You do NOT have the inalienable right to "repeat [my] story/song/whatever" in front of a paying audience while that story/song/whatever is still protected by copyright.

When did I mention a paying audience? But even if there were a paying audience, it's entirely possible for me to legally do so if my work is transformative.

The Constitution, by granting Congress the authority to create and manage copyright, is explicitly contradicting the statement you made, because if they can limit it or take it away from you it is not an inalienable right.

Except that the first amendment specifically prevents Congress from limiting speech and overrides earlier sections of the Constitution, including the Copyright clause. And that is why there is fair use: Copyright cannot interfere with your inalienable right to free speech.

You have SOME rights to use PARTS of the story/song/whatever, but you do not have the inalienable right to repeat that work -- until the copyright expires and those rights do, indeed, become yours.

But I do have an inalienable right to repeat a story. As far as you know, I'm doing it right now as I type to you. Copyright doesn't cover "repeating a story".

And they do not become yours due to the first amendment, that is a red herring. They become yours because the copyright has expired.

Nothing "becomes mine" due to the "first amendment". No amendment to the Constitution grants rights, it only protects them from the government.

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.