Slashdot Log In
Broadcast 2000 Removed From Public Access
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 10, 2001 03:29 PM
from the luckily-it's-gpl dept.
from the luckily-it's-gpl dept.
VRteach writes: "I see that the developers of the fine multimedia software, Broadcast 2000, have removed their main product from public access. Their web site cites a worry of potential liability." The site says that "the distribution of Broadcast 2000 enhanced to unacceptable levels the risk of an individual experiencing significant financial damage due to the extremely expensive nature of high end video production and the high risk inherent in professional video business marketing." It also says they plan to keep issuing "minor works" for now, and as liability issues are resolved to again release major programs.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Broadcast 2000 Removed From Public Access
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 264 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I am not a lawyer, but.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Competition and underdogs come from tyrannical control of a market. What are the cost breaks across this market, and where do the huge expenses add up from?
Re:I am not a lawyer, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The makers of Broadcast 2000 realize the people are ACTUALLY using their software for high-end (that's the "expensive" part) projects. Such users become dependent on Broadcast 2000 and have a lot to lose should the software have serious bug in it.
The developers don't have any legal obligation to fix such a hypothetical bug (well, actually with the DMCA *THEY MAY*), though I am sure they no doubt would - eventually. But this could blow a multi-million dollar deadline for a production house.
The DMCA insists that you always have someone you can sue (the "warrenty" issue).
The biggest problem with this part of the DMCA is that it seeks to hide the fact that computing, by it's nature, is *a risk*. In the Peter G. Neumann sense. The use of ANY technology implies a certain amount of risk/faith - fire resistant gear as a hard example.
The law is being made to hold responsibility beyond what is reasonable in the physical world. Sometimes things don't work out - that's life.
Unfortunately, in the US we would like someone, anyone, to be responsible other than ourselves.
Re:I am not a lawyer, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I am not a lawyer, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The DMCA only applies to "consumer" equipment, not "professional" equipment. What's the difference? Nobody knows.
As we have seen in the music production arena over the last couple of decades, as pro equipment gets cheaper there becomes a "prosumer" class of equipment - professional quality, consumer prices.
The DMCA tries to insure that this will never happen with video production. Anything cheap enough to be consumer is automatically limited in terms of the functionality it can offer.
Re:Is this saying what I think it is? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mirrors? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mirrors? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mirrors? (Score:4, Informative)
Personally... (Score:3, Interesting)
The program was a neat concept, but I was unable to get it working once over the past few years of playing with it. I have 100% compatible hardware for capture.
Liability, why does avery lee still distribute one of the most popular video edditing programs under GLP still then? http://www.virtualdub.org/
I don't understand, and I'm personally very skeptical of this excuse to stop development and pull the program.
can someone please explain to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:can someone please explain to me (Score:5, Insightful)
What the...? (Score:3, Insightful)
As near as I can tell it boils down to this: They fear being sued by a customer that lost a lot of money because of their software. Sounds like a smoke screen to me.
Isn't it GPL'ed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I mistaken, or wasn't Broadcast 2000 GPL'ed? If so, why all the hubabaloo? So he doesn't want to do development anymore, I don't blame him. But anyone who is interested can always pick up where he left off.
the babelfish version... (Score:5, Funny)
This means: "We have fewer lawers than Avid, Adobe, and Macromedia. In the current business climate, the company with the largest number of lawers wins, no matter what the law says. We are closing the project because we would like to have enough money to eat net week."
gov't of the corp., by the corp., and for the corp.
Re:the babelfish version... (Score:4, Informative)
No amount of disclaimers and click-through agreements can keep these lawsuits from getting started, and once started they are incredible money-sinks.
Exactly this kind of thing happened to Burt Rutan, the designer of almost every interesting airplane over the last 20 years. His VariEze, and follow-on LongEZ were spectacular designs, but a few people built them poorly, died, and Burt was sued. He defended four of five of these lawsuits, and won every one, but decided that there were better ways to spend one's life, and pulled the plans off the market. In something parallel to what will happen here; there are xeroxed versions of the LongEZ plans out there if you really want them, in a samizdat kind of operation. Burt's current company, Scaled Composits [scaled.com] continues to build exciting airplanes, but only for the corporate market.
thad
Something more may be going on here (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally, the warranty provisions with which a software maker must be concerned are these three:
Generally, the 2 implied warranties can be disclaimed by reciting the magic disclaimer words. (NOTE: I AM a lawyer and this is NOT legal advice to ANYONE - thus I am not reprinting the magic words here so no one can rely on any supposed "advice" they may claim I am giving.)
What I suspect is happening here (and this is close to pure conjecture) is that the company is spooked by recent lawsuits (i.e. - Napster, DeCSS, Felton, et al.) and decided that it would take the safe route rather than be accused of providing a tool to infringe copyrights in authored works.
Of course this is my opinion alone and is based on current events in the legal world combined with the statements on the Broadcast 2000 website. I may be completely wrong about this. Only the people at Broadcast 2000 can say for sure.
I don't understand... (Score:3, Insightful)
And where's the other players in all this? Between the Video Toaster and Personal Animation Recorder this kind of stuff was done ten years ago on Amiga. Not to mention (as already was) the Mac-based Avid. another poster mentioned the similarity between B2K and an Adobe product: why would they be afraid of Adobe? If anything, Adobe is a relative newcomer to the field, not an innovator.
There's got to be better reasons.
As I understand it... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's similar to someone refusing to post any more legal opinions on Slashdot because they don't think IANAL will protect them if someone actually takes their legal advice, and loses money/realizes damages because of it.
This is bad news, if it's an accurate assesment because one of the key benefits of the GPL is a release from liability. If you just put something in the public domain then someone can still sue you if using it damages them, but if they use it under the terms of the GPL there's no explicit or implied warranty. So, let's just hope these guys are wrong!
Free Speech Warranty?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, getting in trouble with commercial organizations because you are encroaching on their "intellectual property rights" seems to be a near daily event these days, but warranty liabilities?
Will scientists be sued next for disclosing scientific principles, algorithms and processes for breach of warranty if some experiment backfires? I must conclude that the precident of suing people for releasing their source code into the public domain could have a chilling effect on the open source community, perhaps starting with HeroineWarrior.com.
Closing down B2000 represents a significant blow to the Linux-based Video Editing segment. As I recall, commercial organizations were bundling B2000 in a turnkey video editing hardware solution. I guess they'll be looking for alternatives, none of which are as mature or advanced as B2000.
IANAL, but IMHO free (speech) software should be handled rather like free advice. Take it for what it's worth.
Sure They Can Be Sued (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone can sue anyone else for anything at any time. All that's needed is a lawyer who will take the case on contingency. Then it doesn't matter whether the suit has any merit at all, because the defendant will still be out the cost of a lawyer just to get the suit thrown out, and the plaintiff has zero risk in many cases. (Fortunately, some states have frivolous lawsuit laws that provide some protection from totally bogus suits)
I think I'll sue them now. I've always wanted to make an expensive video production, and they've taken away my ability to do that - along with all of the money I would have made from the project.
Of course IANAL but IAMANAL
I think this is a hoax. (Score:5, Informative)
Here:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_i
they mention makine Cinelerra a commercial program, but the message itself looks like it was either a joke or written by someone high at the time. Cinelerra is GPLed, by the way.
From their docs (manual.ps in the Cinerella distro):
"In mid 2000 designs for a Broadcast 2000 replacement were drafted. The Broadcast name was officially retired from the series and the software would now be called Cinelerra."
Total Confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several
involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media
player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite
meaningless in today's economy.
The first and third sentences appear to deal with liability to someone who used the software and lost time/money/product because of it. But the soecnd sentence sounds much more like copyright/DMCA issues, with RIAA vs. p2p sounding suspiciously like the Naptster suit. What is the deal here anyhow? If it's IP issues, warranty exemption is the wrong way to go. If it's warranty issues, what in the world do MPAA/RIAA/p2p issues have to do with it? When something makes this little sense, there's something fishy going on. These folks aren't saying everything they know.
These guys seem really cool (Score:4, Offtopic)
The FIREHOSE package contains a simple library allowing any application wishing to stream data across striped networks to do so with just a few function calls. Also included is a file transfer utility and a pipe utility. Pipe gigabytes of uncompressed video, CD-R images, scientific data, tar archives, and porn all with the greatest of ease.
Um - Anyone know what they're talking about here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone know what they are talking about? They mention some RIAA stuff and mp3 people, but I can't think of a case where people doing ordinary end user stuff went and sued. The RIAA is trying to keep their death grip on their industry, and ditto MPAA. Broadcast 2000 wasn't using DeCSS, to the best of my knowledge, and anyone who uses free software knows (or had better figure out) that they have no right to sue the writers! That's like bringing me your computer, me saying very clearly I'll be happy to try and fix it at no cost but I can't guarantee anything, and then you suing me because I couldn't make it work and you lost too much time while I was trying! At this rate no one will be willing to help anyone do anything ever for fear of being sued! Free software is a gift to the world. If you want to use something where you have the right to sue someone, you'd better find a commercial company and pay them some money. Insurance companies don't give out free insurance - you pay them to assume the risk that you are going to get large sums of money from them in the future. These people seem to be treating free software like free insurance. I doubt the law will accept that. If so, I wouldn't be surprised if the technical people desert this country and move somewhere where people don't try and use generosity as a way to blame people and force them to pay for their generosity with cash. Talk about screwed up...
What about the XCDRoast method? (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand that this software will probably erase my hard drive, kill my pets, make California sink into the Pacific Ocean and the Earth to crash into the sun.
I think a good approach to any bonehead that would sue a Free/Open project is take the ridiculous disclaimer to the ridiculous extreme:
I understand I got this for free and have no expectation that it is fit for any purpose whatsover.
I understand that terrible things are likely to happen if persist in running this software such as permanent damage to system components and loss of data.
I understand that this sequence of prompts is going to look GREAT in court should I be obtuse enough to sue anybody anyway.
I understand that there is no way in hell that I accidentally agreed to this.
If I sue in spite of all of this, then I agree that contents of this dialog are admission that I'm bringing a frivolous lawsuit.
If I'm still obtuse enough to sue then I agree that I'm too stupid to waste a court's time and am a vexatious litigant.
Any version of this software lacking the click through disclaimers is not the responsibility of this Project. For that matter neither is this one.
There should be no option to disable the disclaimers. That's the price of getting to edit video or otherwise operate a computer for free.
Re:WTF?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can someone dumb this down a little for me please.
Basically they are saying that by distributing Broadcast 2000, there was an increased amount of risk for someone to do something stupid and mess up their expensive equipment (and sue the software company for their own mistake). It's pure logic...the more people using something, the more likely someone is to do something stupid.
This is the number one rule of computing at its best: CYA, no one else will.
Re:Well that shot Linux credibility to hell. (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah... why not? The GPL saves the right for *anyone* to fork the code. There is always a more fearless group out there willing to take up controversial code.
So if someone still has the tarball...
It's time for Broad-Kast XP!
The problem with punting (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to fight this battle, here and now, and hopefully, this copyright issue thing is just a pendulum, and it will slowly start to swing the other way. My opinion is that it has to. The media companies have pushed copyright about as far as it can go. I think the way the current legal climate is now, the VCR and the photocopier would never have been produced at all.
What we need is to quit passing laws that protect a business model. There is no inherent right to profit.