How totally bizarre. This is how the Greek government has decided to fight back against online gambling.
See the CNET story by Matt Loney and Rupert Goodwins:
In Greece, use a Game Boy, go to jail.
The law applies equally to visitors from abroad: “If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in,” said a commercial attach
Digital copying rules may change
by Noel C. Paul for the Christian Science Monitor.
In a few years, Americans may not be able to copy a song off a CD, watch a recorded DVD at a friend’s house, or store a copy of a television show for more than a day…
…Currently individuals can legally record TV shows, make digital audio files of CDs, and lend books to friends. Such activity is protected under a federal “fair use” statute, which takes into consideration most consumers’ need for flexibility.
New regulations being discussed significantly erase fair-use rights in the name of piracy prevention. Ultimately, the entertainment industry hopes to charge consumers for what they now do free of charge.
“The only way they can charge you, they realized, is to first take away your legal right, and then sell that right back to you,” says Joe Kraus, president of DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
MP3s not source of music industry woes, by Jack Kapika for The Globe and Mail.
Forrester’s latest study, released Tuesday, says that consumers need a “Music Bill of Rights” to protect their right to get tunes over the Internet.
The five major international record companies, through their trade organization, called the Recording Industry Association of America, have been blaming a 15-per-cent drop in record sales over the past two years on Net-based file-swapping services, starting with Napster.
In reality, other factors led to the drop in revenue, Forrester said: the economic recession and competition from surging video-game and DVD sales.
“There is no denying that times are tough for the music business, but not because of downloading,” Forrester’s principal analyst, Josh Bernhoff, said. “Based on surveys of 1,000 on-line consumers, we see no evidence of decreased CD buying among frequent digital music consumers.”
…The road ahead will be rough, the Forrester study cautioned. The record companies will spend the next two years struggling as they try to deliver digital music while testing out various technologies and legal moves to stop people from swapping the songs.
But by 2005, Forrester predicts that the five big labels will endorse a standard download contract that supports burning and a greater range of devices.
That will lead to soaring sales as finding content becomes effortless and impulse buying sets in. Labels will make content available on equal terms to all distributors, while on-line retailers become hubs for downloading.
By 2007, the new business model should generate 17 per cent of the sales in the music business, Forrester predicts.
Looks like you can’t just uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box after all (see the gif on my “more” page — i’m still dinking around with images in Movable Type)
I just happened to have to reinstall Windows Media Player 7.1 over the weekend (due to my Real One player expiring on me for no apparent reason…More on that experience later in perhaps far too much detail…)
So I took a gander at the EULA while I was installing WMP 7.1 and took a screen grab of the window that wouldn’t let me uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box (and also states very clearly in writing that Rights Management is a requirement, not an option).
Also, this paragraph of the EULA seems pretty darned relevant. How the heck did “security” get grouped in with “digital rights management” and my having to agree to allow Microsoft to install DRM updates on my computer that might “disable my ability to…use other software on my computer”??:
* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management (“Secure Content”), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.
A guy reformatted his hard drive and then found out none of his Windows Media files would work. Turns out that Windows Media Player turns the “copy protection” (copy prevention) on by default when it rips CDs, so when he reformatted his hard drive the player thought he was trying to play the copy protected files on a computer other than the one they had been licensed for.
Let me say this another way: when you rip CDs on a Windows machine using Windows Media Player, it makes a unique identifier for your computer (that has privacy implications, yes, but I’m trying to make another point here).
That unique identifier is associated with a license that is stored separately from the file itself that will only let those files be played back on the one single computer that matches the unique identifier. No other devices. Ever.
(Without a lot of hassle anyway — Without having to backup and restore your licenses on the other computer — or use Microsoft’s Personal License Migration Service (PLMS) — two processes that, to date, have performed less than dependably — according to many a sad music collector….)
And it turns out there is a solution: turn it off! Change the settings on your player for now, and say “no” when it asks you about wanting copy protections (fair use copy preventions) in the future.
See the Guardian story by Jack Schofield:
When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the ‘Protect Content’ box. In previous versions, this box was called the ‘Enable Per sonal Rights Management’ check box.” Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.
Digital Speech.org has created a boilerplate letter you can send to your representative.
I hope to get to this later this evening. I’ll let you know how it goes…
Here’s more about GeekPAC from Doc Searls:
Setting Fire to Hollywood’s Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story.
Hollywood Vigilantes vs. Copyright Pirates
Also, in the spirit of fair use – a poorly formatted version of this article is available by clicking “more”…
Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece on the last month or so of developments surrounding the complex CARP and “Crazy Tech Legislation” (like the Berman Bill) Battles on Capitol Hill.
This thing is so loaded with important content, I know I’ll be going over it in more detail over the course of the day, but I didn’t want to hold up pointing it out to you:
Hollywood Steps Up Its Assault on the Net While Webcasting Death March Claims KPIG.
Here’s the LawMeme discussion along with a nice synopsis by Lisa M. Bowman for CNET:
File-traders in the crosshairs.