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Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Feb 05, 2003 02:03 PM
from the you-mean-they're-against-otan dept.
from the you-mean-they're-against-otan dept.
ditogi writes "The Harvard Political Review did a quick interview with the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti. He gives his thoughts on government mandated copy prevention, fair use, and lobbying. In response to his famous 'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.' And what does he think of his current job? 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession.'" My favorite quote: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." Update: 02/05 20:05 GMT by T : Derek Slater writes "I'm the author of the Valenti article you guys linked to. I've made some brief comments about it on my site, and figured I'd send them along."
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Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age
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no backups !!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait till his hard disk dies
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You buy it again! I mean, duh.
Why would anyone want backups of stuff they paid for when they could simply pay for the same content all over again!
Look, let me put it in terms even a Slashdotter can understand. If people could have backups, how would Jack make more money? Next thing you know, people will start thinking movies are about "watching photons bounced off or emitted from a screen and being entertained". Sure, there's that "acting" and "direction" and "plot" and "special effects", but, please, people, don't lose sight of the important part, namely the part about Jack making money.
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Or what about when media changes? Can I simply transfer digital content from one media to another when I have paid for the right to listen to it? For instance, I purchased and repurchased a significant bit of music first on vinyl and then on CD with many of the albums being duplicates. In fact, some of them were purchased as vinyl LP's, cassettes, and then CD's of the same album. Now they are digital and hosted on my dedicated G4 media server, I don't want to have to purchase them again.
Also, what about all of that vinyl I have that is out of print? Old punk and bluegrass vinyl that I want to rip into iTunes as well. Since I have already purchased this stuff, I should be able to digitize it without having to pay any more royalties.
Re:no backups !!! (Score:4, Funny)
"The RIAA, where an ignorant consumer[*] is our best customer!"
[*]sheep, that is
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why technologists don't just make a Valenti watch explaining how he's being dishonest and disinforming legislators. That would destroy his credibility as a lobbyist (legislators hate to be embarrassed by parroting a lying lobbyist) and badly hurt his employers, the MPAA.
Re:no backups !!! (Score:5, Funny)
"All I am saying," he said, "is that there is currently no oversight over the information that is getting duplicated. In other words, for all we know these people could be backing up my clients' protected material. My clients are simply requesting a reasonable amount of access to this data to verify that it doesn't contain any of our intillectual property."
Mr. Valenti then asked the SysAdmin industry can justify spending so much money on "backing up" untold Terrabytes of content even though the data is in digital, format which does not degrade.
"I'm not accusing them of anything, but I think they are stealing content," he concluded.
Well, it's obvious...Mr. Valenti is on crack. (Score:5, Insightful)
Backups aren't necessary? I wonder if, when he was a kid, he ever dropped a record on his bedroom floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. He obviously really believes that if he scratches a CD, trips and falls and smashes a CD in half, has his cassette player or his VCR eat a tape, or anything like that, he (and we) should all just rush out to buy a new one. No way!
Where does his figure "$3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy" come from? How does he "measure" this loss, being as it's really difficult to measure negative quantities. Is he counting the total street value of large-scale bootleg videotapes, or some sort of hypothetical "if Joe Average hadn't taped Star Trek off the tv, he would have bought the box set" figure?
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. " Well, IANAL, but I quote
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That looks like there's something in law, all right. In Canada, the similar reservation is called "fair dealing," in case you're looking for it.
Oh, how he do go on. He claims to have been in Vietnam. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? That's the only other explanation I can think of...
Re:Well, it's obvious...Mr. Valenti is on crack. (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright infringement already WAS a crime 100 years ago. All the law that is needed is already on the books. I don't download music files. I don't "pirate" software (luckily, I'm able to use Free software for almost everything I need and I can afford the closed stuff I still need until Free versions mature). I don't copy movies from friends or strangers. But I do rip my CDs into ogg and mp3 files. That was legal. (Still is, unless I need to "circumvent" a copy-protection system to do it -- then the DMCA kicks in).
Valenti not only doesn't have to speak the truth, he doesn't want to speak the truth. He is selling the Big Lie.
I hate to sound like a broken record (for anyone who still remembers what that means), but the best thing you can do is to educate, say, two non-techie friends on fair-use, the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions, and the Big Lie about DVD region encoding (it's price fixing, folks, not copy protection) and ask them to do the same. Then support organizations that are taking the fight back to the entertainment lobbyists: Support the EFF. [eff.org]
One Big Lie I'd like to put to rest is that the world is filled with people longing to destroy intellectual property. I'm sure there are some. But I'm opposed to the DMCA, UCITA, CBDPTA (did I get that acronym right?) and the extension of copyright terms, but I'm still in favor of the existence of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Copying something under copyright illegally is and should be a crime. But making a device that copies something for fair-use purposes shouldn't be, especially if that device has uses for non-protected works as well.
So, if I may pretend I have the man's ear for a moment:
You see, Mr. Valenti, I have no desire at all to steal your industry's products. Zero. Zilch. But I do refuse to let you or our government look into my home to prevent me from doing so. To be Valenti-esque again, if the DMCA makes sense, then we should pass another law that makes similar sense: Since the majority of violent crime is perpetrated by young men from the ages of 15-30 years, we should lock all males between those ages in prison. It would dramatically reduce violent crime. That seems like a legitimate public goal to me.
You see, opposition to the egregious expansion of IP law is a civil liberties issue for many of us. Not a "I want free stuff issue."
a shed (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy is a knob.
Re:a shed (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm...
OK, I've switched sides. I'm a fan now.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:a shed (Score:5, Insightful)
They werent opposed to selling you movies to watch in your own home, they were opposed to a free market distributing those movies.
Thats where the whole crap about they sell 'liscenses' to the movies come about. Legally you can lend, trade, give away, or sell a videotape, but since the movie it contains is only liscensed to you for a particular purpose (personal viewing or rental) you cant.
But in the digital age, apparently he feels we should not be able to protect those 'liscenses' we bought. Or he maybe thinks our liscense is only valid so long as the medium the movie came on is in working order?
Is anyone stupid enough to believe a DVD is indestructable? My 8 year old single-handedly destroyed 2 of them this weekend alone. Does she no longer posess the liscense to view 'Shrek' because she stepped on the DVD, or can she watch the backup I made of it?
Re:a shed (Score:4, Insightful)
Is anyone stupid enough to believe a DVD is indestructable? My 8 year old single-handedly destroyed 2 of them this weekend alone. Does she no longer posess the liscense to view 'Shrek' because she stepped on the DVD, or can she watch the backup I made of it?
My 4-year-old wrote all over the movie side of my Back to the Future II DVD this morning, and I'm pretty pissed about it. I bought the set of the 3 movies for $50. Now I'm going to download a replacement and try to get it burned onto an svcd.
From the article:
You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
Exactly how does protecting your intellectual property compare to a standard that brings about industrialization? It's not like movie companies do anything productive for society, they just entertain us. They don't ship food the the hungry, or build houses for the homeless, or do any important scientific research. They just make goddamn movies!
You OWN DVDs, you do NOT license them. (Score:5, Insightful)
The belief that movies, music, or books are somehow licensed to you is incorrect. It's a popular misconception, presumably because the copyright industry wants people to believe it. Don't fall for it, the debate over copyright is messy enough without people bring incorrect beliefs into the mix.
If you purchase a DVD, a CD, or a book, you have a right to that particular DVD, CD, or book. In general you have every right to that DVD as you do to a chair you purchase. You can sell it, loan it out, modify it, give it away, use it, and let your friends use it. The only restriction of note on your behavior if copyright law. Copyright law says you can't distribute copies, that right is reserved for the copyright holder.
The copyright industry is spending alot of effort to manipulate the language of the debate. Their goal is to make the debate impossible by removing or invalidating the language of the other side. Don't let them!
Costs of Production (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to respond to the article's citation
to the costs of producing a CD and a movie.
I believe it cited 250,000 dollars for a CD and
20 million for a movie.
I talked about this with a friend who is doing
a CD for a chorus. He said that the studio
rental and editing costs were about $20,000
to $30,000.
We did not get a chance to talk about the
manufacturing and distro costs, but I strongly
think that the total costs can be done at much
less than the number cited in the article.
Mark
Re:Costs of Production - not studio costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Choruses also usually spend less time in the studio than the typical band. The chorus is working from a precomposed score and can sing their parts right the first time. Overdubbing, multiple takes, mistakes, and experimentation all take time.
Manufacturing/distro is in the $2/cd neighborhood. Marketing can be huge.
Re:They really let anyone be the head of the MPAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Now now, it's all a question of what the meaning of the word "facts" is. You know, how a 48x CD burner is "equivalent" to 2.4 regular CD burners?
Turns out that a $100 bill is equivalent to one fact. A $100 bill wrapped into a round tube, is equivalent to two facts. That same $100 bill, wrapped into a round tube, with one end placed near a line of cocaine on a Hollywood fuckgoblet's silicone implant, and the other end placed near a Senator's nose, is equivalent to several hundred facts.
> Yes, Lobbying turns Capitol hill into Capitalism... every dollar has a vote! YAY!
That ain't Capitalism. That ain't even a free market. Hint: If your business model requires that you lobby Congressmen to pass laws that allow people with guns to preserve your business model, what you're doing is so far away from capitalism that it can no longer see capitalism without the help of very-long baseline interferometry.
Thank goodness... (Score:3, Funny)
Visionary is as visionary does. (Score:4, Insightful)
The more serious, non-copyright-infringing projects are cooking, the better defense we have against indefensible legislation.
Wanna talk to a REAL visionary? check out the MAPS project at http://www.kingdomcomeinstitute.com
And by inference (Score:5, Funny)
From that quote then we can also infer he wasn't opposed to the Boston Strangler. Maybe he is the "Prince of Darkness".
12 Year olds? (Score:5, Funny)
Valenti: But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world.
Hey Valenti, what sites have you been visiting lately? Pete Townshend wants to know...
Why? I don't know. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Nowhere in this article did I find any mention of turning "Bringing down a movie on the Internet" into a viable business model.
People download movies becasue it is easy, convenient, and fast.
Attach a cost.
Keep it easy.
Keep it convenient
Make it fast.
and it could become a viable business model for the future...
The music industry still hasn't gotten the clue, maybe the movie industry still has a chance before it eaten alive by Kazaa, IRC(for the moment), and other file sharing applications.
No backups? (Score:4, Funny)
Dear Jack (Score:5, Funny)
I work at the bank where your financial information is stored. We were considering backing up your jillions of dollars but decided after hearing your comments that the information is secure because it is digital.
Have a nice day,
A fan
Lord o' darkness (Score:4, Funny)
the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti.
I was going to make a comment about slashdot, and professionalism, and editorial responsibility to present unbiased viewpoints..
but..
..fuck it. This guy is Satan on Earth, and I hope he goes the fuck out of business.
"Fair use is not a law" (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit, Jack. It's right here: US Code: Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 [cornell.edu].
TheFrood
Re:"Fair use is not a law" (Score:5, Insightful)
replacing VHS tapes for generations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also I never knew it was illegal to copy VHS tapes that you already owned. All the FBI blurb at the begining of almost every U.S.-made movie says is that it is illegal to copy for distribution or showing in front of an audience. I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
Definition of public performance (Score:5, Informative)
I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
United States copyright law, 17 USC 101 [cornell.edu] defines an audience as "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances".
Valenti is unaware of copyright statutes (Score:5, Informative)
He obviously has not read Title 17, United States Code, the statutes that specify copyright law in the United States. If he had, he would have seen section 107 [cornell.edu], which tells the judge what four factors to look at.
And one of the four factors is commercial exploitation. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. If a work is out of print or otherwise not being exploited, then it'd probably be possible for a defendant's counsel to argue that by taking the work out of print, the copyright owner has admitted that the work has negligible market value, that unauthorized copying could not possibly diminish the market value, and that the use of such material is more likely to be fair.
Obviously doesn't use a PC. :-) (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like him to play a DVD from Hollywood Video.
Of the last three I rented,
- one had pits and I had to skip a scene,
- one was delaminated, unplayable and I had to eject it before my DVD drive got munged,
-one was outright unplayable on my TiBook because according to the README.TXT "It doesn't play on a Macintosh."
I can MAKE a DVD on my TiBook with iMovie and a video camera but I can't play one of yours Jack.
Bwahahaha. Somebody buy this poor dumb [expletive deleted] a clue.
He probably believes M$ when they say that their systems are "secure now."
No backups?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, I wish he banked with my company... I'd make sure we didn't make any backups of his bank account - since they're not needed and all that.
And then I'd schedule a disaster-recovery test involving fire, flooding, and lots of sledgehammer blows to the DASD where his data was stored.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself."
So what if I've 'undermined the encryption'?
I do know what the DMCA says about it. But it's absurd and wrong that they can wrap a patent around something that copyright law won't let them accomplish.
Through their own legal battles against used sales and mom & pop rental places, they've made the point that I'm purchasing a liscense to the content. Where is the liscense (if there is a standard one)? Is there a term anywhere that says the liscense is tied to the medium and the encryption somehow?
Also I take issue to this quote:
"We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know."
This is bullshit. 'Young students' surely do know right from wrong. They know getting a movie (or video game or album) they haven't paid for is wrong. They also know it isn't theft, but a copyright infringement. I just hate his insinuation that we're not only criminals, but stupid.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright infringement is a TORT. A tort is a civil wrong. You can be SUED by the person/persons on the other end of the tort. The other party brings the lawsuit, the goverment merely acts as an arbitrator to settle the lawsuit.
Theft is a crime. You are charged with a crime, and prosecuted by the state or federal government.
Theft, more accurately, is the act of depriving someone of real physical property. If you take a DVD from blockbuster, blockbuster has 1 less DVD to sell/rent.
If you rent the dvd and copy it and return it, no real property has been lost. But you have broken the rental agreement, and committed a civil wrong. Both blockbuster and the copyright holder could sue you. You may be liable for damages, but you have not comitted a crime, and are not a criminal.
So, the MPAA is in the position of having to sue everyone they think might have copied a movie. This isn't feasible.
Lo and behold, the DMCA makes it a CRIME to circumvent a technological measure put in place to limit your access to digital media. Copying a DVD is still perfectly legal, but decrypting the CSS to be able to do so is a crime.
So no more wasting their own money to protect their copyrights. They get to waste taxpayer money sending the feds out doing their dirty work for them.
there was one lucid comment (Score:4, Interesting)
Summary: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interviewer: blah blah blah
Valenti: I am a back-pedalling, hypocritical, full-of-shit weasel.
My favorite line: (Score:3, Informative)
And of course, the MPAA are the "creators," because who else would ever make a movie? And he's also saying this implies that the MPAA own the right to copy movies period?!
This line, too:
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law."
May I point Mr. Valenti to the US Code Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use.
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
And he thinks no one should be allowed to copy anything, ever.
I don't see how anyone can take this guy seriously.
Backups...we don't need no stinkin' backups! (Score:5, Funny)
Local Man Arrested For Violence At Bank
Police Tuesday arrested a local man at a Bank of America branch. Jack Valenti, 46, was charged with assault and attempted robbery for beating the bank president with a spindle of blank CDRs and attempting to take cash from the teller's drawer. According to the teller, Mr. Valenti became upset when he was informed that, due to a computer error, his account had been closed. Due to recent changes in the bank's policies, the IT staff ceased making backups of the bank's data. When asked about the policy change, the IT manager, who appeared to be choking back laughter, said, "We recently changed our backup policies in light of statements made by Mr. Valenti himself that digital information was timeless and, therefore, did not need backed up. The bank president read that interview and told us he could no longer justify the cost of daily tape backups."
Mr. Valenti is being held on $50,000 bond. His lawyer declined our request for an interview. In similar news, the RIAA has filed suit agains Bank of America for copyright violations. When asked what evidence prompted the suit, a spokesdemon replied, "They had CDRs, didn't they? What more evidence do you need?"
55 MPH? (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the 55 MPH speed limit was acknowledged to be a bad idea and repealed, and if not, then Texas sure doesn't seem to care...
and if that's standardization then I have the ass of a boar. Yet again, last time I checked, the vast majority of cars in the United States are capable of driving both above and below 55 MPH, and do not actually require roads to operate (though it is recommended)
And to further debunk the arguement, the 55 MPH was not a 'standard' in that it was a 'regulation', and that anybody could break it without risk of more than a traffic ticket, there were no technological barriers. Then there's always the fact that a state could legally have a higher speed limit in those days, they simply wouldn't get federal transit maintenance money if they didn't.
Please move your hole-filled arguements over to the sink now, jack...i have some pasta to drain.
3.5 billion dollars a year on videocassette piracy (Score:5, Funny)
That means that he's claiming about $20 worth of losses for EACH blank videotape.
So I guess they're assuming that every single blank videotape sold is used to pirate movies. Nice.
Wait, just kidding. I just totally made up those numbers. Shit, I should be a lobbyist and live with honor.
Why wouldn't this man be angry? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who wouldn't sympathize with this creature? The world it has grew up inside of, loved and excelled at, is eroding away. Mentally, this person terrified of a world where information is moved without oversight; copied without permissions.
We all know there is no way to prevent the erosion. When you get to brass tacks, there are mathematical theories about how information cannot ever be entirely "secure". His battle is to do two things:
- Increase the effort to bypass licensing schemes. Make the appearance of an unlicensed copy an obvious flag of misuse and globally "illegal" activity.
- Increase the punishments for conviction of misuse and license bypass. Make them so horrifically outrageous a small percentage of ne'er-do-wells avoid trying to bypass the license.
So, we have the DMCA and all the legal details. Trial lawyers salivating at the chance to walk these through the courts, since they are headlines and precedent-makers. On the side of the status quo, they are also money makers.
But, in the end, digital information, if able to be delivered to the senses, can be recaptured in ever-increasing quality. Reprocessing of this kind skirts most license protection. For others, only a gentle spin cycle takes care of the rest.
This is the crux of his fear. Movies begin to appear on swapped discs the weekend before release, copied from stolen or illegal screenings. On a P2P network, with ever-increasing sizes and trusted agents, the information flows faster and faster. 1.5MB/sec later, I am popping my own popcorn and bypassing the Status Quo.
Oh woe is the Status Quo! The RIAA is first in the lineup for bat, but the issues are the same. Artists MUST eventually build the New Way to directly reach consumers. If they would only band together, they'd have enough strength to do it. Right now, they are too timid. Newbies in the industry still clamor to jump into the status quo. They are so mistaken. But that's all they know, like Jack. He will die an unhappy man, unable to put the genie back in the bottle.
mug
Maybe Valenti Needs To Listen To Himself (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, then, Jack, by your own words you might as well just give up already.
Just another greedy bastich (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this ass, the film industry, which is rolling in more money because the VCR exists than they would without it, is still grousing because the SCOTUS decided to allow me to videotape my niece's birthday party without forking money over to his fat-cat cartel.
Most Overlooked Quote (Score:3, Funny)
"We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit."
Who is Valenti (Score:3, Informative)
Valenti was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated -- and was the first person to be given a new job under Johnson (before AF1 even left Dallas!) He had a part in writing most of Johnson's speeches, and was stronly in favor of the war in Vietnam.
The man is over 80 years old.
One thing I definitely have observed is that people over 80 make short-term decisions. (Little old ladies selling farms to be paved over, old politicians milking the last bit of pork from the barrel).
I thought our society was supposed to strongly encourage retirement at age 65? For Valenti, that would have been during the Reagan administration.
The e-mail I just sent Jack Valenti (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair Use HAH (Score:4, Informative)
This is really laughable, and an idiot like this should not even be ALLOWED to lobby. Sorry Jack, but you don't know Jack. Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the United States Code provides a four value metric [cornell.edu] for determining whether or not something falls under the fair use doctrine. A very good fair use explanation can be found here [eff.org].
Valenti on VCR's (Score:3, Insightful)
"Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy].
"I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy."
Well how nice, he never wanted to destroy the money-making prerecorded video cassette industry that he so astutely predicted, he only wanted to charge us for time-shifting TV shows and making our own home movies.
This guy really takes the cake. He isn't happy with all the money that selling videocassettes made his association. He just whines about the 3.5 billion extra he thinks he should have been able to extract from people.
The prerecorded videocassette industry came after VCR's were introduced (of course). VCR's were invented to record, not just play. At about the time VCR's became popular, prerecorded movies where available on higher quality play-only media like laser disks; but people weren't buying Laser Disk players, people bought VCR's instead because they could also record with them. After a while, when a large-enough number of movies were available on tape, and the studios started charging a reasonable price for them, the market for videocassettes took off, despite some piracy.
I think that not only did the availability of VCR's create a huge market for videocassettes; it also made the sale of DVD's possible. When DVD players first came out, the pundits predicted that people wouldn't buy them because they couldn't record. Yet people did buy them because of the market for prerecorded copies of movies created by the existence of VCR's.
Is this guy really so stupid that he objects to devices that have made his association untold billions of dollars because some people are not paying? If VCR's couldn't record, not many people would have bought them, and the studios wouldn't have made any money at all.
People buy hardware because of the capabilities of the devices. Once enough hardware is out there, then there is a market for software. Software availability drives hardware sales too, of course. These markets are feedback loops that are sensitive to the characteristics of the hardware and quality and availability of the software. If you change the capabilities of the hardware, you are going to affect how many people buy the hardware, and therefore the market for software.
Record companies are going to be disappointed if they monkey with copy protecting CD's (without lowering the price). Movie companies are going to be disappointed if they force us into their preferred rental model where you pay for each viewing. Computer software companies are going to be sorry if they monkey with the computer hardware to prevent unauthorized execution of their software. All of these companies have an overinflated opinion of the value of their software, and are underestimating the backlash that will occur when they try to shove crippled hardware down our throats. They can only play us for suckers for so long. The huge price discrepancy between the cost of making an illegal copy and buying a legal one creates a vacuum that technology will fill. If the copies are more convenient than the originals, that will only add to the pressure. I wish the companies luck in cutting their own throats.
Standards evolve (Score:4, Interesting)
The "railroad standard" evolved without a gov't mandate (unless of course were talking about Rome)...search google for "space shuttle chariot railroad". Any number of links to the following text:
FALSE! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.ht
DVD = Better Value (Score:3, Insightful)
I often download divx rips of movies. I then watch the movie. If I like the movie I buy the DVD, which offers superior quality of video and audio and usually a plethora of special features, like director commentaries or deleted scenes. The movie probably cost between $75 - $150 million dollars to produce. I feel that $15 is not too much for me to pay for the quality of the movie and the extra features.
On the other hand, I download an album of VBR mp3's. I listen to it, and I usually like three or four songs, assuming I'm downloading an album because I've been exposed to the artist. (Otherwise, I might like one song.) I look at the CD, which (liberally) might have cost $350,000 to produce. The CD will cost me at least $15, and I will get a very minimal increase in quality with no added features. That is simply not worth it to me. By purchasing the CD, I get nothing, and I am sending the message that I like the music on the album. Of course, I have bought around 10 cd's in the last month, but they were albums on which I enjoyed a majority of songs.
The RIAA needs to adapt. Their options, as I see it, are to start producing better music or dramatically drop the price. Wasting efforts on DRM systems and lobbying for stricter laws is myopic and futile.
Sure, copying entire DVD's is possible now, but it is beyond the capability of most people. Spending my time finding and downloading an entire DVD image is not worth the cost, to me.
An Answer for Valenti on CD's (Score:5, Insightful)
"The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?"
I think I can answer his question. I suspect that the same producers will still be available if the music industry dies; I doubt that all the producers will be killed.
I think the question he really wanted to ask was "who's going to PAY to produce it?" The answer right now is that the musicians themselves pay to produce; the record companies just front them the money. If the musicians become about as popular as Britney Spears, they can earn enough to pay back the production costs out of their royalties.
So the question really is, who is going to front the musicians production money when record companies can no longer make obscene profits from their control of music distribution?
There are some possible answers to that, which I'll illustrate from experiments done by one of my favorite groups, King Crimson. The band owns its own record label, and they make 10 times as much money per copy on the CD's on their own label, compared to the CD's that they license the Record companies to distribute. Even if the current music distribution system collapses along with Valenti's predicted collapse of record companies, then independent record companies can still use their distribution methods.
Although King Crimson is a popular enough band to be able to provide their own production money, only their new releases are sure to make back the money. They also have a scheme for paying the cost of producing CD's from old concert recordings. They ask their fans to front them the money by contributing to an account, from which they buy for the CD's that they want from the ones that are produced.
Musicians and producers will survive the death of the current music industry. More and more musicians are bypassing the current record companies because of how badly they are being ripped off. I am confident that music will still be produced because either the artists or their fans will be able to front the production costs. If the big multi-national record companies no longer monopolize the distribution and promotion systems, I think you will find that the artists themselves will be able to take over. After all, the current system is really only helping the small number of hugely popular acts that dominate MTV. All other acts are simply getting screwed by the current system, which charges them for all the costs, but gives them only a tiny percentage of the earnings.
A few comments. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet they still participate. According to Opensecrets.org the movie industry donated $20,172,249 to Democrats in 2002 and $713,874 to Republicans in 2002. Most of that money came in the form of soft contributions, the primary targets of the Mcain Feingold bill. See here [opensecrets.org] for details. The Star player in the industry Disney came in at #66 in the all-time top donors list at opensecrets. See here [opensecrets.org] for the list and here [opensecrets.org] for their profile. They too favor a lot of soft money. Jack's own opensecrets link is here [opensecrets.org].
And yet he favors censoring technologies and code when his clients' profits are at stake. It's obvious that he doesn't consider code or engineering to be speech but still it seems odd to take this kind of firm line on one area of human endeavor and yet to be so closed off in another. Perhaps his speech is more important than other peoples' speech.
However:
In Jack's world of course we would all be happy to pay for new copies whenever this occurs. Here on earth however my wallet and I object to re-purchasing the same thing.
The same way that we always have with books, cd's and movies, by relying on sensible laws. And accepting the fact that the profit models just have to take a hit now and again.
Not completely true. It is illegal for me to copy the Spider man videotape and to share it with a million friends. It is not illegal for me to copy excerpts from it for activities covered under fair use restrictions. I agree with Jack that you cannot legally make backup copied of your tapes (unlike cassette tapes) but I would argue that this is wronmg and that this restriction, in light of the fair-use provisions, exists soley to guarantee a stream of new customers as tapes wear out and to permit hollywood to adopt a two-tier model of pricing whereby video stores pay more than the rest of us for each copy.
Just how old does he think video tapes are?
Seriously, Would I find one if I looked through my grandparent's house?
Other people have pointed this out already but just to rub his face in it the law is here [cornell.edu]. Since we haven't been using the Internet for generations he may not be used to it. In his testemony [cryptome.org] before Congress on the VCR he stated "I am suggesting that the copyright royalty fee lives under the canopy of fair use."
Actually he was opposed to the VCR and what he felt that it would do. The presentation before congress is a beautiful read [cryptome.org] in which he quotes excerpts from peoples' diaries as evidence not unlike the recording industry's current work with phone surveys. He also decries the first sale doctrine as a route to an unstable marketplace, spends time discussing the greed of Japenese companies and his desire to help the American Consumer. He even admits to infringing himself and asserts that the only purpose of VCR's is to "is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people".
He predicted:
Where the hell can you download >700mb in a matter of minutes?
Although this isn't in his article but in the testimony [cryptome.org] above I feel it should be commented on too:
If that is the case, then he has a lot of explaining to do about the DVD Reigon Encoding system.
Final quotes from Jack:
Re:Message body (Score:3, Funny)