I’m not that big of a movie fan. I prefer books - I control the casting, camera angles, and lighting. Control freak? Maybe.
The ripping and storing of DVDs is just above wall papering the waiting room in hell on my list of things to do, but I get the revolt that is going on. Some clips that highlight the issues:
From Freedom to Tinker:
…the fact that the content in question is an integer — an ordinary number, in other words. The number is often written in geeky alphanumeric format, but it can be written equivalently in a more user-friendly form like 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625. Giving a private party ownership of a number seems deeply wrong to people versed in mathematics and computer science. Letting a private group pick out many millions of numbers (like the AACS secret keys), and then simply declare ownership of them, seems even worse.
From EFF;
What is the AACS-LA’s argument? In its takedown letters, the AACS-LA claims that hosting the key violates the DMCA’s ban on trafficking in circumvention devices. The DMCA provides that:
No person shall … offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
and PC World:
The brouhaha erupted when executives at Digg began removing posts that contained a software key needed to crack the encryption used to limit copying of HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. Digg, which began removing the posts after it got a cease-and-desist letter from another company asserting that the posts violated its intellectual property rights, also began deleting user accounts of those posting the key.
That move outraged many Digg users, who repeatedly posted the key until founder Kevin Rose relented last night and stopped the deletions. Stories about the key received tens of thousands of “Diggs,” or online approvals from the community and by this afternoon, Digg’s top two stories — both about the keys and user response to them — had received approximately 35,000 Diggs.
The revolt marks a test case for social networking sites that accept user-generated content, said Dianne Lynch, dean of the communications school at Ithaca College. Lynch, who also writes regularly about Web 2.0 issues such as alternate worlds, noted that she couldn’t access Digg last night because of the high traffic.
“The situation tests the validity and integrity of a social communities,” she said. “The social community won.”
My take is that companies that gained their prominence and power in the 20th century did so by exploiting hierarchies of specialized skills knowledge. In the 21st century, that model crumbles. The infrastructure is too large and inflexible to keep pace with change, so the typical response is to use existing resources to fight, or at least control the change. This leads to something I refer to as ” The Committee To Keep Things Exactly The Same As They Are.” I don’t like these people.
Well, here is the tipping point: Those in power are now becoming outnumbered by those with knowledge, resources, and access.The desire to capture market share drove prices down and available memory and power (thank you, Moores Law!) up, creating a situation where independent users had access to the tools to harvest, create, and host their own media.
We are not consumers, we are users. This, to steal from Zappa, is the crux of the biscuit.
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