New Ruling Confirms Copying DVDs is Illegal - Page 8

Are you laughing at me, or with me?

This is one of the oldest arguments on this subject. The thing is, it's true but meaningless. When it was 2% of people who were doing it, it made more sense as an argument. But we are so far past that that it's not a valid argument anymore. When the level of theft has reached what it has now, clearly lots of stuff that would have been purchased is just stolen instead. It doesn't matter if half of it or three quarters of it would have been purchased. It's a LOT of money lost.

And of course it's very EASY to argue that you wouldn't have bought it (not you personally, the generic you), becuase you used the money you saved to go buy something else that you couldn't steal. So of course now you don't have the money to buy the music, so you just download it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is flowing money from the pockets of intellectual property creators into the pockets of people who sell physical objects that can't be (easily) stolen. ANd the more theft there is, the more it encourages. When people look around and see all the people around them are getting stuff for free, while they are paying for it, it doesn't take long to convert the otherwise honest into less than honest people, because no one is suffering any consequences for doing it, as things stand now, or almost no one.

All three items in the chart can be downloaded illegally. There is not one single positive correlation here in regards to other forms of entertainment. DVD sales are flat and video games are through the roof. So how is it illegal downloading has only affected music sales?

Video games is easy.
Multiplayer and consoles.

Yes you can hack a console game but when the fun part of the game is multiplayer, you still have to have a legitimate copy or you can't get online.
It is still a form of copy protection.

The studios had a chance with Blurays and online content, (bluray live) but really dropped the ball when they could have offered something with real value over just the movie content.

music is comparatively small. a cd is what, 80 megabytes when converted to 320kbps mp3? that can download pretty quickly and is easier to store. a dvd size is 100 times that. movies are starting to catch up just because hard drives are becoming cheaper/larger and internet speeds are getting faster.

i think dvd sales were definitely heavily inflated by catalog titles being purchased. it seemed to take a longer amount of time for many movies to come to dvd from vhs, and that was an immediate upgrade. so many average consumers are confused and/or don't care about the differences between bluray and dvd. while anyone on avs is going to instantly recognize a large quality upgrade, average consumers are just angry there are still black bars on their new hdtv.

games (software generally) are much harder to illegally acquire. especially for console systems, which is where most mainstream gaming is going on. and like dvds those take up a much larger amount of space, making very large hard drives necessary. they also cannot be compressed the way music and movies can. a 40gb bluray disc can be made into an acceptable 4gb mkv file. theres no way to shrink a video game to ten times it's original size.

book sales are the next thing to be seriously hit. its happening already. you can download a 5gb torrent with thousands of the best selling novels of all time within a few minutes. much cheaper than buying all of them and easier than getting them all out of the library.

I am laughing with you...

Every generation of Play station has been able to be hacked. PS1 had the gameshark plug in that allowed burned copies of PS1 games to be played. PS2 has been hacked and "jailbreaking" a PS3 will allow you to play copied games online so it can be done. DL time is and interesting idea but typical game is 3-4 GB and I believe the highest are maybe 12-15 GB that's between 4-12 hours on a pathetic 1.5 MB/s DSL connection. A large portion of games today are legally downloaded so I don't think that is really a relevant point.

If the law is just about illegal decryption...there are options to copy while keeping the encryption, and still playing back from a hard drive!

The video game analogy is correct...I play Call of Duty and pay close to $100 per year on the game , guides and add-on services and play 99% in online multi-player mode.

The solution to RIAA etc...make better stuff and price it accordingly. They should digitize their entire collection and charge a minimal fee to access the DB, while charging for advertizing spots. It the customer wants the big screen/ 3D effect, then head to the theater (or build on at home).

Record companies have also been known to pirate software and music. I remember a case where they were selling songs in a compilation and not paying a certain artist. Is it true that artists receive less than 10 cents on a dollar song? That also seems unfair. Some of these companies have done a lot of bad stuff in trying to stop piracy. However I still don't think its ok to go on the internet and have a free for all to whatever you want and because of this now laws are going to be more restrictive. Morally I see nothing wrong with making a backup copy for yourself but as has been mentioned I wouldn't be surprised if they shut down the software creators that help us to make the backups. Sales will increase once they make piracy not worth the risk but it won't be anything like their ridiculous projected lost sales.

This is overly simplistic. You need to first look at what they've been given as a recording advance, what their management and attorney take off the top (usually 20% and 7% if i remember correctly), pr, publishing, songwriting, production, etc etc.

Traditionally, labels have not been that unlike the movie business - they invest in many projects and hope a small percentage work out to pay for the money lost on all the rest.

Just because your neighbour has something you want, but can't afford, doesn't give you the right to break in when he's not home and steal it. For every famous actor, producer, etc, that you hear making scads of money (But they were probably poor once too.), how many hundreds, or thousands are just making do?
I probably helped pay for one of George Lucas's rooms in his mansion with all my purchases. But, he came up with a Formula to produce something everyone wants to buy, and therefore benefited financially for it. Do I begrudge him for it? No just wish I had the ambition and ideas to do the same. This is a free country, and everyone has an equal opportunity to do the same.
So, like the guy that came to me to tell me about the great deal he gotten on a Boat Motor down at the local bar, was back later crying about how he got home and some so and so had broken in and stolen his TV and Stereo. My reply to him - `Now you know how that Boat Motor owner felt when he went down to use his boat, and found his Motor Gone!' Turned Red faced and left.
Want to keep a viable industry going, buy your media you want to watch! If not, one day there will be nothing to buy!
Can't afford it right now, wait until it goes on sale, or get your kids to buy it for Father's Day, Birthday, and/or Christmas.

The public library systems are funded in part by State Department of Education and local tax dollars as well. The people have collectively paid for that copy and share it for EDUCATIONAL purposes - and educational applications such as research and teaching is a safe harbor to copyright infringement. In addition the first sale doctrine allows for lending of purchased copyrighted materials.


http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright

Morality has nothing to do with, as I posted earlier... it's illegal - pure and simple.

And, good luck with shutting down the software vendors. I'm sure the Chinese government will work with Hollywood to track down Fengtao at DVDFab and put a stop to all of this nonsense (you know, in exchange for more turbine engine controller software technology for their new fleet of attack helicopters).

Sure it does. Why else would people rationalize to themselves that "it's not hurting anybody"?

Trying to enforce a law that is *not* seen as prohibiting an intrinsic wrong is a losing proposition. If enough people feel that way, that is. Also, importantly, they must feel there's little chance of suffering any consequences.

There's a philosophical distinction between "malum in se" and "malum prohibitum". Between something intrinsically wrong and something prohibited by law. Stealing is still (mostly?) regarded as intrinsically wrong. Exceeding the speed limit, for instance, is not (at least sometimes, if no one is endangered). Who here has not exceeded the speed limit a little when they thought they could get away with it?

Anyway, Dean is onto something when he says the culture has changed.
Edited by fritzi93 - 11/14/12 at 1:08pm

Some of this was addressed above, but there's also the fact that were are just now really getting to the point where it's as easy to download a DVD (sort of) as it has been to donwloading an MP3 in the first stage of the downloading phenomenon. There is also of course the fact that there are rental solutions available for movies. They do obviously feed into the illegal downloads world, but they also provide a steam vent for some of that pressure to download. It's still probably easier to hit the Red box at the grocery store or use Netflix than to download significant numbers of DVDs, much less blu-rays.

I guess, with my download speeds, I could download a smaller DVD (just the movie) in a few hours. If it's been re-compressed, I guess a couple hours. That's probably the situation for the bulk of people out there, or worse. And of course it could tend to draw attention to you for the sheer bulk of bytes being sucked down if you were doing it often. That's a considerably different thing from an entire album, at pretty high resolution, in probably 10 minutes or less.

But, that situation continues to change as well. More and more people are getting fiber with much higher download speeds. When it gets to the point that you could download a DVD in 10 minutes (without much worry of infestations) and be watching it, then the situation would likely change for DVDs as well.


I was seeing some discussion the other day that even multi-player console games may be doomed, because people are starting to move more away from them. Without the multi-player aspect of the games to provide a defacto copy protection mechanism, they may start to suffer as well. I don't know if the person writing that really knew what he was talking about that consoles are starting to give ground to single player games again. But, if it does happen, then games will lose one of their most powerful weapons against piracy.

I will say that at least things have changed somewhat for the better, in the sense that these types of threads are no longer me vs. 100 people arguing for their right to just steal anything they want. It used to be, I think, that no one even wanted to be seen taking the position of IP creators at all, even if they might have been sympathetic. Now there are a lot more people taking a reasonable stand on the matter. If everyone was so reasonable, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, since there'd be no financial incentive for IP creators to go to any great lengths to protect themselves. If it was the 1% lunatic fringe stealing and everyone else doing the right thing, there'd be nothing to argue about. It's when it became mainstream to streal that this situation came to a head.

Of course, you then have places like Youtube, where it's a hourly occurrance to have someone damning some movie studio to Hell as evil Nazi's for having one of their movies removed from Youtube, or having a soundtrack removed from one. Go into one of those threads and post something reasonable about how Youtube is making huge advertising revenues off the backs of IP owners and it's not right, and they have every right to have these movies removed. You'll get a feel for what I used to feel like around here, and see why there must be legal action on this front. There's a whole generation now who has come into their supposed consuming years but raised on the anti-IP creator sentiments that have permeated the internet for a decade or more. They don't just steal, they consider an affront to themselves to be prevented from stealing in a lot of cases.

BTW, a friend sent me this video, which is a funny rant on a lot of this, though it starts off about a slightly different subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysyZF-DZFY

Actually this thread has zero do with illegal downloading of un-purchased material yet you keep bring it back up again and again and again. This thread was derailed about 3 posts in and there has been almost no actual discussion about the real ruling.

the ruling is about how encrypted digital content pertains to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

if nobody could pirate material the incentive to have such strong DRM would be minimal. my money is that studios still wouldnt want you copying your own discs, but fair use laws would support it without the DRM.

i remember reading a case where a judge mentioned that the fair use laws and DMCA were at odds with each other, but the case did not directly address that and thus no challenge has ever been brought before the court. Beyond RealDVD being shut down that is. Kaleidescape's case was not about this either - it was about what they were doing with their DVD CCA licenses, since encryption was never broken by them.

This is an issue that custom integrators have dealt with - what is their liability for selling movie servers or home theater computers with AnyDVD on them?

Heh, funny video.

As to the members on this site: Well, they seem to be reasonably well-educated, literate adults for the most part. Just judging by their posts. Not many warez kiddies here.

Yes but these sites can be blocked. Thats why I'm asking how difficult can they make it for us to access the software? Guess it doesn't matter to me now anyway since I'm converting my movies using the d2d.

Being technically possible to block, and being politically possible are two different things. Look at what happened with the bill a year ago or so, where all of the companies that have made out so well from the current situation used their enormous resources and visibiltiy to stop it. It's almost a perfect storm really, when you have 1) just regular folks, as they are called basically wanting to continue to get everything for free 2) large companies who are now some of the biggest companies and who made a lot of money directly or indirectly off the theft and 3) people who consider any attempt to regulate the internet as the first step towards world government and fascism, and all of them are ganged up against the IP creators. That's some strange bedfellows, but together they make it difficult for any politician to really step in and deal with these types of problems. They will almost certainly prevent any sort of system that would make it much more likely that honest people were being honest and dishonest people were being caught, and maintain the status quo where they are able to get what they want. OTOH, it's probably a lot easier as a politican to sacrifice the rights of a smaller group to get the affection of a much larger one.

Is that a real question? The US can't even stop on-line poker, so what makes you think they will 'block' the sale and distribution of software like DVDFab?

You should go to the DVDFab website and see how many licenses they've sold, which have no other use than to 'archive' / 'backup' DVDs and Blu-rays. Here's my favorite quote from their website:

...and what they are dedicated to is this:

They've been at this since:

I guess I should say thank you for this ruling. What this means is that I will stop paying full price for new Blu-ray releases and instead move back to renting discs

A few years back I had promised myself that I would stop purchasing DVDs. Most of them just sit around collecting dust. When Blu-ray came along and when I discovered that these movies can be stored digitally for easy access, I jumped right back in.
But if I am not able to store my movies (purchased legitimately at full price), then I am inclined to stop purchasing discs.
On the bright side, I needed bad news like this to get me to put an end to this expensive hobby.

I wonder who loses out on this eventually. I wonder ....

Similar to the Boy who cried wolf, the more retarded laws American lawmakers make, the more the rest of the world will start ignoring the more serious ones.

Here is a question that I haven't seen asked.

Would anyone be opposed to there being a "CD Key" to their movies where you had to register your movie with the Production company?

So say I buy the Avengers on Bluray and want to have a digital copy on my computer. I would have to register the copy with Marvel for no extra cost. If I ever sold the movie for any reason I would have to delete the digital copy as well when sold for someone else to use the disc.

I know that involves way more than what we should have to deal with as customers but it might be a decent compromise because it would allow us to use the content that we bought any way we want and put it on as many devices as we would like....

So would a digital equivalent of the blu-ray be provided by the studio?
Don't they already do that by providing a SD itunes digital copy (sigh!) or an ultraviolet code to access the same movie?
Problem is both these alternatives are crippled (just not up to snuff compared to blu-ray)

Or are you suggesting something else?
I honestly don't care if the digital copy is DRM'd (and requires a key/password to access it) as long as the pic/audio quality is same as the blu-ray and can be accessed off a hard drive

whats NAS?

Tell that to Homer.

They already do this with "Digital copy" and it's a lower resolution, crappier audio copy that can only be played on one device and so on...

All digital copy is is a collection of your rights to fair use taken away and sold back to you piecemeal.

You miss out on extras and loss less audio but the streams are very high quality and I've read a post by one user saying they couldn't tell the difference between the streamed avatar vs the bluray.
As I mentioned earlier at first I thought UV was somewhat useless. However now you can stream your UV videos through vudu. You can also take some of your videos to walmart with the d2d program and unlock them on your UV and vudu account. I've added over 20 movies so far. I'm liking it a lot. If it continues to work as it does I will be very happy with UV and vudu and I think its a great alternative to running a htpc minus the extras which a lot of people strip anyway to save space. You can also add several others to your account so my Dad can also access my collection anytime as well.

I would like personal backups to be legal but UV could be a great alternative. Disney is holding out and not all movies are UV yet but it has a great start so far. I hope more people start using it to show them the interest is there.