Jacco

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Excellent article, well worth reading. Online porn has much more in common with e-books and publishers than it has with music and musicians.

The fact that Baen went from zero to being the highest profit publisher in the online market really shows that his competitors cut their own throats by using DRM.

Interesting to see also that unlimited free downloading of an online book always massively boosts sales of the printed version in stores, purely from the "free advertising" effect. I can imagine a direct parallel there with file sharing and DVD sales.

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The car thieves don’t really need keys to your car to take them. Just might temp more honest people to take your car if you didn’t need keys to drive the car. DRM = Keys at least that’s what my understanding of it is.

Here is a time from my past.
I was in a huge biker club. Some discovered that some keys start anyone’s bike. How could this happy from know brands of bikes? I have no idea but it did. So what happened next with this newfound discovery? Well friends just kind of borrower other friend’s bikes for real quick rides. Not to steal it or anything, but since you don’t want everyone to ride your bike, it pissed you off. This was there chance to test drive your bike without you saying no. Did thieves when they heard of this care if they had keys that started your bike? No they had their ways of getting them started that worked just fine, but it did piss off a lot of others. Where am I going with this? It just looks to me that computers gave everyone keys to everyone’s stuff. Do you lock your stuff up with a new ignition (DRM)? Well now it’s gone be tough as people are used to getting your stuff for free who the hell wants to pay for it now. I know when we started to change our ignition it pissed off some people off that could not drive your bike. Crazy - but true.
Don’t get me wrong I hate DRM too. There has to be a better way.

www.vizualfilms.com

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Just imagine you did the watermark trick with a DVD. Many people sell their used DVDs after they have watched them. If you download a movie and burn it to a DVD, that same right applies, as long as you don't keep a copy for yourself.

Now, imagine that the movie has passed through several hands on the used DVD market, then the latest owner uploads it to a file sharing service.

Whose door will the stormtroopers kick down when the publisher identifies the watermark?

Right! The ORIGINAL customer, who paid full price to the movie maker and has done nothing wrong.

I will give you an ironclad guarantee that after that original customer has finished defending himself from cops and lawyers, he will NEVER buy from you again.

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I like the idea of joining a site, checking it out and downloading everything off it to my harddrive, so that I can view the movies at a later date on DVD. I hate sites with daily download limits and DRM. But as I said above there are ways around minor complications if I wanted the movies bad enough. I just rather join a site as a consumer and consume. But a few bad apples spoil the whole damn bunch, and they are not likely to go away.

If I pay to download a movie, I'm gonna convert it, if need be, and burn it in a playable DVD format, so I don't have to sit at my 'puter watching porn.

- -B -I -G -m -i -k -e, here and there, over and out! - -

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We have several terabytes of content on our website. You can consider us to be like library. A porn library that is!!! Seriously, it would cost you a couple thousand dollars to house that much storage.

People can get porn from a million different places. I believe that providing quality service at a reasonable price will win the day. DRM is a guaranteed way to give shitty service, which is why we don't do it.

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Anyway, it's not a perfect system, but it's be slightly better than what we have now.

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p_n

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That is all.

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Now, the 'CD quality'-part is misleading disinformation; what about 'legally'?

p_n

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p_n

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You purchased it.

You have the right to use this file through any media player you desire.

How will Apple know you cracked their MP4s? They won't.

And neither will any other DRM content out there.

"Legality" is an issue you should take on a moral stance.

It protects RICH companies. It doesn't protect you or your

desires. Is that fair? Do the CEOs of rich companies really

need another Bently or gold door knob? I think not.
----

Remember me? Spew...[SonyVAIOFE790]C2D2.33ghz. 2GB RAM. Nvidia GO 7600. Linux.

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You've made ADT, the forum, into a marketing medium: "you didn't pay for it, it isn't yours!".

I'm old enough to life without repeated slogans, thank you. You lost a potential customer here ...

Next

p_n

Edited by - pinc_noiz on 4/19/2007 4:56:35 PM

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Rich, who says? You, 'VAIO 2GB RAM Nvidia GO 7600'-man can buy your downloads, rich-man. But you did already, did you?

p_n

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It wasn't my urge to defend DRM (like you, I don't see why I would defend it), as more the need to express my disliking towards the 'DRM protective-law'-breaking "you have the right to use this file through any media player you desire" and the "who cares" statements used.

DRM-rules may be frustrating, but this is no reason to offend against them, under the cover of 'nobody will know' no less ... that's cowardly and punishable behaviour IMO.

Thanks for taking the time reading & responding.

p_n

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FYI, my quoted post was a rhetorical question... I already knew the answer.

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May 3, 2007

In Web Uproar, Antipiracy Code Spreads Wildly

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, May 2 — There is open revolt on the Web.

Sophisticated Interrs have banded together over the last two days to publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.

The broader distribution of the code may not pose a serious threat to the studios, because it requires some technical expertise and specialized software to use it to defeat the copy protection on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. But its relentless spread has already become a lesson in mob power on the Internet and the futility of censorship in the digital world.

An online uproar came in response to a series of cease-and-desist letters from lawyers for a group of companies that use the copy protection system, demanding that the code be removed from several Web sites.

Rather than wiping out the code — a string of 32 digits and letters in a specialized counting system — the legal notices sparked its proliferation on Web sites, in chat rooms, inside cleverly doctored digital photographs and on user-submitted news sites like Digg.com.

“It’s a perfect example of how a lawyer’s involvement can turn a little story into a huge story,” said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame.”

The number is being enshrined in some creative ways. Keith Burgon, a 24-year-old musician in Goldens Bridge, N.Y., grabbed his acoustic guitar on Tuesday and improvised a melody while soulfully singing the code. He posted the song to YouTube, where it was played more than 45,000 times.

“I thought it was a source of comedy that they were trying so futilely to quell the spread of this number,” Mr. Burgon said. “The ironic thing is, because they tried to quiet it down it’s the most famous number on the Internet.”

During his work break on Tuesday, James Bertelson, an engineer in Vancouver, Wash., joined the movement and created a Web page featuring nothing but the number, obscured in an encrypted format that only insiders could appreciate. He then submitted his page to Digg, a news site where users vote on what is important. Despite its sparse offerings, his submission received nearly 5,000 votes and was propelled onto Digg’s main page.

“For most people this is about freedom of speech, and an industry that thinks that just because it has high-priced lawyers it has the final say,” Mr. Bertelson said.

Messages left for those lawyers and the trade organization they represent, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, which controls the encryption system known as A.A.C.S., were not answered. In an e-mail message, a representative for the group said only that it “is looking into the matter and has no further comment at this time.”

The organization is backed by technology companies like I.B.M., Intel, Microsoft and Sony and movie studios like Disney and Warner Brothers, which is owned by Time Warner.

The secret code actually stopped being a secret in February, when a hacker ferreted it out of his movie-playing software and posted it on a Web bulletin board. From there it spread through the network of technology news sites and blogs.

Last month, lawyers for the trade group began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming that Web pages carrying the code violated its intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Letters were sent to Google, which runs a blog network at blogspot.com, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The campaign to remove the number from circulation went largely unnoticed until news of the letters hit Digg. The 25-employee company in San Francisco, acting on the advice of its lawyers, removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database earlier this week, then explained the move to its readers on Tuesday afternoon.

The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. Some also said that the trade group that promotes the HD-DVD format, which uses A.A.C.S. protection, had advertised on a weekly Digg-related video podcast.

On Tuesday afternoon and into the evening, stories about or including the code swamped Digg’s main page, which the company says gets 16 million readers each month. At 9 p.m. West Coast time, the company surrendered to mob sentiment.

“You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company,” wrote Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, in a blog post. “We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” If Digg loses, he wrote, “at least we died trying.”

Jay Adelson, Digg’s chief executive, said in an interview that the site was disregarding the advice of its lawyers. “We just decided that it is more important to stand by our users,” he said. Regarding the company’s exposure to lawsuits he said, “we are just going to prepare and do our best.”

The conflict spilled over to Wikipedia, where administrators had to restrict editing on some entries to keep contributors from repeatedly posting the code.

The episode recalls earlier acts of online rebellion against the encryption that protects media files from piracy. Some people believe that such systems unfairly limit their freedom to listen to music and watch movies on whatever devices they choose.

In 1999, hackers created a program called DeCSS that broke the software protecting standard DVDs and posted it on the hacker site 2600.com. The Motion Picture Association of America sued, and Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, citing the 1998 digital copyright act, sided with the movie industry.

The DVD code disappeared from the 2600 site, but nevertheless resurfaced in playful haiku, on T-shirts and even in a movie in which the code scrolled across the screen like the introductory crawl in “Star Wars.”

In both cases, the users who joined the revolt and published the codes may be exposing themselves to legal risk. Chris Sprigman, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said that under the digital copyright act, propagating even parts of techniques intended to circumvent copyright was illegal.

However, with thousands of Interrs now impudently breaking the law, Mr. Sprigman said that the entertainment and technology industries would have no realistic way to pursue a legal remedy. “It’s a gigantic can of worms they’ve opened, and now it will be awfully hard to do anything with lawsuits,” he said.

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