[opendtv] Someone else's ramblings on copy protection

http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html

This John Gilmore blog, or e-mail, from back in 2001, updated for links in 
2005, is a good read. He makes many points about about "what's wrong with ..." 
These are his opinions, of course.

The points I find most compelling are not those at all. Instead, they are these 
two, specifically:

"Pioneer New Media Technologies, who builds the recently announced recordable 
DVD drive for Apple, says 'The major consumer applications for recordable DVD 
will be home movie editing and storage and digital photo storage'. They 
carefully don't say 'time-shifting TV programs, or recording streaming Internet 
videos', because the manufacturers and the distribution companies are in 
cahoots to make sure that that capability never reaches the market. Even though 
it's 100% legal to do so, under the Supreme Court's Betamax decision."

Looks like I'm not the only one who wonders about who the CE manufacturers are 
most afraid of, eh?

Then this:

"What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't 
disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's recent happy-happy web 
pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month 
(http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write 
DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to 
say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video 
copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the 
technology will prevent you."

[ ... ]

"It isn't just Apple who is misleading the consumer; it's epidemic."

Yup. He describes unnecessarily crippled products, whose limitations are not 
disclosed. Wow, how unique. Although as far as DVDRs (or PVRs) go anyway, 
perhaps things are not as bad now as they were when these devices were still 
analog only. Maybe just temporarily, who knows.

John Gilmore is a co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Bert

-------------------------------------------
http://www.eff.org/about/board

John Gilmore

Co-Founder, Board Member, entrepreneur; technologistgnu@xxxxxxx  John Gilmore 
is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early employee of Sun 
Microsystems, early open source author, and co-created Cygnus Solutions, the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the 
Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He's spent 30 years doing programming, hardware 
and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. 
Along with being a board member of EFF, he is also on the Board of the Usenix 
Association, CodeWeavers, and ReQuest. He's trying to get people to think more 
about the society they are building. His advocacy on drug policy aims to reduce 
the immense harm caused by current attempts to control the mental states of 
free citizens. His advocacy on encryption policy aims to improve public 
understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in 
open societies.

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