back to article Big media gangs up on pirates, file sharers

A large group of media giants is poised to announce a new system for copyrighting content on t'internet. The US edition of the Wall Street Journal reports CBS, Microsoft, News Corp's Fox and MySpace units, NBC, Viacom, and Walt Disney are all part of the group. Reuters has more here. Reuters says: "The agreed principles …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    O.o

    so they're going to use magic?

  2. Vernon Lloyd

    Hmmmm

    I wish you all the luck in the world.

    If you as a collective can stop the hackers from hacking then hell will truely freeze over.

    No point wasting your collective money.

  3. Raineh
    Thumb Down

    How Stupid?

    Are they so dumb they dont know that it will be "haxed" very fast?

    With coders becoming more and more "famous" {see dvd jon} on the tubes, They have even more motivation to be the one to crack the code than they ever had.

    It just makes me think, rather than spending obscene amounts of wad on all this fancy "drm" what if they substancally lower the price of media.

    Sure people will still play pirates but they will no matter what is done, But the "mainstream" downloaders who used to do it the right way might just hit the shops

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Don't you mean protect copyright?

    rather than a method for "copyrighting content on t'internet"

  5. Simon Ball
    Pirate

    Nuts

    Given that repeating the exact same action over and over again and expecting a different result is often regarded as a sign of madness, do you think we'd have any success getting the RIAA and company declared clinically insane, and put away?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    So now we know

    All those billions spent on Vista for what didn't seem like a lot of improvement (if any).

    Now we know what the money was spent on. MS gets you to by their content control OS and sells the control of it to these creeps. I bet they wish the take up of Vista was a lot better before announcing this.

  7. Giles Jones Gold badge

    They'll ruin the net in the process

    This is why we don't want media giants controlling any part of the Internet. It will be transformed into a huge money making tool if they have their way.

    Too much emphasis is on money, music publishers should care more about the quality of the music they output and be proud of bringining genuine talent to the masses. But they're just bean counters obsessed with bleeding everyone dry.

    I write music, I support those artists who aren't earning a fortune. When the labels can afford to shovel £85 million to one artist for a record deal then you do wonder if they need any more money?

  8. Keith Doyle
    Dead Vulture

    Technical solution?

    Let's see-- well, some kind of tagging won't work unless you can eliminate all untagged content from the internet (maybe not even then), and eliminating untagged content will go over like a lead balloon.

    The best they will be able to implement IMHO is Google's YouTube scheme using a more centralized and "independent" (or at least, advertised as such) registration service, so they won't have to submit their entire copyright catalog to Google and also to every other potentially infringing site. But they still would have the problem of going after infringing sites that aren't using their central registrar and are going to have a time forcing noninfringing sites to utilize it. Google in fact, are the only ones possibly capable of implementing an internet-wide copyright checking system, and even if Google was up for it, you still are going to have a time forcing everyone to utilize it.

    I write my own music and make my own visual content that I give away for free. I'm not going to "register" it at Google or anywhere else. Try to force me to and I'll be registering multi-terabytes of random noise. If these guys do anything to the internet that impedes my ability to give away my content, or tries to make me pay for that "privilege", I smell Class Action...

  9. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    Be my guests - do it!

    Can't wait for them to block and eliminate all "unauthorised" copyrighted content - and kill themselves in the process.

    If they thought that YouTube blocky thumbnail-sized versions of their masterpieces served any other purpose than promoting their product and boosting their sales they (or probably their administrators) will need to think again.

  10. Nicholas Ettel

    @Giles

    "This is why we don't want media giants controlling any part of the Internet. It will be transformed into a huge money making tool if they have their way."

    Ummm... and just how do you get access to the internet? Unless you steal WiFi, or somehow manage to splice into a hardline, people get their internet service through an ISP, which for the most part are owned by media giants. You pay the ISP to get access to the internet... it already sounds as if the internet is a money-making tool.

  11. Svein Skogen
    Go

    Some questions:

    How willing are these companies to consider wiping out all "free software" as colatteral damage in their "premium content protection" scheme?

    If you don't like the answer to that question, consider this: How willing are these companies to lobby for making their content protection scheme "mandatory" under US law.

    If you still don't like the answers, consider the last one: How willing is the administration in Washington DC to trample over other countries laws to implement their "chown USA:Federal international.law && chmod 664 international law" tactics? Everyone knows that USA has complete read/write rights to any nations laws, don't they? Isn't the attitude "too long have these guys been able to hide behind their local sovereign law, no longer shall they be able to this"?

    If you dislike the questions to ALL these questions, your options are rather limited:

    1: I sincerely consider the option of not copying any US-made media a good one. By this I don't mean that you should rush out and buy it, quite the opposite: Totally ignore it. If someone asks about the latest Hollywood head^wblockbuster, simply say "I don't watch that trash", and explain why it is trash. If someone asks if you've heard Slit-my Ears'es last album, give the same response, and tell them that "copying it is wrong, buying it is immoral, the only correct attitude is to totally ignore it". This kind of boycott will work, if enough people spread it. Manage to live without the copywronged material altogether.

    2: Contribute however you can to get alternatives for the most needed applications onto truly FREE operating systems like GNU/Linux and Free/Open/NetBSD. What the open/free software needs most of all right now, is an alternative to Photoshop and Lightroom (and no: Gimp is no replacement for Photoshop. Not even close). The other really needed thing, is documentation and localized languages. The last two don't really need a lot of programming experience to contribute to, but they need people starting the work, and people contributing. When we have alternatives to the most needed software, we can DITCH Windows, and start setting up alternatives. Still without those copywronged things.

    3: When we have alternatives for these, we can actually convert 90% of the desktops. Consider this: We have a good office suite (I've been using oOO for several years, I've also installed oOO for several end users. It's good enough.), we have a VERY good mail solution (Both Thunderbird+Lightning, and Evolution are GOOD suites, but they lack a lot of documentation), and we have web-browsers that will leave the users smiling. With picture handling and editing capabilities (see above), we will have alternatives for most of the "must-have" applications. What is left, is games. And let's face it: The games industry isn't likely to make the move away from a DRM+Copywronged OS unless they're forced.

    4: When the above is done, stop supporting windows-installations privately. If someone approaches you "because you know computers", tell them that "helping you with windows costs you $XX/£XX/€XX per hour, minimum 4 hours, but I can back up your data and help you started on BSD/Linux/Whatever for a total sum of YY" and make YY be cheaper. Make sure that people still running Windows are "bled dry" if they want your help. If it starts to cost money getting help, people will start thinking. Fast. If they ask you why, tell them that by staying "on windows", they are actually "part of the problem", because the excuse software companies use for not wanting to port their software to Free/Opensources OSes, is that there isn't enough users running alternatives to Windows to give the port a good cost/benefit for the company. Let's start moving people away from windows, and we take away the media+microsoft control permanently.

    :)

    //Svein

  12. Pooper Scooper
    Stop

    @Svein

    One of the many reasons you show yourself to be a total moron in that post is your mis-acronyming (if that's a word) of OpenOffice.org as oOO. Considering you've been using "oOO for several years" you haven't seemed to grasp that the various O letters in the title turn into OOo, which is what everybody else uses.

  13. BitTwister

    @So now we know

    > Now we know what the money was spent on. MS gets you to by their content control OS and sells the control of it to these creeps.

    No shit, Sherlock - you reckon? Lots of us saw it coming in with XP - where were you?

    Could *anyone* still believe that Microsoft has the users' interests at heart? Surely they dropped that sort of money-losing silliness years ago.

  14. leslie
    Thumb Up

    True....

    Can we also stop having to have huge power hungry machines too?

    My original machine took 135w of power from the wall, now some gfx cards need that......

    Why? so a stupid game can be played, on windows....

  15. Pooper Scooper
    Stop

    @leslie

    Buy a low-powered graphics card and a low-power chip and stop complaining. No one is forcing you to either have a huge power hungry machine or to play games.

  16. Alex

    waving...

    ...or drowning?

  17. Svein Skogen
    Happy

    @Pooper Scooper

    And your brilliant solution, apart from stating "One of the many reasons you show yourself to be a total moron" over a spelling mistake, is?

    :)

    //Svein

  18. Daniel

    @Svein Skogen

    YES. It is wonderful to see that there are other people who understand what the word boycott really means. I honestly can't remember the last time I voluntarily acquired new RIAA/MPAA produced material. I don't buy them, I don't download them, I don't go to the theater. I am occasionally exposed to them when I go out in the world, visit family and friends, etc., but that's about it. This doesn't mean I don't listen to music - I have plenty of music I bought years ago, and I occasionally buy independent material. Likewise, I watch foreign and independent films. But not if they've been touched by the MPAA.

    Regarding free software: While Photoshop gets talked about the most in forums like this, one of the questions I hear most frequently from people who are technical enough to switch over and would consider it right now isn't about Photoshop, it's about a replacement for Visio. Visio is considered a critical tool for a number of technically oriented business users, and none of the free tools out there come even close - the comparisons are very similar to Gimp and Photoshop.

    As far as the less technical users go, I have to question if what we need is really so much a replacement for Photoshop, so much as a more general photo management suite. Let's face it - drop most users in front of the full version of Photoshop, and they're lost. Photoshop is a solution for serious photo editing, while most users need easy to use touch up tools, resizing and conversion, and a photo library. For those who actually need Photoshop, increased pressure on Adobe to provide a port is probably the way to go.

    -daniel

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Making money is bad?

    OK, maybe I'm losing it here but who pays for the development of open source? More to the point, if the development teams of OS projects aren't being paid for their work, how do they afford all them fancy electonic computer thingys? How about bandwidth? Power? Anyone??? Anyone???

    God help me for saying this, but maybe Bonehead Bawlmer was right when he said Open Source was "communism"?

    I'm sure Paris would be apalled at everybody's short sighted attitude....

  20. The Aussie Paradox
    Joke

    @Daniel

    <quote>I am occasionally exposed to them when I go out in the world, visit family and friends, etc., but that's about it.</quote>

    So Daniel, do you admit that you accidently listened to some music when you visited family and friends? I think you have just opened them up to a lawsuit from the RIAA. How dare they illegally use an Air-Based, Peer-to-Peer system to share music (ABP2P)

    Please handcuff yourself now, and wait quietly out your front door.

    Signed

    RIAA (Department of Legal & Revenue).

  21. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    @bws

    Making money is not bad. Making money through corrupt practices and abuse of market position is, though.

    And Open Source is to Communism what Freedom of enterprise is to Feudalism - not directly comparable but not compatible either.

  22. Colin Jackson

    Arse.

    I just heard a bit of thumping base from the car of the boy racer who just drove past me. Where do I turn myself in?

  23. dreadful scathe
    Flame

    @Nicholas Ettel

    giles: "This is why we don't want media giants controlling any part of the Internet. It will be transformed into a huge money making tool if they have their way."

    you: "Ummm... and just how do you get access to the internet? You pay the ISP to get access to the internet... it already sounds as if the internet is a money-making tool."

    right, so if my garage door - when opened, gives me access to the road network...i "control" the road network do I? I'll use that excuse next time I'm stopped for speeding :) I hope you were being obtuse - either that or you truly didn't understand that Giles was talking about controlling more than just initial access.

  24. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Flame

    @bws

    Making money is great !

    Now, if you think that making money by any means is acceptable, then round yourself up a dozen bitches, put them on the street near the train station, and wait for the dough to roll in.

    Or the cops.

    But you can always accuse the cops of keeping you from making money and being communists. Don't know if the judge will take to that kindly though.

  25. Pooper Scooper
    Thumb Down

    @Svein

    Since when do I need to give a solution to make fun of you for being a moron? I have neither the desire nor the time to get into a convoluted discussion as to the ins and outs of getting back at the RIAA, especially when they're doing a damn good job right now of proving themselves incompetent, irrelevant, and boneheaded.

    I did however have both the desire and the time to make fun of your continual mis-acronym-ing of OpenOffice.org, since you claimed to have been a long-time user of it.

  26. Ivan Frimmel
    Mars

    Free market dynamics

    Free market dynamics will sort all of this out. Shouting about it will not bring change any closer.

    The more things change - the more they stay the same. While RIAA and MPAA are winning cases and " adding value " ( in the eyes of the people that write them the checks ) .. they will continue to exist - for as long a people pirate content - people will keep writing them checks.

    Convergence is down the road - but it may take us a few generations to figure out the middle ground.

    The world continues to spin. Ho hum .. round # 5123212 .. people vs the evil empire despirately trying to contain knowledge and wealth .. I sure hope that handing out content on USB Keys is going to work out for them ;) .. why change your business model , when you can just change the media the crap comes on .. right?

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