Non-P2P DRM / Copyright News Comments 2006-10-06
This is really good expample a enefficieny of HFOG (‘Heavy Foot of Goverment’) and HFOG boosting effect of cranking up the opressometer (security at the expense of freedom). The site’s target market is ‘over the air’ movie censors (profanity, nudity, gore, time limitations). Mixing with copyright and the fact they didn’t give a location to get the original, and probably didn’t inform end users of the editing, and the lack of quality of the censorship (mid-sentence cut off, dead air), I think I would agree with the studios beating down on ClearPlay. Now they exploit a copyright loophole, requiring additional effort, and ‘Cuts inc.’ is born. Hopefully the censoship is higher quality, and there is information given to the end viewer about the censorship.
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I like this – “In its battle for truth, justice and bigger revenue stream” he he.. Looks like the doggies can only smell the presense of polycarbonate, which is what DVDs are made out of, not specific pressing plant scents or burned media ink. The doggies might also smell polycarbonate safety goggles and eyeglasses with polycarbonate lenses (lighter and scratch & break less) and point out as DVDs. With the rate of theft of small, portable valuables (A case with 32 dvds with can be sold for $100-200 and cost 400-600 to buy legit) from luggage, I wouldn’t want to put DVDs in my checked luggage if I paid for them though. Maybe the dogs are trained only to point out a certain minimum strength of polycarbonate scent so that bags with only a few DVDs in them won’t get searched. But a few dozen (including full portable CD/DVD cases) or more, would get searched, and possibly stolen.
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Microsoft must either be passing it around in its internal bureauracracy or have provided links, but made them very obscure and convoluted that few will find it. Maybe the APIs will be on Emule before Norton and McAffee gets their legal copies? Norton and McAffee should look on Emule for the APIs. Maybe Microsoft wants them to get them from P2P (like the RIAA does to the radio stations – ’shipping’ music via limewire) so they can turn around and sue them for breach of contract/copyright rather than being sued for anti-trust violations.
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He’s going to get sued for the reverse engineering of FairPlay instead of DRM cracking. I don’t know if copyright can ban reverse engineering (Patents definitly can). Business profits only make him more sue-able. He needs to crack them Blu-Rays for us.
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Copyright law serves publishers and labels more than consumers and artists. That was probably ok when home mass-production of copies didn’t exist and the internet didn’t exist and the publisher was absolutely neccesary to sell more than a dab of copies and it took a major investment to make money off of counterfeiting (printing presses). Copyright in its current form is obsolete, DRM’s permant nature (in the case there isn’t any hacker motivated to crack it), and the anti-DRM circumvention clauses of the DMCA and its clones make it all worse. Copyright needs to be a default of a copyleft (GPL, DSL, CC), which protects free distribution and the actual ‘intellectual ownership’, but doesn’t protect revenue strreams. Full protection should require registration. DRM should be legal, but it shouldn’t be illegal to crack it. It should be required to provide DRM strippers for a DRM-ed work when its full-copyright expires or the courts won’t hear any infringement cases on your other copyrights. The term of full protection should only be 5 years with possible 5-year renewals to 20 years that are not guarenteed. When a full copyright expires, it reverts back to a basic copyleft. Basic copyleft would last the durations that current copyrights do now.
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Put the speech with all the hacker techy stuff into a PDF and share it on Emule! I have several shares that get more traffic on Emule than they do on the web, and they mostly game addons are authored by me. Most notable is my X-Plan popular mechanics design contest submission. It got disqualified and ‘normal’ (people with pilot licenses and fly real planes) pilots in the X-Plane circle can’t fly it, but pleny of ‘wierdo’ (bedroom geeks with no pilot training and only know things about airplanes and ony fly in video games) pilots can fly it as it has over 15 complete sources much of the time and it is my second most downloaded perma-share despite all the other seeds. So share it on Emule. File Sharers won’t give a damn what apple says or think.
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Galactic Civilizations II DOES have copy protection. It has activation. I havn’t messed with it to know if they have a phone activation exploit (it is neccesary for offline folk, but then again they are selling expansions online-only) or if a activation-keygen is available. People HATED activation in Windows XP (and Vista). Doesn’t seem to be complaints here. What sets GalCiv2, and X-Plane apart is the ability to copy and plant copies of the installed game directy and have it just work. Most games don’t do this! Where they differ is that X-Plane has a CD-dongle and GalCiv2 has activation. GalCiv2’s activation has less lasting inconveniance than X-Planes CD-Dongle, but X-Plane’s DVDs are easily copied. X-Plane is updated too frequently for NoCD cracks to keep up. I havn’t tested to see if a GalCiv2 installed with a keygen-generated key will pass activation. They don’t with MS WinXP because MS keeps a database of issued keys (WGA adds continual monitoring for invalidated keys). StarDock is pushing bulshit that it doesn’t use copy protection. They chose to use activation. They chose to do away with mandatory use of installer (copies of installed games just work and upgrade patches work), CD-Dongles and CD-copy protection. X-Plane uses CD-Dongles but not with mandatory use of installer, activation or CD copy-protection. Most games use CD-Dongles and mandatory use of installer. Some also have CD-copy protection. Hardly any games require activation
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Looks like the European Pirate Parties are banding together to try to influence EU-level elections. Good look! I support the action but don’t think they will get far.
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People pay out of their asses for skins and objects for the Sims and Sims 2. People will buy sony’s shit too. They are complete idiots. I won’t though. For game addon content, it is either Legally free (Emule or web), Illegally free (Emule), or I won’t get it at all.
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It appears these are MP3s in the .asf container that can be downloaded by basic mms:// capable downloaders (ones that don’t hack into your NIC or proxy through IE). The .asf encapsulation appears to be easy to remove to expose a bare .mp3 file. I’ll just look on Emule.
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Another somewhat cool feature bites the dust. All the more reason to get a DiY DVR system for your PC and to use open source DVR software
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I like this. Imagine scaling to a multistellar environment with a pan-galactic cybernet with Star-Trek style replicators that can materialize copies of almost anything from downloaded, scanned-in, or self-made schematics:
“The lowest common denominator will look like a community-based wireless network. Each house will have a cheap tin can antenna ($3 to $7), which will participate in mesh networking of every neighbor’s computer, and giving everyone broadband access that is 10 times as fast as the telco/cable monopolies’ offerings.
VoIP, videoconferencing, telemedicine, and all the other services anyone wants, will be freely available.
P2P networking will thrive and become as ubiquitous as email. Independent Artists are now uploading and making their live concerts, gigs, and songs in video formats. They’ve found that using unencumbered (by patents) file formats such as .ogg, they can guarantee their creative works will live on, in spite of any corporate threats to make them illegal.”
