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Sunday, December 03, 2006
U.S. Copyright Office issues new rights
Yahoo! News: "Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books."
5 comments:
Anonymous
said...
With the possible exception of the cell phone exemption, it doesn't sound like any of these new exemptions are going to hurt the people/companies that hold a copywright. Good to hear that exemptions are being made for specific groups; it'll probably start to make the laws a little muddier if more continue, but it still sounds like a good thing. -Serrano
I heard about this on NPR first, and find it really interesting that Hollywood - which has been spending a lot of money to try to encourage film studies programs - is at the same time wanting to make it more difficult to teach film studies.
However - in response to mcausland - I do understand some of the concern over piracy. The cost of producing a CD is miniscule compared to the cost of producing a film. And it's not Tom Cruise who loses out - it's the set builders, the painters, the lighters, etc. who suffer for piracy.
I think that these rules are fine, but I don't understand the whole mess about how owners of DVDs cannot rip them to their iPods. If you buy the movie then it is yours to deal with. It is not the job of the consumer to have to buy all different sorta of media when they already own it.
None of these seem totally out of line. And most of them are common practice anyway. One thing that struck me was the dongle exemption. Most software which requires a dongle doesn't have much other copy protection. The required code is the dongle, the software is freely available. So "hacked" versions of this software would really hurt the company.
One that I really enjoyed was concerning limited cellphones. As one who purchased a rather expensive blue-tooth capable motorola cellphone I was very dissapointed when I learned that verizon had blocked alot of the bluetooth capabilities. Namely connecting to a bluetooth compatable computer or sharing photos. I spent alot of time and effort hacking my cellphone (or maybe I didn't...) to get it to do what I wanted. So this exemption was a nice personal like FU to verizon and their unreasonable blocks (which, for the record, were to force you to use their "get it now" service. if you could drag and drop any ringtone you wanted onto your phone, who would download them from their website?...stupid, right?)
the whole digital media protection struggle these days is only going to get more intense. we have hardware restrictions now being implemented on all new laptops and display devices that will decide if they can output legally the content the computer is asking them to. this is a fundamental change in the way this problem has been handled to this point and i think it will just bring the real solution that much closer to happening.
5 comments:
With the possible exception of the cell phone exemption, it doesn't sound like any of these new exemptions are going to hurt the people/companies that hold a copywright. Good to hear that exemptions are being made for specific groups; it'll probably start to make the laws a little muddier if more continue, but it still sounds like a good thing.
-Serrano
I heard about this on NPR first, and find it really interesting that Hollywood - which has been spending a lot of money to try to encourage film studies programs - is at the same time wanting to make it more difficult to teach film studies.
However - in response to mcausland - I do understand some of the concern over piracy. The cost of producing a CD is miniscule compared to the cost of producing a film. And it's not Tom Cruise who loses out - it's the set builders, the painters, the lighters, etc. who suffer for piracy.
I think that these rules are fine, but I don't understand the whole mess about how owners of DVDs cannot rip them to their iPods. If you buy the movie then it is yours to deal with. It is not the job of the consumer to have to buy all different sorta of media when they already own it.
None of these seem totally out of line. And most of them are common practice anyway. One thing that struck me was the dongle exemption. Most software which requires a dongle doesn't have much other copy protection. The required code is the dongle, the software is freely available. So "hacked" versions of this software would really hurt the company.
One that I really enjoyed was concerning limited cellphones. As one who purchased a rather expensive blue-tooth capable motorola cellphone I was very dissapointed when I learned that verizon had blocked alot of the bluetooth capabilities. Namely connecting to a bluetooth compatable computer or sharing photos.
I spent alot of time and effort hacking my cellphone (or maybe I didn't...) to get it to do what I wanted. So this exemption was a nice personal like FU to verizon and their unreasonable blocks (which, for the record, were to force you to use their "get it now" service. if you could drag and drop any ringtone you wanted onto your phone, who would download them from their website?...stupid, right?)
the whole digital media protection struggle these days is only going to get more intense. we have hardware restrictions now being implemented on all new laptops and display devices that will decide if they can output legally the content the computer is asking them to. this is a fundamental change in the way this problem has been handled to this point and i think it will just bring the real solution that much closer to happening.
- mr. barton
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