I have the natural, unalienable free speech right to repeat your idea/story/song/whatever.

That was the original assertion.

And THAT, dear sir, proves that you do NOT have an "unalienable" right to use ideas as you see fit.

But I do. I can totally repeat the entirety of the dialogue from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail from memory. And doing so is my inalienable right. Copyright prevents DISTRIBUTION and/or DUPLICATION of a published work, and even then only in very specific circumstances.

Also the First Amendment DOES trump Copyright. In situations where someone is being prevented from engaging in protected speech by Copyright, the courts almost without fail fall on the side of Free Speech. That's what the concept of "Fair Use" is about.

As I've said before, commercial speech has always had limits.

No, it hasn't always had limits. Such a statement is just silly. And even now, it only has very specific, targeted limits. Fair use of a copyrighted work is not prevented solely due to the commercial nature of its use.

The US Constitution disagrees with you.

No, it most certainly does not. You need to go read the Constitution. It does not establish copyright. It gives Congress the power, if it so chooses, to establish a LIMITED system whereby creators are given TEMPORARY monopolies on their ideas, EXPRESSLY for the purpose of encouraging the creation of new works. Copyright exists to enrich the public domain, as per the Constitution.

So, essentially exactly what the grandparent poster said...

I pull out the phone and click maps. No need to plug my address in the phone will centre in my current location. I search for "restaurants" and I get a list of restaurants starting with the closest one with good reviews.

Now I know you're lying. Google obviously bogosorts every result list I ever get back from Maps on my phone. "Closest" restaurants are always at least ten--if not twenty or thirty--results down.

Hell, half the time I search for something, it shows me something completely unrelated in Portland (which is an hour away). No, I am shocked at how abysmal Maps has become in the past year. I think I still have it rated at one star in the Play store. It's an embarassment!

This is what I used to brag to my iPhone toting friends about!?

Look up the Cablevision decision, where the supreme court ruled such a remote DVR service was legal. Then think about what you said.

Aereo was designed specifically with obeying the letter of the law as set by Cablevision.

Inquiring minds want to know...

Or bad compared to a gang member, a warlord's soldier, or even security consultant?

Do you mean the NYPD? Those are all pretty apt descriptions of them.

Well this was 2006 by my best estimation, not fifteen years ago. I was ripping DVDs of Slayers: Next if I remember right, and turning them into iPod formatted MP4 files with the subtitles burned into them. There wasn't a free, push-button solution solution that I could find at that point in time that would do all that. Sure, there were tools that would rip a DVD into DiVX format or something. But I needed them resized, transcoded into h264 (or whatever), and the subtitle track extracted and added into the video stream graphically, as the Nano didn't support subtitles. That required a script--so no, I don't believe it was an exaggeration. There's a big difference between simply "ripping DVDs" and "Turning a DVD into something properly formatted for an iPod". :)

And as far as Handbrake, looks like they removed libdvdcss from it, so a default install can't remove DRM from DVD videos anymore.

I think I used MakeMKV the last time I had to rip a DVD. If it's the software I remembered, it did a damn good job. But then again, my Nano broke years ago so I don't need iPod compatible video files anymore. MKV containers work fine on Plex, XBMC, and Android.

It wasn't intended as an advertisement. You could fairly assume it was an unsolicited endorsement, I suppose, but I don't know anything about Cucusoft's current offerings to be honest. This was a long time ago.

If Handbrake (for some reason I thought Handbrake was an OS X only solution, so hadn't looked at it recently) has progressed to the point that there's a single button press for "Rip this DVD for my iPod" then that's worth knowing, and it makes the "only technically savvy people..." statement even more silly.

My Dad asked me once how I got DVDs that I owned onto my iPod Nano, and if he would be able to do it himself. I told him it was a pretty convoluted process involving multiple pieces of software I downloaded and built from source, some shell scripts, and invoking the Nyarlthotep, the Crawling Chaos, at the appropriate moment.

After a few minutes of research, I bought my Dad a piece of software for $20 that with one button click rips a DVD and transcodes it into an iPod-compatible file. I believe it was something from Cucusoft. I then watched him easily rip his entire DVD collection to an external hard drive using that software, This made me realize something important: The saying "Sure, a tech savvy person could do this, but not an average user..." is only true because "tech savvy" people (like myself) are morons and will happily accept a poor user experience and hours of lost productivity to save $20, and then pat themselves on the back because they did something "cool". Meanwhile the "average user" has already been watching their movie for a couple hours.

Or my favorite example from my home town, LUSFiber.

Your local government has picked Charter to be the local monopolist. The solution isn't to get Verizon to lay lines, it's to allow alternative cable providers to operate. If it comes down to it, require Charter to sell access to their lines. If Charter throws a fit, see how they like running cable without government granted right-of-ways.

Also, the Federal Government fscking LOVES XML. Like, a lot. The things I saw in the new "protocols" they're deploying for internatl air-traffic control data stuff... Wow...

Having said that, I don't really have much sympathy for someone who's trying to help students and employees circumvent network policy. They can watch their porn or check facebook on their own time.

Actually at my last job I'd regularly have to "circumvent network policy" to just do my goddamn job. That policy was quite literally set by Congress, by the way, so good luck getting it fixed.

Maybe we shouldn't apply technical solutions to these sort of non-technical problems. Maybe we should just discipline/fire people who waste time at work, or trash school computers.

So you read the handy transcript right below the video, right?