Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
And there's my word of the day. Can't wait to go pessimize me some software systems. Heh. Theses days, it's practically my job description.
> Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the “most pessimum”.
I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.
The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.
Plus, you get automatic coverage of damaged disks: the company will buy back undamaged disks for what you paid minus the rental fee, or for full price in the case of an all-you-can-watch service.
Beyond that, any pointers to information on regulations about things with a low bid/ask spread?
- can you explain that? threshold % of asset value?
Except... this is exactly what has happened.
Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.
My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?
Nor has ReDigi been found to be legal, unless the article failed to mention the resolution of the legal action against it.
It's not a bug.
> Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.
Why are you so sure of that?
Some people would say it's because of "Big Hollywood" or "the mafIAA" or whatever, but regardless of the spin, Congress would still act.
At least in this case, talking about what decisions will "obviously" be made beforehand seems unwise.
So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.
Someone should start an Airbnb/Zediva mashup and make software to automatically buy/stream/sell DVDs from other people.
I think that was a licensing scheme offered by Rational and not a clever hack we devised for screwing Rational out of license fees, but I wasn't sure and wasn't brave enough to ask.
Hypothetically, a company could set up a datacenter where you rent DVD players by the hour, provide your own disc, and stream the output to your computer over the internet. It seems that this would be allowed based on the Cablevision ruling. Then, I could rent one of these players for three hours, look up someone who lives near it, and pay them to go to a Redbox, pick up a DVD for me, and pop it into the DVD player, so that I can stream it at home. It seems this would be legal and not even completely impractical.
Does it only become an issue when the player, the courier, and the Redbox are all provided by the same company?
wget http://example.com/file.flv; sleep 5; mplayer -cache 8092 file.flv
am I "streaming"?
In answering that question, does it matter what I do, or only what the guys at example.com are doing?
What if my system is diskless and file.flv is downloaded to a RAM disk? What if I turn off the system after watching? What if I don't? What if I save file.flv to a USB stick and watch it later? What if I loan the stick to a friend?
What if I do this:
ffmpeg -i file.flv file.mp3; mplayer -vo null file.mp3
Can the guys at example.com prohibit me from doing that? Based on intellectual property law? What if some user owns the IP rights to file.flv and uploaded it to example.com and the guys at example.com do not have any IP rights in file.mp3? What if the user did not give them any of her IP rights?
What if I never put file.mp3 into "iTunes"? What if I never put it into "Dropbox"? What if I never send it to "the cloud"? What if I just leave it on a USB stick? What if I play it back from the stick? What if I move it from the stick to my RAM disk and then play it back?
OK, enough.
Enjoy your media.
To get the most from the experience, it may be necessary to stear clear of people who willingly conceal the truth or, in the worst case, lie to you in order to suit their business model.
And there isn't anything these people can do about it.
But hey, lets do a lot more suits against companies and at least force them to do crazy things.
That'd be neat to see: a bittorrent case which the user turned the upload to 0.0 . Are they infringing?
They're working their way down the ladder. First it was dedicated hosting sites like Napster and Pirate Bay. Next it was bittorrent users who were seeding. When the content providers have pretty much mined out that vein they'll go after the Rapidshare users.
The real question is can they do it without losing money. My guess is they'll get the law changed so it's an administrative infraction under a certain amount, or they'll stick with people who've downloaded enough content the legal work can be paid.
Uploading is easier to sue, because there the damages (the number of files made available) is much larger and it makes things more cost effective. It also (possibly?) acts as a deterrent to other uploaders.
Criminal charges tend to come in when money is being made from copyright infringement. Selling burnt DVDs, for example.
I'm being a bit vague because of the international audience. (I'm in the UK.)
Copyright infringement is always a tort, but the conditions under which it becomes a criminal offense vary by jurisdiction.
You're making a single copy without a license. Fair use doctrine may apply depending what you're doing with that copy. There is a general exclusion against the right to copy works that are protected under the Berne Convention for example see Article 9 (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#...):
"Authors of literary and artistic works [...] have the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of these works, in any manner or form."
Distributors however can be more easily stung for punitive damages so until they run out of people who're 'distributing' some bits then they're unlikely to bother [as much] with mere* downloaders.
However, the downloader shows the intent to make the copy (they are requesting the blocks of the file) and are contributing to the copying (the uploader would not have made that specific copy without the downloader initiating it). I think that would muddy the waters more than enough.
Do I still have fair use rights for the ephemeral buffers used to play a file even if I got it illegitimately?
It's a kind of interesting question in technical terms. However the law gets interpreted practically and judges are very good at seeing through these sorts of "clever" ideas: if the site doesn't have a license to distribute then they're acting unlawfully. If they purchased copies and then transferred them, destroying their own copies then there's nothing in copyright law generally - that I know of - that is a problem. Lending an e-book to a friend is allowed under copyright as much as lending a paper bound book. It is highly likely however that the seller has attempted to add contractual obligations in your use of their e-reader and at your purchase of the e-book ... whether those terms are legal or not is a whole heap of legal spaghetti that I'm not really competent to pronounce on.
Jurisdictions vary on the difference between holding and using a copy but pretty much it's like receiving stolen goods (though of course copyright is not theft, I'm making an analogy); if you know they're stolen then you're guilty, if you don't know then you're still guilty but the courts don't tend to punish you and you are likely only going to have to return the goods (or in copyright terms pay actual damages).
The media in which a work is created is not especially important. So a digital work in general terms should be treated the same as others - however the nature of the media means there is movement and some stretching of the law. For example with e-books you could automate sharing so that you buy in to a pool of books that are shared whenever you wish to read; you get a contention factor (like when using broadband) and effectively you may only have to pay a-hundredth of the cost of the book (plus the service charge) in order to read the book whenever you wish ... this is not illegal AFAICT [I'm not entirely up on US copyright though] but it's probably contrary to the spirit of the law and unlikely to have been in mind particularly when 100+ year old international treaties were first drafted.
>fair use rights [...] illegitimately //
These are contradicting terms.
If you have a fair use right to a copy then you didn't get it illegitimately you got it within the legal bounds of the copyright law. I imagine you're thinking if you use bit-torrent to download a work that you have a fair-use "license" to use. Well of course the people uploading to you probably are infringing, though you'd never know if they have a license or not, and you don't have a license to upload. You might fall foul of provisions against derivative works, for example if the work was edited to remove attributions or copyright notices, but I don't see why you'd be judged to have committed a tort provided you have a genuine fair-use right to duplicate the work and you ensure you're within the lines on the above mentioned issues.
Gah. Got carried away there. Verbosity is a weakness of mine.
Intuitively it seems like this would result in more money for the rightsholders as well, although maybe the need for video rental shops to vastly overprovision copies of some films made them more money than the alternative.
My suspicion is that that fee would be set to extract as much money as possible from the rental stores (cf. Netflix) and that they are/were better off with the status quo.
The problem is, there's no good way to verify that.. Aero seems to be using HTML5 location, which can be bypassed by setting geo.wifi.uri in Firefox pretty trivially. (I know they ask for Safari, but you can also change user-agent)
Even if they used IP (which is a huge mess!), you could bounce through a proxy.
The problem is the internet does NOT have a reliably way to determine where someone is.
This goes all the way back to the Yahoo/France Nazi memorabilia issues back in 2000.
We have hints, and suggestions at where people are, but not hard and fast proof. For technical and social reasons, this is unlikely to change- So having laws based around restricting things to certain geographic areas is never going to be a long-term solution.
Does Johnny know that when he watches YouTube he's downloading? Or does he think he's "streaming"? As long as Johnny does not have to wait for playback, and playback is smooth, does Johnny really care about whether he's "streaming" or "downloading?
All else being equal (i.e. speed to fill a buffer or a disk block is the same and in neither case does Johnny have to wait for playback longer than in the other), I'd bet Johnny would prefer "downloading" over "streaming", since then he can watch the video again later. Just like a VHS or DVD rental.
Assuming you have the storage space, all else being equal, "streaming" video when you can "download" it seems "insane" to use the Professor's term.
Unless of course your business model is traditional "broadcasting" of the pre-digital, pre-internet variety.
That's never happened. Even though the content creator would be getting paid for their content there would have been many court cases shutting anyone providing that service down.