Thomas E. Keiser on Tue, 1 Feb 2000 16:18:43 -0500 (EST)


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Re: [PLUG] An interesting story with good points...


Michael:

    I agree that the "attitude" is a sure loser, and that many Linuxers have
little respect for private property, intellectual or otherwise. But at the
moment, in this case, it is my understanding that any DVD blanks available
are (1) expensive; and (2) come with the country code/encryption tracks
already burned to zeroes. This means you can use them for storage, but not to
dupe a movie. OTOH, and I may have this wrong, the data stream emanating from
a legit DVD contains everything you would need to make a copy, without resort
to DeCSS. The problem would be playback, as the encryption would be missing,
but presumably that could be overcome by playing it back as raw data on a
DVD-RAM, rather than as a movie on a DVD player. In either case, there's
substantial opinion that the movie industry just wants to have us all buy,
but be unable to use, this technology for our own purposes. This means, if
you want to create your own DVD movie, advertising your products for
instance, then you have to pay the hollywood types to encrypt, produce and
burn your disks. I'm not sure how the corporate types will respond to this,
once all the facts have been put into evidence at the trial.

Regards,

Tom

"Michael W. Ryan" wrote:

> You know, I'm getting tired of the argument "it's too impractical to copy
> DVDs".  The same thing was said about about CDs, and now look.  I can't
> believe people are using this as an argument.
>
> And to put a Linux spin on this:  I think this lawsuit, win or lose, is
> damaging to Linux and Open Source.  The attitude taken by the defendents
> does nothing to engender any kind of goodwill in the business community.
> Oh, and before anyone says that Linux doesn't need them, look at your
> history of the microcomputer -- it didn't become widely accepted until it
> became a viable business platform.
>
> Michael W. Ryan, MCP, MCT     | OTAKON 2000
> mryan@netaxs.com              | Convention of Otaku Generation
> http://www.netaxs.com/~mryan/ | http://www.otakon.com/
>
> PGP fingerprint: 7B E5 75 7F 24 EE 19 35  A5 DF C3 45 27 B5 DB DF
> PGP public key available by fingering mryan@unix.netaxs.com (use -l opt)
>
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