Media Industry Wants Mandated Spyware and More 373
An anonymous reader writes "The joint comment filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) requests anti-infringement software on all home computers, pervasive copyright filtering, border searches, forced US intellectual property policies on foreign nations and a joint departmental agency to combat infringement during major releases." The MPAA would also like to have its rent paid a bit by Congress, with a ban on what seems to me like a useful tool (for those in as well as outside the film industry), the recently-discussed futures market for box-office receipts.
Re:Sounds like mad men (Score:5, Interesting)
People who want peace of mind to not be sued for something they're not sure they did or not could install and run it on their system since they aren't going to actively download infringing content anyways.
The rest of us, will simply download a cracked version of this watchdog software which, when it runs, never finds anything. Hence, "the pirates" enjoy the same protection from the xxAA that the ignorant get.
"But your honor, my client downloaded and ran the program provided by the prosecution and it never found any infringing content. Clearly any content found on my client's hard drive is legal or it would have been automatically deleted."
Stallman predicted it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I would urge IATSE to strike against this (Score:5, Interesting)
If entertainment industry workers took a stand for the country as a whole then public opinion would be on our side. The producers would have to take us seriously.
Makes Me Think About Pirating (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like mad men (Score:4, Interesting)
Makes me think of the movie Brazil... in the xxAA future you'll go to jail or not based on a boolean return value.
Of a closed source program.
Re:Eh, the typical (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I read a book on how to influence people that cited a study done on Watergate. And, it is a well known sales tactic, and is confirmed in social psychology texts. The implied conclusion of which is that the result does not even have to be "semi-reasonable" itself. The sales pitch (negotiation as you put it) just has to appear somewhat reasonable, not what is actually being sold. It just has to be less audacious, hence your quotes.
It seems people are hard coded to negotiate in good faith under the assumption that the other player is also acting similarly, even if evidence indicates otherwise. Thus, people will often reflexively entertain and agree to ridiculous arrangements based on the need to alleviate this external dissonance of sorts. Thus, a street peddler can sell you the $1 trinket necklace he just bought at a dollar store for $5 by asking for $8 first and then "compromising" to $5, despite the fact you wouldn't even have bought it for a buck otherwise. (FYI: That also includes an example of assumed high value for high cost and inadequately compensating for an initial impression.)
Re:Why not just charge less? (Score:3, Interesting)
RIAA, MPAA - why don't you just sell your product for a reasonable price so that more people will buy it? Make it easily downloadable and hassle-free (standard formats with no DRM). Wouldn't that be easier than the technical and legislative shenanigans you seem so enamored of??
You seem to think they're after money. I think they have loftier aspirations. Who needs gold when you can order your subjects to do anything at sword-point?
OK, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Eh, the typical (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, they're just using the old tactic of pushing the comfort boundaries. This is what really worries me ... they'll "water this down" so that its "fair in comparison to the original proposal" after much debate, but in absolute terms it will still be ridiculous.
It will be interesting to see what happens if and when Congress attempts to mandate spyware on every single operating personal computer in the United States. And, I might add, not a program that reports to a legitimate law-enforcement agency (if any such Federal organizations exist in the present time), but to the private sector. If that does happen, the next question will be what penalties would be applied to an individual who attempts to circumvent, disable or uninstall said spyware. You know, like most of us on Slashdot. This puts a bad taste in my mouth, it really does, and anyone who claims, "hey, it's just entertainment" isn't seeing the bigger picture.
... there are plenty more where he came from.
Besides, given the RIAA's demonstrated inability to reliably sue the right people, unwillingness to admit mistakes and offer redress (and absolute willingness to write off the collateral damage with out a second's thought) I have zero doubt that this would also be highly destructive, only more so. Remember folks, the MPAA is composed of people just as amoral and fundamentally dangerous as the RIAA crowd: hell, they're cut from precisely the same mold. Don't forget Jack "The VCR will DESTROY the industry!" Valenti
Not the America I grew up in, let me tell you.
Re:Why not just charge less? (Score:2, Interesting)
quite a few people buy books. libraries have been available for quite some time.
Re:Don't stop there. (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is (Score:3, Interesting)
exactly why I don't go to the movies anymore. Blame piracy if you will (despite the fact that some movies keep breaking records). A lot of us are fed up with being ripped off at the box office, raped at the confection stand, and then accused of being pirates (talk about preaching to the choir) before the movie starts, only to be ripped off again by movies that fail to deliver.
Back in the day, there were basically two forms of entertainment - staying home and watching tv, or going to the movies. Nowadays there are many more things to do that entertain, from playing multi-player games, to playing with consoles, to watching people ignite their farts on youtube. Your market share will drop accordingly.
I want the open source version ... (Score:3, Interesting)
.. to run on Gentoo Linux.
Re:When is it going to happen dammit! (Score:3, Interesting)
Corporations have some of the rights of human beings so why not require that to have those rights they must be embodied by at least a single person within the company who has the ability to order anyone in the company to follow his instructions.
Then require that the embodied person(s) is/are held accountable for the actions of the corporation.
Those people already exist. Typically, they are called "directors".
The problem is that those responsible for holding them accountable have been asleep at the wheel for a while, and then sold the keys to their henhouse to the foxes to buy their way out. IIRC, the US recently passed a law that basically says commercial organisations can contribute unlimited funds to election campaigns, which means in practice that they can buy representatives legally and openly at this point.
The only thing that is going to fix that is a grassroots rebellion, because the one thing the corps don't have yet is the vote, and money only translates into votes and therefore winning elections if the people who do get votes buy into the campaign propaganda. But you'd need a hell of a rebellion to overturn the US situation as it stands today.
I suspect that in the long run, what is really going to sink the US megacorps is the rest of the world. For example, while our government here in the UK has played along more than I'd like with ACTA and public consultations talk about limited change due to international agreements, even government ministers and the senior civil servants in the relevant departments are now admitting in the lower profile stuff that copyright is no longer fit for purpose and much greater changes are going to be necessary. Reassuringly, they also seem to be reasonably clued up about the idea of alternative business models and not propping up the dinosaurs, too, but for now they still speak in guarded tones when they have a large audience.
Similar comments apply in other fields, and at European level too there is quite a strong sentiment against letting big business steamroller democracy in the way certain other places seem to have allowed in the past. When it becomes clear that the rest of the world are bored of doing what the bought-and-paid-for US government says just to be nice, the US government will have to remember who it's there to serve, and the dinosaur megacorps will die out, while those who continue to do useful things that people in the US and elsewhere actually like will survive.
Re:Sounds like mad men (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think you read my posting carefully enough, but since you ask why I used the analogy of theft in my comment, I'll answer.
The entertainment industry is free riding on an agreement (copyright) designed to encourage literature and quality writing. They are allowed to restrict other's freedom of speech in return for (supposedly) increasing the amount of speech. However, not only are they turning in completely vapid useless and sometimes even damaging speech; now they are actively trying to interfere with all sorts of other free speech.
At the point where they start to knowingly interfere with free speech (by encouraging censorware) and deliberately failing to keep up their own end of the bargain (by ensuring that their copyright products will not be available after the term of copyright) anything more that they try to take is theft. They have broken their contract with society and lost the right to any of the royalties which they take. I used an analogy to theft deliberately and with meaning.
Re:Sounds like mad men (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't be TOO sure (Score:1, Interesting)
There could be spyware in the open source software too. Not nearly as likely as closed source, but theoretically possible. Really, how many of us actually read the source code for the OSS we use? And even if the source is clean, the pre-compiled binary people usually download instead of compiling it themselves could have something extra added in.
I don't want to suggest that OSS is insecure, but if you think running only OSS makes you 100% immune to spyware, you're fooling yourself. If someone really wanted to get some spyware on your computer, they probably could. OSS just makes it more difficult.
Re:Sounds like mad men (Score:5, Interesting)
The same held true for me with Magnatune. [magnatune.com] They aren't just "whatever you want to throw in" and do filter for quality, but license under CC-BY-SA-NC. And despite the fact that it's entirely legal to share it (so long as you don't do so commercially, anyway), they've been around for several years now, and put out some very good music where the artists actually get paid a significant share.
I've also run across the independent band Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers [azpeacemakers.org], and quite like them. They do amazing live shows (and most of the time you can sit down and have a beer with the band afterward), and I've been to several. They highly encourage fans to share their stuff-if my sister hadn't sent me a copy of Americano, I'd probably have never heard of them. That sharing sure didn't hurt them a bit.
Filesharing is in no way bad for the artist. Now the media cartels, those are horrible for the artist-and distribution channels existing outside their control is in turn disastrous for the cartels. The "artists", aside from a few very big names, get very little to nothing out of record/box office/etc. sales, and then the cartels deliberately fudge the numbers to avoid paying even that small amount.
Re:I would urge IATSE to strike against this (Score:3, Interesting)
For the English comment, even as an American I find the dropping of the second 'e' very odd.
It turns out that this is arguably a more correct spelling. Employee comes from employé, which is the past participle of the French verb Employer meaning, of course, "to employ". Being the past participle, according to french linguistic tradition it can also be used as a noun, having the expected meaning. For females, the word gets an extra unaccented 'e', becoming employée a feminine past participle, which if I remember correctly, is a form only ever used in noun form.
Go figure.
Re:Will likely be implemented (Score:2, Interesting)
Then again, Mr. Biden appears not to have much influence with the Government Accountability Office, as they're calling bullshit on the "WE'RE LOSING BILLIONS TO DEM PIRATS!!1!" argument so often touted by record labels and movie studios. Without the "OMG MASSIVE LOSSES!" argument, I don't know if Congress will be inclined to act.