ACTA has many problems...
But I'm not going to talk about those well known ones. You know that you can take your whole CD collection and put on your fancy new smartphone. It is fully legal to take you music that you bought over the years and carry it with you in a different format. But you can't do that with your DVD collection. It is strange because they both the same physical form but what makes the DVD different? And how is it related to ACTA?
When you buy CD with music it is not protected with encryption. When you buy a DVD it is encrypted to protect against piracy. Now some countries have protected the encryption for the purpose of copy protection. You are not allowed to sell or distribute software to break that encryption. It is already protected by laws and now ACTA wants to keep those laws in place.
The point of the laws are that pirates should not be able to easily obtain software so they can make easily distributable copies of DVD movies. The success of the law for that purpose has been less than stellar. Pirates are doing something that according to the law is illegal why would they care that break one more law?
The law has one side-effect. It quite effectively controls regular consumers. Regular consumers can't behave the same way. You can legally get your CD on to an iPod, but you can't store your DVD on an iPad unless you use the same tools as the pirates. No legal alternative for you. And with ACTA in place we might not see it for a long time.
There are many problems with ACTA and the problem that I just described might be the smallest one. But it is clear the encryption protections aren't there to protect you, they are there to protect your DVD movies from being watched on a tablet like an iPad.
posted by paracelsus at
12:24 PM
3 Comments:
Can't say about other countries ...
Anyway, in Germany the copying is forbidden whenever it requires circumventing copy protection. No idea how CDs are protected in your country, in Germany they most often are. How? Differs. But you will most certainly notice when you stick the CD into your car's MP3-capable CD player and it refuses to play or makes funny noises. When I noticed this the first time in 2004 I started watching out for a note that the CD is or isn't copy-protected and simply refuse ever since to buy protected ones.
Turns out that this is/was some unholy liaison between CD and CD player manufacturers, because ancient CD drives weren't affected at all. CDs are affected, even though perhaps not as much as DVDs and the HD discs that are the successors of DVDs.
Nevertheless, even though Germany has something like a fair use regulation (MCs were always copied, heck people used to record music from radio can you imagine?), the implementation of copy protection and the law that restricts circumventing it effectively voids that right to copying under fair use.
You are right, ACTA likely wants to carve the existing restrictions into stone and make it worse in countries where the regulations aren't as strict yet. And they do it in secrecy as should be done in true democracies ...
And without certain civil rights organizations we wouldn't even know about more details. Yuck!
My stance on it is that if a law effectively criminalises a whole population, the law is wrong, not the population. There ought to be alternatives. For example it has been suggested in various countries that there could be a "cultural flatrate", meaning you pay a fixed amount per month and can consume media no matter from what source afterward. I like the idea, though it may require some honing.
By
Miðgardsormr, at 12:44 AM
I haven't bought a CD for years(9 years to be exact). I the last one I bought was with copy protection. Now it refused to play in my CD player for some strange reason. So I copied it.... and the copy played just fine in my CD player. Figures. The funniest thing was that the copy protection kind of worked on my computer. But the ripping program at the time I was using showed the tracks just fine. So there was no issue in ripping it and burning it.
Here is another funny thing, if consumer aren't allowed any kind of fair use on their bought media to make personal copies. Why do some countries pay levy on empty media. Isn't the levy there to pay for fair use of copying your "legal" content to empty media you bought? Why are we still paying levies then?
My stance is that file sharing and copying media that you don't own is like speeding in a car. Everybody has done it and everybody is going to do it at one point or another. If you get caught you get fined. Not an impossible sum to pay but it is money you could have spent on something else.
By
paracelsus, at 1:15 PM
The post have the nice information . I dnot know in depth earlier... Here cd's are not protected. I am going to start my own cd for tutorials. But dnot know how to protect.
By
Anonymous, at 10:37 PM
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