Tag Archives: hollywood

Stop the Senate from breaking TV and radio

There's a push on in the Senate to introduce the broadcast flag for TV and radio: a Hollywood plan to take control of consumer electronics, and force government-mandated DRM on any media system. The EFF has a site that lets you contact your senator to complain about this plan -- see below.
To take action on this issue, click on the link below:
https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?s_oo=baixSb9L5ZuXMJOOgi4yNg..&id=223
If the text above does not appear as a link or it wraps across multiple lines, then copy and paste it into the address area of your browser.

wtf

tommy lee jones
and
vin diesel

in cutesy ‘protection’ movies…

is it just me or did some hollywood exec. decide to emasculate them?

from EFF: Enough Already with the Crocodile Tears

Enough Already with the Crocodile Tears

In File sharing

Ed Felten today asks Hollywood to quit shedding crocodile tears over profits “lost” to Internet-enabled piracy — at least while it continues to make more money than ever, while denying movie stars (the “artist”) a more sizable cut:

[Surging profits] undercut the industry’s rent-seeking in Washington, which relies on a narrative in which technology destroys the industry’s revenue stream. If the technology problem is really as bad as the industry says, then it ought to show up in the sales numbers. [...]

It may turn out that the net effect of technology on the industry is neutral, or even positive. If so, then no expansion of copyright law is needed, and a mild contraction may even be in order. Remember, the goal of copyright is not to maximize the profits of any one industry, but to foster creativity by regulating just enough to ensure an adequate incentive to create.

For more on this very topic, check out the comments [PDF] EFF filed with the FCC earlier this month. It provides a number of instances to demonstrate that, despite the shrill rhetoric to the contrary, the entertainment industry’s sky is far from falling.

DVD Copy Protection: Take 2

The next generation of technology won’t have a Hollywood ending

from…

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan05/0105ldvd.html
“Ripley identifies a technology called media key block as an important element in recovering from cracking. With this system, there are actually two keys—one is on the disc itself, but it doesn’t work until it is decoded by a second key installed in each player. Multiple versions of this second key can exist; indeed, it is possible that each player would have a unique key, or that groups of players would share keys. Either way, if one key is compromised in the way that CSS was compromised by Johansen and if that decoding method becomes public, new DVDs could include updated on-disc keys that would cause the compromised player-based key to fail. They would, nevertheless, still work with other, uncompromised player-based keys.”


“GartnerG2’s McGuire says he appreciates the industry’s need to address cracking, but he also sees the cycle of crack/fix/crack as an endless loop. The motivation to crack high-value content like movies isn’t going to go away, he notes, so the overall economic benefit to the industry is not obvious.”

“If they can’t, individual consumers will find ways to transfer their content anyway, Wallach says. “It is not a matter of if—it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can’t make it impossible.

“They are living in a fantasy world,” he concludes.

q:What about the consumers who own hardware that just happens to use a compermised key? I guess they are SOL.

My suggestion, as a consumer, don’t buy into this crap.

Bad Behavior has blocked 1536 access attempts in the last 7 days.

>>>>>>> .r246