Posted by Trackmaven on 10/10/07 11:28

Don Del Grande wrote:
> Trackmaven wrote:
>
> >Giles wrote:
> >> That Don Guy <del_grande_news@earthlink.net> wrote in
> >> > Here's a solution: make iPods that allow you to copy songs from CDs,
> >> > but you have to "recharge" them every 24 hours by reconnecting the
> >> > iPod to the CD player and then "play" the original CD - that way, the
> >> > iPod has some idea that you still own the CD.
> >>
> >> Dumbest post ever.
> >
> >YHBT, and by a B1FF-style post no less.
> >
> >Hang your head in shame.
>
> IANATNABTYVM - I am neither a troll nor a B1FF, thank you very much

Your "modest proposal" is so completely outlandish that I have serious
trouble believing you're not being satirical.

> (although I will admit that I owned an Atari 800 in the early 1980s,
> even though a true B1FF used a VIC-20). I'm just tired of people who
> think the solution to the music problem is to get rid of RIAA (and,
> while they're at it, the MPAA) and allow for free copying.

Yet you think a 24-hour "recharge" restriction of hundred-plus
gigabyte devices designed explicitly for convenience and portability
is a sane idea? I can't accept that anyone that can form coherent
sentences wouldn't see, oh, dozens and dozens of problems with that
from the face of it.

>
> Tell me, what's your opinion of the following theory of legalizing
> decrypting video discs:
> 1. I have the right to watch the movie on the (choose one: Blu-Ray,
> HD-DVD) disc I bought on whatever device I want;

Right in the sense of legal, or morally good? Under US law (DMCA) you
can't legally circumvent DRM.

> 2. I choose to watch it on my computer running Linux;
> 3. Linux is required to be open source - therefore, the decoding
> software must be open source, and therefore public information;

Another flawed premiss. There are plenty of proprietary, closed-source
applications available for Linux which do not violate any license.
There are definite legal issues with F/OSS DVD players on Linux
(libdvdcss is most-likely illegal in the USA), but a Linux DVD player
being F/OSS is not a requirement.

> 4. Therefore, we have every right to publish the method for
> decrypting the discs,

Right in the sense of legal, or morally good?

"By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable,
belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the
moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the
occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be
curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual
brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable
property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all
others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power
called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as
he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces
itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot
dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one
possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He
who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our
physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society
may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an
encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but
this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of
the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it
is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied
her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a
legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries
it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal
act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these
monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society"
- some communist bastard

> and if it results in the ability to upload the
> contents of the discs for free downloading by whoever wants them, then
> that's not our problem

The DMCA makes circumventing DRM illegal in the US; is that why you
chose DRM-protected movie formats as a way of making an argument about
music?

Unlike most movie formats, physical music media are not generally
burdened with copy protection.

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