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Save $80 on your Windows 7 purchase - the Upgrade does full installs, too (Download Squad)

Oct 23rd 2009 9:57PM Software piracy is only bad when the Chinese or the Dutch do it. It's perfectly fine for us good ol' Americans to partake.

What am I missing Macrovision? (Blog Maverick)

Jun 23rd 2005 7:31PM By contrast, I think that the music industry's relative success at going after file sharing sites and individuals who were illegally sharing copyrighted songs was the right course of action. The end result was that the music downloading industry has largely become a legitimized profit center for a number of companies, and the music industry has a new source of revenue. Good for them. What Macrovision and various other entities have done with their lawyers is far less intelligent. These people are looking rather unrealistically to technology to create an electronic barrier as close as they possibly can to their product. In doing so, they are trampling fair use in the name of protecting their profits. Does it make sense to deny fair use of a product based on the premise that the legitimate product owner might, theoretically, potentially, commit a crime by redistributing the product? Mark is correct that there are some logistics issues that prevent DVD copying and distribution in mass quantities to the degree that songs have been ripped and downloaded (my inference in comparison.) So the question is why doesn't the MPAA and anyone else who has a vested interest in protecting the copyrighted movies simply take the example of the RIAA and go after those folks who actually break the laws by sharing movies illegally? The answer is simple. The DMCA has invented an illegal act that shouldn't be illegal at all. And in doing so, the industry is going after software producers as if they are the source of the problem. IMO The DMCA is simply further evidence that our lawmakers are unable to address the needs of our society as technology has advanced. My advice as we move forward is to reconsider our votes. Perhaps instead of voting Democrat or Republican we should be voting young versus old, or even better tech savvy versus clueless.

How to Lose 1 Billion Dollars (Blog Maverick)

Feb 22nd 2005 3:02PM Fist off to Balasz, even though it's a lockout, it doesn't mean that the owners "aren't honoring a contract." That's stupid. The contract has expired and neither side can agree upon a new one. Second, the league needs a viable economic system. Period. A system with no limits, player holdouts, always favorable arbitration, and no adjustment for poor performance isn't a very good one. That's why the owners didn't want a new CBA that looks just like the old one. Owners need self-control? Puh-leeze! Owners *COMPETE* with each other by trying to acquire players with every spare dime they have. Revenue sharing doesn't create parity because the wealthy teams don't need it and the poor teams won't get as much of it as the need. I hope a lot of NHL careers end during this lockout without the glory and joy of players playing their final game at home and knowing it when it happens. I hope the bad negotiation decisions that the NHLPA has made will fester and turn foul in the collective stomachs of the players who have held out for more money in the past, sometimes at the expense of the whole team, and the whole season (can you hear me Nabokov and Stuart? Wonder whose fault it is that your team tanked, two best players left, and coach and GM were fired?) I hope we get replacement players and none of the NHL'ers ever come back. The sport will thrive and we'll be back to great hockey in a few short years as the draft brings us the superstars (hopefully without the super-egos) of tomorrow. Millionaires need a union like a hole in the head. Who would protect these guys interests if it wasn't for the NHLPA? There's no such thing as a $500,000 a year scab. If you have the opportunity to make that kind of money, take it or you're a fool.

Abandoned by the DVD business (Blog Maverick)

Jan 21st 2005 3:51PM My point about NetFlix and Fair Use was simply that in a debate like this when the wrong people get on the right side of an argument that it makes it more difficult to fight the uphill battle. In a similar fashion, the folks who got sued by the RIAA for distributing THOUSANDS of songs online aren't the same people you want arguing in favor of P2P networks. The issue at hand in all of these similar cases is really simple. It's the competing interests of people who want convenient use of something they own and legitimately paid for versus those who either feel entitled to obtain the same content without paying anyone, or those who would try and profit by selling content to which they have no legitimate rights. There are flaws on both sides of the arguments. First off, copyright and content ownership is a very valuable and important thing. Without those rights and protections you wouldn't have nearly as much quality content available. Can you imagine New Line putting up $300 million to film the Lord of the Rings trilogy if you could legally download it for free online the day it came out in theaters. However, the content producers alway egrigiously overestimate the total losses they incurr because they assume that every dollar worth of stolen content equates to a dollar of lost sales. The reason why people steal something in the first place is usually that they don't have the money or the inclination to pay for it. This isn't like shoplifting where if you steal $100 worth of solid goods that you have demonstrably taken $100 out of the pocket of the merchant. Selling media content is like selling software and/or prostitution. You got it. You sell it. You still got it. Defending the disingenious because they agree with your side of the argument only discredits the remaining, legitimate advocates of the position. In other words, if you steal stuff then STFU and let the honest people argue for Fair Use.

Abandoned by the DVD business (Blog Maverick)

Jan 19th 2005 8:34PM Just a note that ripping a DVD is not illegal in every situation. It is only illegal to circumvent the copy protection mechanisms according to the DMCA. Not every DVD is copy protected, and not every ripping method circumvents copy protection. The main argument for the DMCA is anti-piracy, whereas the main argument against is fair-use. What sucks is when people who obviously have no right to excercise fair use try and invoke the fair use argument. Think about it. When someone in one sentence tells you how cool NetFlix is, and in the next tells you how the DCMA blows because it infringes upon their rights, what conclusion do you draw? What prevents someone from taking the component output of their DVD player and feeding it into an ATI All-In-Wonder and simply pressing play and record? This isn't circumventing copyright protection because copyright protection isn't present in the analog component video stream. Therefore the DCMA is no longer in effect and fair use regains its priority. How stupid that the same content from the same disk when ripped in the digital realm is somehow now illegal. BTW - Using re-author mode in DVDShrink I was able to rip the main program alone without any (additional) compression, the total output of Return of the Jedi was still less than 5GB, the quality is full DVD, there are fewer VOB and IFO files, and the whole thing took 22 minutes. (Plus I can play the files on my HD TV using my wireless G network and a very cool product called the Roku HD1000, and a free open source app called Mplay, in full DVD resolution.) I think the home media server with DVD/HD quality content is starting to arrive for us uber-geeks today, and will start to push it's way into the mainstream in a few short years. Let's hope that Hollywood and Washington don't jack everything up even more in the meantime.

Abandoned by the DVD business (Blog Maverick)

Jan 19th 2005 2:46AM Based on comments on the rokulabs.com support board (for something somewhat unrelated, their HD1000 device) I gave DVDShrink a shot. I just ripped Return of the Jedi (thinking if anyone was paranoid about copy protection it'd be George Lucas) in 44 minutes to unprotected, region-free TS files with perfectly acceptable quality for laptop viewing. Stripping out extras I didn't need and using moderate compression brought the total size down to about 4.5 Gigabytes. Very worthwhile to check out.