That's how the media industry wants to frame it - that unless you're a developer working in this specific field, you're unaffected.
But you are very affected - you are denied the use of software that this law prevents a small minority of developers from distributing. So we get DVD players that refuse to play region-locked media, or can't record streaming shows, regressing us back to before VCRs entered the market.
Regressing us back to before VCRs entered the market is the entire point.
Jack Valenti went to his grave still believing that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision in the Betamax case. He's not alone, many if not most of the top players in the industry feel that way. A personal story: my girlfriend's parents lived and worked for the MPAA in Washington, D.C. as part of their legal team. Throughout the 80s and 90s, they banned VCRs altogether in the house because in their opinion, despite the Betamax ruling, recording a show was still copyright infringement, and VCRs were illegal piracy devices.
Strictly speaking, they're right: the Betamax decision did not allow all recording of personal copies, nor did it make "time-shifting" fair use. All it said was that in this one specific instance: time-shifting in order to gain access to a program you otherwise would have no access to at all, allowances may be made under the fair-use doctrine and thus the VCR has a non-infringing use and is only mostly an illegal piracy device. Fun fact: this is why the DMCA also requires all VCRs sold in the USA to come with Macrovision.
Another story: Recently, Tom Cruise was recorded berating the crew on the set of Mission: Impossible 6 in a swear-filled rant because he caught two crew members standing closer than social-distancing orders permitted. Cruise was afraid that if word got out that they were lax on social distancing, the government would shut the production down and shut other film productions down, putting cast and crew members out of work and rendering (some of) them unable to feed their families. He displayed startling and commendable (especially given his Scientology training) awareness and empathy for people on the set who weren't millionaire celebrities and might be living paycheck to paycheck as a gaffer, make-up artist, caterer, or something -- even as he shrieked at his own people.
To people in the movie business, piracy is like that. It threatens to shut down the entire industry and put hundreds of thousands of good honest people out of work. There is no greater evil than a movie pirate, who steals food from the mouths of hardworking film crew members and their children, in order to avoid paying the fifteen bucks or whatever it is now to see a movie during its theatrical run, or waiting a bit to pay an even smaller amount to see it on DVD or streaming. Therefore, you can't give a pirate an inch of quarter, lest they consign the entire glorious film industry to the dustbin of history.
This isn't just cigar-chomping studio executives crafting a good lie to lobby to legislators and government officials so they protect their vast fortunes. This is what they actually believe. This is how they actually think.
So to them, Section 1201 is not an awful law. It is part of the great American tradition of protecting the little guy and allowing them to prosper in the land of the free -- and it is absolutely necessary. When weighing the very livelihoods of hardworking film-crew members against the complaints of a few whiny nerds who could otherwise get cushy jobs elsewhere, which would you -- as a lawmaker or judge -- side with?
Your arguments about pirates stealing food from the mouths of the workers are valid and can be accepted as long as you define as pirates those who sell or distribute copies of something for which they do not own the copyright.
Nevertheless, the American copyright laws and all the similar laws that were introduced in other countries, as a result of US bribing or blackmailing, are profoundly flawed and it is completely beyond my understanding how such laws could have been voted by so-called rational beings.
Neither the act of making copies or any device that can be used to make copies have anything to do with piracy or copyright infringement. All the laws that say otherwise are wrong and they have no rational basis.
Only the act of transferring copies to a third party can rationally be incriminated.
It is absurd to define copyright infringement as making copies and to consider this as a crime.
Making copies of any information that you own is a fundamental right, not a crime. If you cannot make copies, then you certainly do not own it. The support of any information will sooner or later self-destruct, so, if the information had not already been copied, you will lose your property.
Some people are happy to just rent information for a limited time, but I find that unacceptable. I am not even interested in viewing a rented movie, instead of buying it. I do not want to forget anything, unless I decide to do that, so if the owner does not want to sell it, i.e. in a form that can be copied, then I do not pay money for it in another form.
If the information owner claims that he is selling it, not renting it, but the product is copy-protected, that should be considered as fraud. If the law says otherwise, the law is wrong.
> To people in the movie business, piracy is like that. It threatens to shut down the entire industry and put hundreds of thousands of good honest people out of work.
I appreciate the different point of view, but the people in the movie business (at least the ones that write legislation) are not acting in good faith as you're making them out to. "Honest folk trying to put food on the table" doesn't square with "subvert governemnt to produce PR material for you, then suppress that material when it says the wrong thing": https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...
I appreciate that you're not making and argument and, rather, trying to give the HN audience some perspective as to what the parties who benefit from the current "intellectual property" regime might be thinking. Several sibling comments to this one think you're trying to make some kind of argument for draconian "IP" measures. You've made a comment to the effect that you're not (and I didn't read your parent comment that way) but I think it's worth me pointing our your intention explicitly.
Jack Valenti had particularly repugnant beliefs in that he stated that copyright should be infinite. (I don't have the exact quote, but it was something like "1 day less than forever...") Those kinds of beliefs show an incredible blindness to the reality that art and culture are fundamentally built upon transforming older works. There are no new stories under the sun.
This is a tremendous example of argument by anecdote, and a strange anecdote at that. And a tenuous link to an event that is not simple to interpret: A prominent Scientologist berating members of a film crew on the basis of what might or might not be a pretense.
Here is a more plausible analogy: I write books. All of my books have been pirated. Almost all of the pirated copies are consumed by people learning to code who would otherwise not be able to afford my books, or who would buy them from local publishers in developing countries from which I make a pittance. While I am not left out of residuals the way a movie crew is, once I have made money in first world markets, that's mostly it. I really have no incentive to pursue pirates, much less make anti-piracy a fetish and lobby to impose draconian measures on the general public.
The MPAA is a lobbying organization like other organizations that lobby against the public interest. They need to construct a self-justification the way coal, cigarettes, soda pop, etc. have that need. There don't care about the "little guy" but will cynically spin that story if there is an advantage in it.
When sugary fizzy drinks are taxed, think of the out of work... dentists? Or would it be more like "if home soda machine DRM is hacked...?"
I think your question of who to side with is interesting and I’m going to sidestep it entirely because there are second order effects to consider.
I couldn’t help but think about your quote
> people on the set who weren't millionaire celebrities and might be living paycheck to paycheck
Do you think that’s a healthy situation? Where you have Tom cruise, who yells because he has tremendous empathy for his workers who could starve because of their actions? Why is it that they are so vulnerable to piracy when the captains of that industry don’t have to worry about starving?
From the text in the linked article
> DMCA made a digital action a crime that had never been a crime when done in analog — publishing technological know-how to improve and repair devices that we own.
A farmer in Iowa cannot have her tractor repaired by her mechanic, she has to go to John Deere. Because of DCMA.
> Big Tractor says farmers have no right to access the copyrighted software that controls every facet of today’s equipment, even to repair their own machines. That’s the exclusive domain of authorized dealerships.
We have broken systems making other systems broken. It’s like a virus. Maybe Tom Cruise should yell at Paramount and John Deere from standing so close.
The situation we have is that institutions are seeking (and getting) preferential treatment in society. This has been pushed by corporations and supported by government. Maybe Section 1201 isn’t an awful law, but the fact is that the little people it’s supposed to protect didn’t get a voice when it was drafted, they may have gotten lip service, but they were not listed to. We have just kept our incumbent industries alive, kept the systems that deprive them around and make life worse for the little people.
"There is no greater evil than a movie pirate, who steals food from the mouths of hardworking film crew members and their children, in order to avoid paying the fifteen bucks or whatever it is now to see a movie during its theatrical run, or waiting a bit to pay an even smaller amount to see it on DVD or streaming. Therefore, you can't give a pirate an inch of quarter, lest they consign the entire glorious film industry to the dustbin of history."
There are far greater evils.
1. You have to define who you mean as pirates. People at home recording on VCR a TV show are not in fact stealing food from anyone, you have no proof of this because the underlying factors for why this kind of piracy happens results in there being little to no loss of revenue.
2. The overwhelming majority of pirates do not have access to the digital product because they cannot pay for it. Therefore there is little to no loss in revenue.
3. Equating digital goods to physical good theft is an outright lie. Digital goods are infinitely copyable without cost.
4. Anti-piracy is a business not because it works but because film makers want to believe it does. It's snake oil that those who don't understand the digital world continually fall into.
5. "Anti-piracy" is an act used to suppress Fair Use of content so people cannot transform it. Especially for criticism.
6. Actual commercial pirates should be prosecuted. But if you lump all kinds of pirates together then you don't have the legal resources to target the actual harm.
7. Piracy is not as evil as you want to cast it. Piracy only looks evil if you're creating products people can't pay for. If people are overwhelmingly pirating your content even when it's affordable, accessible and good then your product isn't actually affordable, accessible, nor good.
8. People pay for quality. As you can see time and again movies originally on VCR have been resold on DVD and blue ray dozens over. Many people have both VCR recordings and retail DVD's. That goes against the spirit of what you're saying.
Your entire arguement is backed by a single anecdote of Tom Cruise. On top of that, your entire premise is the following statement:
"Regressing us back to before VCRs entered the market is the entire point."
First of all, let me point out, this statement alone is beyond absurd and I will not be giving it any legitimacy whatsoever. Let me put it bluntly, you're wrong, and here's why:
Users don’t experience Section 1201 as a copyright protection. They experience it as the reason they can’t fix their tractor [1], repair their car [2], or even buy cheaper printer ink [2]. And attempts to get exemptions to this law for these purposes—which, again, are unrelated to copyright infringement and create absurd conditions for users trying to use things they own—are always met with resistance.
Professor Jessica Litman, of University of Michigan Law School, laid out the problem of 1201 clearly:
The business that make products with embedded software have used the anti-circumvention provisions to discourage the marketing of compatible after-market parts or hobble independent repair and maintenance businesses. Customers who would prefer to repair their broken products rather than discard and replace them face legal obstacles they should not. It’s unreasonable to tell the owner of a tractor that if her tractor needs repairs, she ought to petition the Librarian of Congress for permission to make those repairs.
1201 covers pretty much anything that has a computer in it. In 1998, that meant a DVD; in 2020, it means the Internet of Things, from TVs to refrigerators to e-books to tractors. Which is why farmers trying to repair, modify or test those things—farmers, independent mechanics, security researchers, people making ebooks accessible to those with print disabilities, and so on—either have to abandon their work, risk being in violation of the law (including criminal liability), or ask the Library of Congress for an exemption to the law every three years.
Put simply, the existing scheme doesn’t discourage piracy. Instead, it prevents people from truly owning their own devices; and, as Litman put it, “prevents licensed users from making licensed uses.”
The intent of the DMCA 22 years ago was to discourage copyright infringement but create space for innovation and expression, for individuals as well as Hollywood and service providers. Over the course of the last two decades, however, many have forgotten who is supposed to occupy that space. We need to remember that this is not “Big Content v Big Tech” and ensure that users take center stage.
> When weighing the very livelihoods of hardworking film-crew members against the complaints of a few whiny nerds who could otherwise get cushy jobs elsewhere, which would you -- as a lawmaker or judge -- side with?
Excuse me? Everyone from Farmers, to Truck drivers, to mechanics, are ALL negatively affected. Not just "whiny nerds".
I'm not making an argument. I'm trying to get y'all into the headspace of the MPAA, congresspeople, and judges so you can see what we're up against. As usual in American law, right or wrong don't really matter; it's who has the resources and the drive to fight and win.
Probably HN title filtering that did it. They try to prevent titles like “10 facts about cats” etc, automatically removing leading numbers. But sometimes, like here, it doesn’t have quite the intended effect.
It's currently 17 USC 1201, so it looks like this got resolved. Note, however, that emailing the mods using the footer Contact link is a guaranteed way to see such repairs made — they don't always see and fix these issues otherwise.
What a terrible law.