A Peek into a Mind

Here is my opinion about what should be legal (opposed to Huge American Companies opinion)

Jon Johansen, now 18 years old from norway, have coded in 1999 the known DeCSS, a program that overrides the DVD protection. Norway now brings him to trial under the pressure of the notorious MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). Jon, with 2 other programmers merely found a way to bypass the protection on a DVD he has BOUGHT to watch it under linux (no dvd player was available back then on linux). You can read the story yourself, I just want to express my own opinion.

MP3, warez, copy protection - these are all heavy issues that draws fire from big legal firms trying to FIGHT the public and customers instead of serving them. If MP3 had been embraced by the RIAA and single songs would have been offered at low price over the net, they could have done a nice amount of $$$ instead of doing NONE. All these recent attempts to make legal networks that allow you to hear songs over the net won’t work - cause they don’t give customers the freedom with the song they have bought. I got a song. I want to have it on CDs I burn, on cassette in my car, in my mobile mp3 player - hey I paid for it!

The thing is that people ALREADY do that, people won’t accept a priced crippled version of something they already have for free. (on the other hand, people buys Windows…) Anyway, I think making MP3 of your cds is perfectly your full right. About songs I haven’t bought - if there was a way to buy a legal MP3 of the song in low price (say 1 dollar) - I would have. Subscribing? Give me a break, what bandwidth do they think I have, T1 ?! I got a lousy 56K modem, just like the vast majority of people. I won’t DOWNLOAD a song every time I want to hear it and once I have it - I want to take it with me offline, away from the computer - and whenever I want. Copyrights? Does copyrights means I can only hear it on my computer?

Same with DVD. The ‘non legal’ methods fill in a gap where ‘legal’ services fail. For example, TV. I’m a fan of FARSCAPE tv show. It isn’t being broadcasted here in Israel, and even if it was I’m a student and hardly ever near a TV I can watch. The Internet fills a big gap for me. I download captured episodes of the series and watch them on my computer whenever I can. I make my own TV schedule. The truth? it’s hectic to get the people, and download the 250-350 MB files, but it is possible, specially using a friend with ISDN and university connection. I burn the episodes on CDs and watch them on my free time. I’m not causing any losses to anyone, cause they’re not showing the show here anyway. I’m just 1 more fan in a country they fail to reach. If I could have bought episodes, in good quality, I would have. As long as it wasn’t too expensive. These are TV episodes, not movies, after all. If I could buy a DVD set of a season in, say, 100$, I would have. Say, 10$ if it would have been sold per episode - as long as these episodes will be available very close to that episode broadcasted on TV. I can guarantee A LOT of sells to the company doing that.

Regarding protections (hardware/software) - breaking them (should be) perfectly legal. Actually it should be legal and encouraged! The only thing illegal is COPYING and DISTRIBUTING these illegal copies. But if some kid announces he had broken the protection, it should only be WELCOMED by the companies. The ones distributing illegal copies will do that quietly and THEY will cause the losses. if the company knows about the break they can at least do something about it (or accept the losses until catching the merchants). The ones with the technical knowledge to break the protection should be supported by these companies!

Finally, games and software ‘warezing’. First, as anyone close to these people know, the real kids that ‘trade’ and collect ‘warez’ hardly ever USE them. They don’t usually sells them either (in that case they are merchants in stolen property and should be arrested). But most of them are harmless. BTW, the real way to ‘fight’ games warezing is doing official demos that features every feature from the real game except levels. Most people that look for warez are more into TRYING the game. Most of them are usually just playing it once or twice and erase it. Demos serves the same purpose only they also encourage the gamers to BUY the game.

Well, this has been a little longer post then the usual, but hey, that is the space I’m suppose to write these things. Leave comments if you have any remarks…

Other links
25/3/2002 : When elephents dance
25/3/2002 : Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders