online that aren't supported and probably aren't owned and operated inside the United States. The important thing is that they are not sold at Best Buy nor are they easy to use. I know ways of doing it with Ubuntu but your average person is still mystified that typing something on a command line causes my DVD player to do something.
DVD X Copy comes to mind although I've never used it, that's the most commercial looking stuff I've ever seen. And this is what its site [dvdxcopy.com] says:
Authentic DVDXCopy software is no longer being sold anywhere.
In response to:
If there isn't, can I write one and get sued ? At least I'd get my name in the papers...
Sir, you need look no further than the RIAA/MPAA to be sued. Why bother writing software when you can simply create a single backup copy of a CD or DVD for your personal use and notify them that you have done so. Your name won't make the papers but you will be sued. I'm certain they will be able to show that since you had it on your computer and your computer was connected to the internet, you were distributing it to several thousand other people who had no legal right in owning it. You won't be sued for the additional price of that media, you will be sued $75,000 because that's how much money you thieved from them! And thus you can be part of the ridiculous system that is digital music today!
Isn't there other software that allows you to copy/rip DVDs ?
Not commercial. There are open source tools that you can accomplish this with and there are certainly shady products you can find online that aren't supported and probably aren't owned and operated inside the United States. The important thing is that they are not sold at Best Buy nor are they easy to use. I know ways of doing it with Ubuntu but your average person is still mystified that typing something on a command line causes my DVD player to do something.
I disagree. AnyDVD and DVDFAB Decrypter are straight forward and extremely easy to use, (1-2 button click) and have a pretty decent support base. Although you can't find them at Best Buy...
Mirror Pirate Bay, and maybe a few other popular torrent sites. I'm not sure how many billion they would hit you with, but it would probably be enough to bail out a small financial institution. Oh, and end world poverty, but that's not so important now, right?
AnyDVD and CloneDVD2 are my personal favorites for a ripper/burner.
(The AnyDVD ripper will also rip BlueRay and HD DVD's nicely (if you buy the HD Key for HD) and it can also rip directly to a non-DRM'd DVD or HDDVD/BlueRay image file):) http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html [slysoft.com] http://www.elby.ch/products/clone_dvd/index.html [www.elby.ch]
Yes, there are various freeware and commercial products that let you rip and copy DVDs. I would point you at some websites, but I'm afraid of the Slashdot Effect causing them problems.
DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated in years because it's author was given a choice between facing a very expensive lawsuit or turning over the code and stopping work on it. He chose the latter. DVD Decrypter works fine on most DVDs, but not all.
AnyDVD is a commercial ripper that works on all DVDs and is updated regul
I played around with the "free" rippers and re-encoders for weeks and could never resolve audio/video synchronization issues.
Finally I broke down and purchased SlySoft's Any DVD ripper and their Clone DVD mobile. Now I have my entire DVD collection as.avi files - with no FBI warnings, commercials, etc., etc..
See? The big companies CAN work together when they want to. I'm honestly surprised that 6 major movie companies could work together without backstabbing each other. On a related note: When it comes to DVD ripping... just use "Handbrake" (google it. open-source ripping software)
When it comes to DVD ripping... just use "Handbrake"
Or, if you want something that'll play in a standard DVD player, k9copy [sourceforge.net]. I have young kids, and for some weird reasons I haven't bought them and video iPods. Backing up their DVDs is kind of a must.
I can count several other program doing exactly the same job and there are some which are not freeware but can be bought.
Probably only because they got too much attention?
Tweak bitrate and other settings and / or pick a target device (iPod, PS3, 360 etc.)
Click Start
Wait a bit, shiny digital copy pops out
Handbrake is a front end over xvid and x264 encoders so you get either an MPEG-2 ASP (DiVX) or H264 AVC file from the process. Depending on your target device you might want to choose one or the other or fiddle with the other settings but the defaults are pretty sane if you don't know what you are doing.
Sure the process might skip supplementals and there may be edge cases with alternate tracks or subtitles that require more effort but x264 is an excellent encoder and the quality is very good. I really don't see why anybody would want to use RealDVD when it DRMs the resulting movie in the process.
I'm talking about ripping the movie out for a portable copy. If you want to backup a movie then just use DVD Decrypter and your favourite burner to make a copy. If you want to shrink it first to a single layer, google for "DVD Shrink".
I'm not really sure what Real Networks was thinking when they came up with the idea of this software. How could they not assume that this software would attract a lawsuit? The MPAA are a bunch of assholes anyway. I recently moved to Europe, and I was reminded of the BS when I found out that I can't lend my DVDs, which I had legally purchased in Canada, to my friends because of region encoding. Now that I'm reminded of this BS, I will no longer purchase any DVD movies.
I'll stick with DVD Decrypter and DVD2One, then. I'd be more than happy to have a DRM-locked archive on my external hard disk, still with the content protection intact, but oh no, I have to reach behind me, search through the 200 or so properly licensed DVD's stacked in the bookcase behind me for the one I want, open the case, find that I put it back in the wrong box / brother borrowed it and it's not there, go hunting around the house for it, find it under a stack of papers on my desk, and finally g
Holy crap, that's awesome. My dad was the original h4x0r... he actually wired up a reel-to-reel in the family van and would play music on it while we roadtripped to visit my grandparents in Florida. His music of choice? "Alabama", "The Statler Brothers", and John Philip Sousa marches. It's a wonder to me, sometimes, that I even made it to adulthood. Might explain some things, too. 0_o
Huh? You mean ignore a restraining order? That would be totally suicidal. Coming out with the product in the first place is pretty ballsy, and I think Real should be congratulated for that move.
RealNetworks -- the firm behind the software -- has responded to restraining order issued by a US court stopped selling the RealDVD software
is grammatically incorrect and wanted to say "The BBC screwed up, we're just directly quoting them". Whether it's correct or not, it doesn't sound quite right to me.
I'm guessing it's because it's the audio home recording act and this is video.
Having owned a home audio CD recorder for many years, I can tell you that the AHRA was an interesting compromise. Home audio CD recorders do not accept standard CD-R media, but require special "audio" or "music" CD-R media that contains some encoded information that tells the recorder that it's an "audio CD-R."
The system also incorporated a technical mechanism that allowed for only first-generation bit-for-bit digital copying--you could make a bit-for-bit copy of a commercial original, but you couldn't copy the copy. (The machines, however, make a really excellent analog copy of a digital copy).
It was, I thought, really acceptable. It made casual copying convenient, you paid a quite reasonable amount for doing it, you were paying for the copy and not "pirating."
Manufacturers of audio CD-R media are required to pay a small amount of money to an agency that divvies it up between artists and music publishers.
One of the things that pushed me over the edge into a raging anti-RIAA crank was that when they started fooling around with "copy-protected" CDs, they made them uncopiable in audio home CD recorders.
In other words, here I was, an honest user, paying for every copy and keeping my end of the deal, and there they were, reneging on the deal.
I'm now utterly opposed to DRM because I'm convinced that the publishers cannot be trusted to limit themselves to enforcing rights that they actually possess. When allowed to use technical means to enforce their rights, they always overreach. They do not possess a six-year-old's sense of basic fair play.
I'm clueless on this, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't there other software that allows you to copy/rip DVDs ?
If there isn't, can I write one and get sued ? At least I'd get my name in the papers...
Re:I'm clueless on this, but (Score:5, Insightful)
There is other software -- DVD Decrypter was one popular piece of software. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter [wikipedia.org] ) In the US, it may or may not be illegal under the DMCA to use such programs to back up your own DVDs. The only controlling legal authority I'm aware of said that doing so was legal, provided it was for personal use, but that distributing software to make this possible was illegal.
Go figure.
Parent
The Controlling Legal Authority is the DMCA (Score:5, Informative)
This is not an open question.
This is correct--and the controlling legal authority is not a case, but the DMCA itself. You cannot circumvent protection to gain "access" to a work, but you can circumvent protection for "use" of a work provided you gained access (i.e. purchased the work) legally.
The problem being that you cannot "traffic in" tools designed to circumvent protection at all. So you likely can't buy, sell, or give away programs designed to help people take advantage of this subtle difference. You have to know how to circumvent the protection all by yourself.
Ironically, the area of law where this is not clear is whether it is legal to teach someone how to circumvent protection "on their own." Likely the First Amendment would preclude such a sweeping definition of "traffic in," but there are no test cases on this that I'm aware of. Certainly more perplexing conclusions have been reached before...
There is an obvious logical disconnect in allowing people under one section of the law to do certain things that the vast majority will be unable to do because of provisions in another section of the law. The rationale is that tools enabling DRM-circumventing "use" will naturally also enable DRM-circumventing "access," which is a no-no.
Just one more good example of how copyright law is suppressing the usefulness technology. But because this is copyright rather than patent law, the "useful article" doctrine fails to apply.
The foregoing is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer. However I am a law student and have made extensive study of the subject.
Parent
Correction (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, I wrote that too fast. "Useful article" doctrine is not the phrase I was looking for. The "substantial non-infringing use" analysis, which is a part of copyright law, is where circumvention devices might be exempt from the DMCA, under its own provisions.
Please just ignore the second sentence of the second-to-last paragraph. I blame mornings.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What part of DMCA [cornell.edu] exempts that? I don't see anything in there about legally gained access. Is it one of the Librarian of Congress exemptions?
Ugh. You're going to make me CITE this? (Score:5, Informative)
Fine, fine. Here we go. d^_^b
1201(a)(1)(a) says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." (emphasis added)
So circumvention for access is explicitly forbidden, except under the Library of Congress exemptions.
1201(b) adds that "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof," that is primarily designed for, marketed for, or has limited use other than to circumvent protection.
So, circumvention for access is forbidden, and trafficking in circumvetion tools is forbidden. Notice what is omitted here. Nowhere does the DMCA forbid circumvention for use. Thus it was that the Supreme Court observed in U.S. v. Elcom (the Dmitri Skylarov case, which I feel was wrongly decided for other reasons we needn't go into):
There is no part of the DMCA that "exempts" circumvention for use--because there is no part of the DMCA that makes it illegal.
Parent
Not my morning.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I love the phrases "Congress banned..." and "Congress did not prohibit...". Congress would be quite interested to hear that. Congress is made of people, after all, and they almost never have the tiniest clue as to how their laws will be interpreted by trained nit-pickers. The idea that they did any of this intentionally is farcical. A more realistic phrase would be something like "Due to a bizarre, completely unanticipated technicality in over-analysed legalese, we are not allowed to ..."
This reminds
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's awesome then. All we need to do is train monkeys in decryption techniques and we're set!
Re:Ugh. You're going to make me CITE this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, look, you are free to suggest that Congress wrote this badly, but the quote I provided from U.S. v. Elcom cites directly to the congressional record. This isn't just some random law student's interpretation of a confusingly written law. This is how the DMCA was apparently intended to function, and how the courts have interpreted it to function (though, arguably, only in dicta).
Parent
Re:The Controlling Legal Authority is the DMCA (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, every time you use a licensed player to play a DVD, you (legally) circumvent or bypass the encryption (otherwise, you could not view the DVD you paid for)
It comes down to the term "circumvent", which is defined in the DMCA as:
"...to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner..."
I call your attention to the phrase "descramble a scrambled work...without the authority of the copyright owner" in the above quote.
Does viewing a DVD under Linux, for example, using a non-approved decrypter, constitute circumvention, or, have you, by virtue of your purchase of the DVD, received an implicit license from the copyright owner to view the content? Did you receive a license to view the content *only* on licensed playback devices? If so, where is that restriction listed on the media you purchased?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, i don't care if its illegal ( which it is if you break the encryption to do it ) to back up my own DVDs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/)
#!/usr/bin/perl
# 472-byte qrpff, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <sipb-iap-dvd@mit.edu>
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file -> descrambled output on stdout.
# usage: perl -I <k1>:<k2>:<k3>:<k4>:<k5> qrpff
# where k1..k5 are the title key bytes in least to most-significant order
s''$/=\2048;while(<>){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@
b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$
Re:I'm clueless on this, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't there other software that allows you to copy/rip DVDs ?
Not commercial. There are open source tools that you can accomplish this with and there are certainly shady products you can find online that aren't supported and probably aren't owned and operated inside the United States. The important thing is that they are not sold at Best Buy nor are they easy to use. I know ways of doing it with Ubuntu but your average person is still mystified that typing something on a command line causes my DVD player to do something.
DVD X Copy comes to mind although I've never used it, that's the most commercial looking stuff I've ever seen. And this is what its site [dvdxcopy.com] says:
Authentic DVDXCopy software is no longer being sold anywhere.
In response to:
If there isn't, can I write one and get sued ? At least I'd get my name in the papers...
Sir, you need look no further than the RIAA/MPAA to be sued. Why bother writing software when you can simply create a single backup copy of a CD or DVD for your personal use and notify them that you have done so. Your name won't make the papers but you will be sued. I'm certain they will be able to show that since you had it on your computer and your computer was connected to the internet, you were distributing it to several thousand other people who had no legal right in owning it. You won't be sued for the additional price of that media, you will be sued $75,000 because that's how much money you thieved from them! And thus you can be part of the ridiculous system that is digital music today!
Parent
Re:I'm clueless on this, but (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't there other software that allows you to copy/rip DVDs ?
Not commercial. There are open source tools that you can accomplish this with and there are certainly shady products you can find online that aren't supported and probably aren't owned and operated inside the United States. The important thing is that they are not sold at Best Buy nor are they easy to use. I know ways of doing it with Ubuntu but your average person is still mystified that typing something on a command line causes my DVD player to do something.
I disagree. AnyDVD and DVDFAB Decrypter are straight forward and extremely easy to use, (1-2 button click) and have a pretty decent support base. Although you can't find them at Best Buy...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
CloneDVD? It's simple to use and not a shady product. Works pretty damn well actually.
Re:I'm clueless on this, but (Score:5, Informative)
(The AnyDVD ripper will also rip BlueRay and HD DVD's nicely (if you buy the HD Key for HD) and it can also rip directly to a non-DRM'd DVD or HDDVD/BlueRay image file)
http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html [slysoft.com]
http://www.elby.ch/products/clone_dvd/index.html [www.elby.ch]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated in years because it's author was given a choice between facing a very expensive lawsuit or turning over the code and stopping work on it. He chose the latter. DVD Decrypter works fine on most DVDs, but not all.
AnyDVD is a commercial ripper that works on all DVDs and is updated regul
Slysoft makes good stuff. (Score:2)
I played around with the "free" rippers and re-encoders for weeks and could never resolve audio/video synchronization issues.
Finally I broke down and purchased SlySoft's Any DVD ripper and their Clone DVD mobile. Now I have my entire DVD collection as .avi files - with no FBI warnings, commercials, etc., etc..
Working together (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Working together (Score:4, Informative)
Or, if you want something that'll play in a standard DVD player, k9copy [sourceforge.net]. I have young kids, and for some weird reasons I haven't bought them and video iPods. Backing up their DVDs is kind of a must.
Parent
Re:Working together (Score:5, Funny)
If I had a choice between buying kids and video iPods, I'd pick the iPods any day.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
maybe there were other motives... (Score:5, Funny)
Why this one? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
How many of those companies/developers are located in the US?
DVD decrypter + nero (Score:3, Informative)
just use an old copy if DVD decrypter floating around and Nero
to copy DVDs to other DVS's or mp4 files
How to rip DVDs for nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Handbrake is a front end over xvid and x264 encoders so you get either an MPEG-2 ASP (DiVX) or H264 AVC file from the process. Depending on your target device you might want to choose one or the other or fiddle with the other settings but the defaults are pretty sane if you don't know what you are doing.
Sure the process might skip supplementals and there may be edge cases with alternate tracks or subtitles that require more effort but x264 is an excellent encoder and the quality is very good. I really don't see why anybody would want to use RealDVD when it DRMs the resulting movie in the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Who am I supposed to hate more? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Sauron versus Palpatine. Is there a good guy? Don't think so.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that in this case, Real Networks is doing the right thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Good/evil isn't the way to look at it. Assailant/victim is. You can condemn the aggression even if you don't like the victim.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You can condemn the aggression even if you don't like the victim.
Or I can laugh at one pack of assholes beating up on another pack of assholes. Each to his own, I guess. ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with laughing at injustice to assholes, is that some day you will be the asshole. (And in Soviet Russia, asshole laughs at you.)
Surprise? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who in the UK doesn't have a region-ignoring player? You need better educated friends, perhaps.
Parent
Fine. (Score:2, Funny)
I'll stick with DVD Decrypter and DVD2One, then.
I'd be more than happy to have a DRM-locked archive on my external hard disk, still with the content protection intact, but oh no, I have to reach behind me, search through the 200 or so properly licensed DVD's stacked in the bookcase behind me for the one I want, open the case, find that I put it back in the wrong box / brother borrowed it and it's not there, go hunting around the house for it, find it under a stack of papers on my desk, and finally g
Nobody with a brain used that crap anyway (Score:5, Informative)
1. (DVD) -> DVD Decrypter -> MeGUI, X264 -> Done.
2. (BD) -> DVDFAB -> TsMuxeR -> MeGUI, X264 -> Done.
3. (CD) -> Exact Audio Copy -> FLAC -8 -> Done.
Next question.
Re:Nobody with a brain used that crap anyway (Score:4, Funny)
Next question.
8-Track?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what would be a great act of spite? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What, No Balls?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? You mean ignore a restraining order? That would be totally suicidal. Coming out with the product in the first place is pretty ballsy, and I think Real should be congratulated for that move.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What, No Balls?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to a gun fight with a knife is pretty ballsy too, but I'm not sure "congratulations" are the first thought that would be offered to such an act.
Inside or outside 21 feet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because someone thought
is grammatically incorrect and wanted to say "The BBC screwed up, we're just directly quoting them".
Whether it's correct or not, it doesn't sound quite right to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's the AUDIO Home Recording Act. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing it's because it's the audio home recording act and this is video.
Having owned a home audio CD recorder for many years, I can tell you that the AHRA was an interesting compromise. Home audio CD recorders do not accept standard CD-R media, but require special "audio" or "music" CD-R media that contains some encoded information that tells the recorder that it's an "audio CD-R."
The system also incorporated a technical mechanism that allowed for only first-generation bit-for-bit digital copying--you could make a bit-for-bit copy of a commercial original, but you couldn't copy the copy. (The machines, however, make a really excellent analog copy of a digital copy).
It was, I thought, really acceptable. It made casual copying convenient, you paid a quite reasonable amount for doing it, you were paying for the copy and not "pirating."
Manufacturers of audio CD-R media are required to pay a small amount of money to an agency that divvies it up between artists and music publishers.
One of the things that pushed me over the edge into a raging anti-RIAA crank was that when they started fooling around with "copy-protected" CDs, they made them uncopiable in audio home CD recorders.
In other words, here I was, an honest user, paying for every copy and keeping my end of the deal, and there they were, reneging on the deal.
I'm now utterly opposed to DRM because I'm convinced that the publishers cannot be trusted to limit themselves to enforcing rights that they actually possess. When allowed to use technical means to enforce their rights, they always overreach. They do not possess a six-year-old's sense of basic fair play.
Parent