From a copyright perspective does it matter who loaded the disc (Machine, human, Zediva employee, trained monkey or otherwise)? The law in question gives specific exclusive rights to copyright holders for public performances. If blockbuster wanted to rent you DVD players with the discs already in them I don't see any laws that would prevent it.

Regarding your point about avoiding the "legal definition of streaming," they aren't. There are no laws preventing streaming media. The applicable copyright law is against public performance. So as long as your space-shifting "streaming" can be considered a private performance (as I argue it can in Zediva's case), then no laws have been violated.

RE special features: it is entirely possible, and will be coming in future versions. But for now they've limited the buttons to play, pause, fast forward and rewind. You really are controlling the actual disc in an actual DVD player.

Heh, karma is going to burn for this... Pardon me for not having the time to write and in depth summary of my summary (from my iPhone...). When you've actually read what I have to say feel free to come back and hate. Ps, my post did exactly what you suggested: I stated my opinion of this development (good for zediva for fighting back!), summarized my blog post ("a summary of the issues, existing case law, and how Zediva differs"), and provides a link to read the details. No one is forcing you to click the link... Or to read my /. posts for that matter.

Glad to hear they're fighting back. In my opinion, they have a good chance of winning, even taking into account existing precedence.

...Pardon the shameless plug, but I wrote up a good summary of the issues, existing case law, and how Zediva differs on my blog here:

http://appleguru.org/blog/2011/04/05/zediva-movie-studios-and-copyright/

Of course they want control. And of course they can try and sue. By my point is that Zediva has a good case for winning the lawsuit, as they have a fairly strong case and many years of rental precedence on their side. As much as the MPAA lobbys and tries to create laws (sometimes successfully), they, like everyone else, must operate within the current legal system. Zediva has found a legal (in my opinion, as I explain in the article linked above), way to stream movies without licensing them.

Did you even *read* TFS? That's the problem exactly. The NYT *is* the ones originally posting the content (yes, largely headlines), on Twitter. And now they are asking for the retweeting of their tweets to be blocked. Absurd.

I should have looked it up before I rattled off a first post without being logged in, but it would indeed violate the standard TOS (unless NYT agreed to a custom version, which I doubt):

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

http://twitter.com/tos

err.. 4 years.. still $7.5/year isn't exactly a ton of money. That being said, I think the powers that be recognize that fossil fuels and similar power sources are inherintly a dead end. Creating new fuels is an energy intensive process, effectivly making the new fuel a one-time use battery. And depending on the process used to create it, generally not a very efficient one.

A bunch better way to spend money is developing new battery tech and at looking at utilizing solar energy to power them. That, or get over the stigma against nuclear tech and utilize small personal reactors for energy...

That's not much of a development budget....

I just came back from a semester abroad in Sydney, Australia. I bought an iPhone 4 there unlocked, and used it every day, chewing through a lot of minutes and using a lot of data. I was on Telstra in Australia, and their 3g network is hands down the best I've ever seem anywhere. During my entire time there (6 months), I didn't drop a single call. I had wonderful service and fast data almost everywhere, and even with low signals (-110dbm and lower) I was able to make and hold good voice conversations.

In New Zealand it was a similar story. I was on the South Island, and used Telecom. Their 3G network was also very good, and fast, though coverage was far more spotty than Telstra in AUS, especially on the west coast. But when I had a signal, I had fast data speeds and didn't drop a call.

Then I flew into LAX. Popped in my AT&T sim, and was very, very dissapointed. 1-2 bars at the airport, dismal data speeds, high latency... and I've been dropping about a call a day :/ I was on a major road near my house outside of Boston yesterday, and dropped a call driving home. GAH!

I just spent $1000 on mine (Well, $1000AUD; ~$940USD today)... 32GB unlocked iPhone 4 from Apple in Australia...

(apparently I can't speak english very well either... must be trollyed! s/study/studying)

As a college student currently study abroad in Australia (Where all kinds of alcohol *except* wine are ridiculously expensive!) this change doesn't mean much to me. I'm hardly a wine connoisseur though, and while labels like "port", "champagne" and "burgundy" make it easier to identify exactly what a specific kind of wine is, its really just brand recognition. Sounds like both parties stand to benefit financially from this deal, so have at it! ...While the rest of you argue about countries and branding I'll stick to making my own "homebrew" "champagne" from $10 boxed white wine and sprite!

Even just a unique identifier is enough to cause a *huge* privacy concern. Not only that, but most tags do give you additional data, including their manufacturer, what kind of chip they are, and what commands if any they respond to (Some give all of this just in their ATR (Answer to Reset, which nearly all tags respond to). The biggest problem with the current implementations of RFID is that extracting data is a silent process. There's no beep, no light, no counter, nothing to indicate to the end user that their RFID tag(s) have just been read.

While US passports are actually pretty secure and do not give out any unique information without the proper MRZ data from the inside page, US passport cards are not secure at all. They're just standard UHF EPC Gen 2 tags with unique identifiers. Similarly, paypass/wave/blink/whatever RFID credit cards aren't secure at all; anyone with the proper reader can dump your card holder name and card number (though Expiration date and CVV code are not present in the RFID data iirc).

It would be trivial (and until laws are setup otherwise, legal in most places) to build a network of High gain RFID readers around a city. Not only would this let you "track" people around the city, but it would also let you build up a profile on people. You could, for example, keep a database with every tag read at a specific instance and correlate that to different data gathering points you have set up. You could then have a person object with various tag UUIDs associated with it (and if they have a credit card on them, even a name associated with it!).. Couple this with a camera that takes a picture of the people who's tags you're reading, and you have a picture too! Boom, picture, name, credit card number and unique profile of everyone that walks by your antennas, along with the time of day they walked by and their exact location. Try and tell me that's not valuable data?

I highly doubt there *aren't* companies out there doing this.. In fact, so long as it stays legal, I'm going to start up a company that does exactly this! Think about the possibilities for targeted advertising! FWIW, because the "public" at large remains mostly ignorant to all this, and companies/governments get what they want out of it nothing is going to change... ...In the case of the passport card, its even more worrisome.. Say someone sets up a checkpoint outside a border crossing with a long range UHF antenna and a camera... Boom! They now have everything they need to make a legitimate fake passport card! (This scenario is outlined by Chris Paget in his talk at Shmoocon V (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-282861825889939203 ), as well as by several researchers for RSA (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=3557).

just adding to the noise!