Macrovision Wants Old DRM to Work Forever 288
Grv writes "Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analog video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitizing such video, as any good digitizer would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organizations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn't overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analog recordings."
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future (Score:3, Funny)
KFG
Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future (Score:3, Funny)
Or perhaps encouraging how little they care about watching Buffy: Season Three in 2018.
Is that what it's supposed to do (Score:3, Funny)
Is that what they are trying to do. I never can tell, the window that pops up to tell me what DRM scheme is being bypassed flashes by WAY too quickly for me to catch it.
Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future (Score:2, Funny)
Also if anybody ever asked you if you had a CD of Pink Floyd do you think they cared about the physical medium or listening to the content.
A physical medium is a delivery device - an outdated one because it costs money - the great thing about digital media is that you can make N copies for effectively free - you can change its format, you can rip a section of it (either a time segment, or only the audio from a movie say) - its more versatile and powerful. It also has the nice side effect that it takes a lot more to make the data unretrievable. My grandfather used to have some recordings on tape spools - just open tape that went between two reels - player broke - no one around could convert the damn things. Media companies recognize these benefits and you can be damn sure they use it - e.g. cut out the people who make the physical film in favour of digital video recorders.
Thats also the problem with the digital medium though - if you treat things as a bunch of 1s and 0s and liberate it from a physical medium then your buisness model whcih relied on you delivering that physical medium fails. Unless they can control the hardware which is what HDCP tries to do, and is the point of all this trusted computing stuff that scares me. But really such control of the hardware is an artificial limitation of technology. What you should do is change.. or die. Theres no rule that demands that these recoding companies have to survive this century - music won't die. It might just become less corporate.
So sure let them say you have no real right to the song and all you can do is play if from the original medium you bought it on. And let people with cdrom drives and cd rippers and mp3 codecs and mp3 servers and p2p networks tell them to go take a flying leap.
Re:One Fine Day In The Not So Distant Future (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here Here! (Score:1, Funny)
I think you mean to say "RIGHT-ON (tm) Allwest Associates CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 752 Orchard Dr. Paso Robles CALIFORNIA 93446"