

Copyright protectionism - The award for irony goes to...  - CaptainZapp
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/09/copyright-protectionism

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smoyer
Hopefully the software will be enhanced to block more of the political
campaigns and advertisements as this might have two positive effects. 1) we
wouldn't have to be constantly inundated and 2) the politicians might actually
begin to understand the impact of the laws they're subjecting us to.

Sigh ... Or they'll just exempt themselves again.

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freehunter
They'll just rule that political speech is always free speech and can never
infringe on copyright.

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antidoh
Then all _my_ speech is political.

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freehunter
All my speech is satire.

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praptak
This could be used as a denial of service. Show up at an event, play some
copyrighted crap, instakill transmission.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Particularly music from a company with a history of very harsh enforcement.

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alan_cx
How does an automated process like the one that killed this feed determine
fair use? And if it can't, then how can fair use work at all on the internet?
Is the fair use exemption effectively over?

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delinka
The problem is that "fair use" is the purview of the courts. Yes, there's this
thing called 'common sense' that you and I have and can see what fair use
should be. But there's no legal definition that is satisfactory for
determining fair use in advance. So, the copyright holder sues, you pay for
your defense, the court says "fair use" and everyone goes on their merry way
(except poorer. which in the case of individuals is typically unacceptable, so
they cave to settlement and a "fair use" defense is obliterated.)

But what's _really_ obnoxious is this: the streaming feed of the Hugo Awards
that was killed was _better_ than fair use, it was _licensed_ use. The
automated systems have absolutely no way of determining who has licensed
content and who has not.

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Mordor
I've heard of the "police state", but what's a place called that's run by
lawyers?

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archangel_one
Lawyers act on behalf of clients that can afford to employ them, so I'd call
it a plutocracy.

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DanielRibeiro
Former discussion of this shameful incident:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4471213>

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ordinary
_Try to capture a stream of video or a screenshot in most operating systems,
and the OS declines to do so or produces a blurred or blacked-out display._

This really surprised me. I'm right up there with the other tinfoil-hat
wearers, but it'd never even crossed my mind that this might happen because of
copyright infringement concerns. Can anyone confirm this claim by the
Economist is correct?

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mcbarry
They might be misunderstanding how video overlay acceleration works.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay>

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makomk
From what I recall, modern graphics hardware has little or no support for
video overlays. The fastest and easiest way to display video on modern systems
is actually to feed it through the standard 3d-accelerated compositing stack,
which means that it shows up in screenshots just like everything else. Some
content providers don't like this because it provides a way to capture the
video, so they insist on graphics hardware manufacturers providing some method
of displaying video that blocks screen capture; if any modern graphics cards
do support overlays it's almost entirely for DRM purposes rather than
acceleration.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I'm not so sure of that. Try playing a video on Windows XP with a cloned
display. In some cases, the video will play on one screen, but not the other.

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vampirechicken
American Author?

