DMCA woes
Copyright law has undergone changes over the years. Not all of them are good; for example, I'm not sure that it was really a good idea to extend the duration of a copyright past a couple decades. (A lot of people will read that with horror, and those who know that I'm a proponent of individual rights will be confused as well, but I have my reasons. I've already written them up; I'll probably post that here in the Journal soon, but not now.)
In any case, the point I'm working towards is that changes to copyright law can be made, but there's a specific process that has to be gone through, including review and acceptance. I don't know the details, but changing such a fundamental law should require some effort. It should not be possible to change it at the whim of some senator with an axe to grind or some congressman in somebody's pocket.
So on the one hand, we have the vested interests in maintaining complete control of their intellectual property, even when it's to their detriment (another plug for Baen Free Library and its editorials). On the other hand we have US copyright law. US copyright law allows you to, for example, make backup copies of your media that contain other peoples' intellectual property. There are Fair Use clauses that say it's OK to copy your CD to tape so you can listen in your car player (which is important to me, since my car has a tape player and no CD player, and I can't afford to upgrade).
So they use various encryption schemes and other copy-protection tricks to try to prevent you from making copies. They're not worried so much about the tape copies any more -- though they'd like to prevent that as well. But when your content is encoded digitally, it's possible to make any number of copies with 100% accuracy, through any number of generations of copying.
They like the technology because it's easier and cheaper to produce -- but it infuriates them that their customers can get more use out of it as well.
The encryption schemes are all very well and good, except that there are some very clever and intelligent customers out there, and some of them have cracked the encryption schemes and found ways around the other various copy-protection schemes.
Most of those other schemes seem to revolve around violating existing standards, hoping the customers' viewing equipment can compensate but their copying equipment cannot. Macrovision, for example, uses a weak synchronization signal. If you try to record to VCR, the signal tends to get lost and the result is unusable. Unfortunately, a lot of TVs can't handle it, either. It pisses me off when I try to play a Disney tape and it fades in and out on my bedroom TV. I paid for that tape; Disney is stealing from me. Same thing with the new non-standard CD-like media; they use bad ECC (Error-Correction Code) values, which many audio CD players ignore, but most computer CD players don't. Unfortunately, most mobile CD players use the ECC as part of their anti-skip technology.
CDs were touted as being wonderful technology, in part because scratches could be overcome by use of the Error-Correction Codes. So now the record companies are abusing those codes, which means that not only are those non-CDs not playable in many players, but it also means that scratches cannot be recovered from. Now you see it, now you don't.
So now what? Copyright laws say I can make a copy, but if I can make a copy, I can make two copies and give them to my friends. Then they can give two copies to their friends, and so on, and so on. Thus the record company will sell one copy of a CD, and within a week everybody in the world will have pirated copies. ...given certain assumptions.
So how to keep that from happening? Well, in our litigious society, the only way anybody knows how to accomplish anything is to pass a law against it, and then prosecute or sue or both. Copyright law is difficult to change, but there's another way: the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. A wonderful law that makes it illegal to bypass or reverse-engineer encryption schemes. And it doesn't require all that tedious copyright law change! Just grease a few congressional palms and you have yet another bludgeon with which to hit your customers over the head.
So, here I have a DVD of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (that's Philosopher's Stone for you Brits :). It's a legal DVD -- I bought it at Suncoast, still in a wrapper, it came with a box, includes two DVDs (one containing extras), and so on.
I've been watching this DVD while I do laundry, so I've seen it a lot of times. Actually, I don't watch it much, I let it play and mostly listen, occasionally glancing up if I happen to want to see something. But I've seen the movie plenty of times. It works well as something to keep my mind occupied while I do chores.
I'm a bit concerned with the disc's longevity, however. It gets a lot of handling, especially since my daughter likes to watch movies on the same player; so Harry Potter gets moved in and out of the player quite a lot. It also means wear on the box, though I suppose I could keep the disc in a jewel case and leave the box downstairs.
Every time I put the disc in, it wants me to watch all the starting credits and some tedious bit of music and clips from the movie before it lets me get to the main menu. Harry Potter isn't too bad in that respect, actually; I can fast-forward through most of it until I can hit the Title or Menu button and get to the main menu.
There are other DVDs that pretty much force you to wait; the Animatrix, for example, looks like it's skipping past all the garbage, but then it goes back and starts over. Here's what I have to do:
1) Wait through most of the intro. Thank God it's short.
2) Wait until the main menu gets drawn. Long fade-in effects are very nice and artsy, but after a while they get kind of tedious. I've seen them before; why force me to watch them every time? They aren't real content, just flash and splash. I want to get to the content.
3) Once at the main menu I select a sub-menu that says I want to watch the main content, which consists of nine animated pieces. Fortunately it's the default selection. Unfortunately it requires another 5 seconds of useless flash-and-splash animation.
4) Once there I find a list of titles, and three text selections. The default is to play the first animated piece and return to the menu. (Note: If you select any one animated piece, at the end of that piece you get the credits. Not the credits for that piece -- the credits for everything. That's right, there are at least nine complete copies of the credits on that disc.) There is a Play All selection -- at the bottom right. So now I have to navigate from the top left to the bottom right to get to Play All.
None of this is difficult, but it's tedious to have to do it every time, and it's entirely unnecessary. Not to mention that my autistic daughter watches that disc every day, and has trouble going through all that navigation process herself.
So my answer was to rip the Animatrix, remove everything except the actual movie content, sort it all so it was in the right order (a long story), remove all the extra copies of the credits -- and so on. Then burn a CD with no menu and exactly one copy of the credits at the end. Guess what? It all fits on one DVD+R without recompression. It's very nice; I can slap the disc into the player and walk away. For that matter, I can give permission to Mariel to watch it, and walk away -- she knows how to do the rest.
And I still have the original if the copy gets destroyed, or if I want to watch any of the extras.
So I have this nice DVD ROM writer on my computer now. And one of the things I can use it for is making copies of DVDs. I have to compress it a bit to fit the whole movie on a DVD+R, but that's OK. I can pull the content off and create a DVD with whatever menu system I like, or none at all, then use a tool to compress the data enough to fit on a single DVD+R (or split it across multiple discs if I'd rather do it that way).
But wait, there's more! The Extras disc includes some scenes that were produced but cut from the final film. I'd like to put those scenes back in and watch them as part of the movie. Well... now I can! It turned out to be a tedious mess, and took at least two days (part of which was learning which tools to use and how to use them, including several false starts). But I was able to cut and splice and put the missing scenes back. The result isn't perfect, but it's good enough for my purposes. (Or at least, I hope it is. I'm still processing the data as I write this.)
So now I have an illegal copy of the disc! Let's see what's illegal about it.
1) I'm making a copy of the original to play instead of the original, to preserve the original. Same idea as a backup copy, except I'm keeping the original as a master that I don't play much.
2) I'm making a copy so I don't have to schlep the discs up and down the stairs. Chances are pretty low that we'd actually watch both discs simultaneously, but I might want to play it downstairs while I'm doing dishes or something, then watch it upstairs. Might as well keep one copy downstairs and the other upstairs.
3) I'm removing the tedious titles and stuff. Note that I'm not removing the credits. In fact, I went out of my way to make sure the credits got in there.
4) I'm editing the film to put back cut scenes that were included on the second disc.
Basically, I'm rearranging the content that I bought a copy to for my own convenience, and making a copy to keep from destroying the original through repeated handling.
Oh yeah, and
5) I'm decrypting the original disc.
Note that none of the items above violates US copyright law. Note also that there's no ethical violation; I paid for this copy of the content, I'm assuring its integrity and watching it in a manner that's convenient to me, but I'm not making copies to give away to friends, I'm not selling anything to anybody. No import restrictions are being violated.
There's a single technical violation of a law that was ill-thought-out and passed specifically to do an end-run around current copyright law. It was done to protect the interests of the movie and music industries, and only to protect those interests -- it was not passed to protect the interests of the artists, regardless of what the MPAA would like you to believe.
What I've done does not hurt anybody. But it's illegal anyway.
What has the DMCA done for you today?
In any case, the point I'm working towards is that changes to copyright law can be made, but there's a specific process that has to be gone through, including review and acceptance. I don't know the details, but changing such a fundamental law should require some effort. It should not be possible to change it at the whim of some senator with an axe to grind or some congressman in somebody's pocket.
So on the one hand, we have the vested interests in maintaining complete control of their intellectual property, even when it's to their detriment (another plug for Baen Free Library and its editorials). On the other hand we have US copyright law. US copyright law allows you to, for example, make backup copies of your media that contain other peoples' intellectual property. There are Fair Use clauses that say it's OK to copy your CD to tape so you can listen in your car player (which is important to me, since my car has a tape player and no CD player, and I can't afford to upgrade).
So they use various encryption schemes and other copy-protection tricks to try to prevent you from making copies. They're not worried so much about the tape copies any more -- though they'd like to prevent that as well. But when your content is encoded digitally, it's possible to make any number of copies with 100% accuracy, through any number of generations of copying.
They like the technology because it's easier and cheaper to produce -- but it infuriates them that their customers can get more use out of it as well.
The encryption schemes are all very well and good, except that there are some very clever and intelligent customers out there, and some of them have cracked the encryption schemes and found ways around the other various copy-protection schemes.
Most of those other schemes seem to revolve around violating existing standards, hoping the customers' viewing equipment can compensate but their copying equipment cannot. Macrovision, for example, uses a weak synchronization signal. If you try to record to VCR, the signal tends to get lost and the result is unusable. Unfortunately, a lot of TVs can't handle it, either. It pisses me off when I try to play a Disney tape and it fades in and out on my bedroom TV. I paid for that tape; Disney is stealing from me. Same thing with the new non-standard CD-like media; they use bad ECC (Error-Correction Code) values, which many audio CD players ignore, but most computer CD players don't. Unfortunately, most mobile CD players use the ECC as part of their anti-skip technology.
CDs were touted as being wonderful technology, in part because scratches could be overcome by use of the Error-Correction Codes. So now the record companies are abusing those codes, which means that not only are those non-CDs not playable in many players, but it also means that scratches cannot be recovered from. Now you see it, now you don't.
So now what? Copyright laws say I can make a copy, but if I can make a copy, I can make two copies and give them to my friends. Then they can give two copies to their friends, and so on, and so on. Thus the record company will sell one copy of a CD, and within a week everybody in the world will have pirated copies. ...given certain assumptions.
So how to keep that from happening? Well, in our litigious society, the only way anybody knows how to accomplish anything is to pass a law against it, and then prosecute or sue or both. Copyright law is difficult to change, but there's another way: the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. A wonderful law that makes it illegal to bypass or reverse-engineer encryption schemes. And it doesn't require all that tedious copyright law change! Just grease a few congressional palms and you have yet another bludgeon with which to hit your customers over the head.
So, here I have a DVD of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (that's Philosopher's Stone for you Brits :). It's a legal DVD -- I bought it at Suncoast, still in a wrapper, it came with a box, includes two DVDs (one containing extras), and so on.
I've been watching this DVD while I do laundry, so I've seen it a lot of times. Actually, I don't watch it much, I let it play and mostly listen, occasionally glancing up if I happen to want to see something. But I've seen the movie plenty of times. It works well as something to keep my mind occupied while I do chores.
I'm a bit concerned with the disc's longevity, however. It gets a lot of handling, especially since my daughter likes to watch movies on the same player; so Harry Potter gets moved in and out of the player quite a lot. It also means wear on the box, though I suppose I could keep the disc in a jewel case and leave the box downstairs.
Every time I put the disc in, it wants me to watch all the starting credits and some tedious bit of music and clips from the movie before it lets me get to the main menu. Harry Potter isn't too bad in that respect, actually; I can fast-forward through most of it until I can hit the Title or Menu button and get to the main menu.
There are other DVDs that pretty much force you to wait; the Animatrix, for example, looks like it's skipping past all the garbage, but then it goes back and starts over. Here's what I have to do:
1) Wait through most of the intro. Thank God it's short.
2) Wait until the main menu gets drawn. Long fade-in effects are very nice and artsy, but after a while they get kind of tedious. I've seen them before; why force me to watch them every time? They aren't real content, just flash and splash. I want to get to the content.
3) Once at the main menu I select a sub-menu that says I want to watch the main content, which consists of nine animated pieces. Fortunately it's the default selection. Unfortunately it requires another 5 seconds of useless flash-and-splash animation.
4) Once there I find a list of titles, and three text selections. The default is to play the first animated piece and return to the menu. (Note: If you select any one animated piece, at the end of that piece you get the credits. Not the credits for that piece -- the credits for everything. That's right, there are at least nine complete copies of the credits on that disc.) There is a Play All selection -- at the bottom right. So now I have to navigate from the top left to the bottom right to get to Play All.
None of this is difficult, but it's tedious to have to do it every time, and it's entirely unnecessary. Not to mention that my autistic daughter watches that disc every day, and has trouble going through all that navigation process herself.
So my answer was to rip the Animatrix, remove everything except the actual movie content, sort it all so it was in the right order (a long story), remove all the extra copies of the credits -- and so on. Then burn a CD with no menu and exactly one copy of the credits at the end. Guess what? It all fits on one DVD+R without recompression. It's very nice; I can slap the disc into the player and walk away. For that matter, I can give permission to Mariel to watch it, and walk away -- she knows how to do the rest.
And I still have the original if the copy gets destroyed, or if I want to watch any of the extras.
So I have this nice DVD ROM writer on my computer now. And one of the things I can use it for is making copies of DVDs. I have to compress it a bit to fit the whole movie on a DVD+R, but that's OK. I can pull the content off and create a DVD with whatever menu system I like, or none at all, then use a tool to compress the data enough to fit on a single DVD+R (or split it across multiple discs if I'd rather do it that way).
But wait, there's more! The Extras disc includes some scenes that were produced but cut from the final film. I'd like to put those scenes back in and watch them as part of the movie. Well... now I can! It turned out to be a tedious mess, and took at least two days (part of which was learning which tools to use and how to use them, including several false starts). But I was able to cut and splice and put the missing scenes back. The result isn't perfect, but it's good enough for my purposes. (Or at least, I hope it is. I'm still processing the data as I write this.)
So now I have an illegal copy of the disc! Let's see what's illegal about it.
1) I'm making a copy of the original to play instead of the original, to preserve the original. Same idea as a backup copy, except I'm keeping the original as a master that I don't play much.
2) I'm making a copy so I don't have to schlep the discs up and down the stairs. Chances are pretty low that we'd actually watch both discs simultaneously, but I might want to play it downstairs while I'm doing dishes or something, then watch it upstairs. Might as well keep one copy downstairs and the other upstairs.
3) I'm removing the tedious titles and stuff. Note that I'm not removing the credits. In fact, I went out of my way to make sure the credits got in there.
4) I'm editing the film to put back cut scenes that were included on the second disc.
Basically, I'm rearranging the content that I bought a copy to for my own convenience, and making a copy to keep from destroying the original through repeated handling.
Oh yeah, and
5) I'm decrypting the original disc.
Note that none of the items above violates US copyright law. Note also that there's no ethical violation; I paid for this copy of the content, I'm assuring its integrity and watching it in a manner that's convenient to me, but I'm not making copies to give away to friends, I'm not selling anything to anybody. No import restrictions are being violated.
There's a single technical violation of a law that was ill-thought-out and passed specifically to do an end-run around current copyright law. It was done to protect the interests of the movie and music industries, and only to protect those interests -- it was not passed to protect the interests of the artists, regardless of what the MPAA would like you to believe.
What I've done does not hurt anybody. But it's illegal anyway.
What has the DMCA done for you today?