Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

Wed Sep 1 03:16:28 UTC 2004

> Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
> because legislating in the 'USA' something that is clearly
> 'global' has worked so well? politicians looking to get:
> 1) votes
> 2) 'political bang for the buck'
> 3) useless hot air blown up someone's rear
> really need to stop trying to legislate behaviour in places
> they can't touch... To repeat: "If you make <currently legal
> Internet thing> illegal in the US, I'll just move my
> <currently legal Internet thing> OUTSIDE the US Borders and
> give you the middle finger as a salute."

I totally agree, but have you ever met politicians that are _not_
looking to get 1) votes 2) 'political bang for the buck' 3) useless hot
air blown up someone's rear?
All of these are part of the job description.

> Dan Hollis wrote:
> the cynic in me says that the senator is looking for our
> arguments in favor of p2p, so that she knows exactly how
> to argue against us and exactly how to write a bill to
> hurt us the most.

Ah, that would be the politically correct way of expressing what I
posted yesterday!

> Joe Johnson wrote:
> All this hit here in Illinois when the Super DCMA took effect, and
> it technically became illegal to use a router in your home (as the
> Illinois DCMA restricts the ability to hide the source or
> destination of any electronic communication, kinda like NAT).
> I certainly didn't pull NAT off my home or my office connections!
> I think no one has been called down (e.g., no one has challenged)
> on the law, but I could be arrested at any time for running a
> basic Netgear router on my broadband at home.

Fortunately for you, legislation passed by incompetent and stupid people
1) rarely gets enforced 2) even when it does, the odds of being among
the few ones nailed for using a NAT box on your residential home
connection are lower than winning the lottery of being struck by
lightning.

Some pieces of legislation are useful (such as the junk fax law or the
do-not-call list) and some other that are idiotic (such as what you
mentioned).

> Jeff Wheeler wrote:
> Not that I have any idea of MS's software activation can
> translate in to protection of CDs and DVDs and whatnot,
> but it's something to think about (it's certainly better
> than the current mechanisms:  copy once and never again,
> or copy only digital files that are of a degraded quality,
> or only playable on certain players to prevent copying
> via a computer, among I'm sure many others).

I see no future here. All attempts to protect content have miserably
failed so far, as there have enough people that have perfectly
legitimate reasons to break the protection. Some examples:

1) DVD zoning (nothing easier to de-zone most DVD players). I have a
perfectly legitimate reason to break this stupidity: I go to France and
buy a French movie in French on DVD, I can't watch it back at home.
Friends visit from Luxemburg and bring movies, we can't watch them
either. Even if I wanted to buy these movies, I can't, as they have not
been dubbed in English and are not available in Zone1 format. This
pushes me to either de-zone my DVD player, DeCSS the disc, or use this 3
megabit broadband to download a copy. Stupid.

2) Make audio CD's unreadable in a computer so nobody can rip the .wav
tracks to .mp3. Totally stupid:

2.a) Remember the last ones that tried (namely Sony)? Their protection
scheme could be defeated in 2 seconds with a sharpie. I'm still laughing
at it. Hara-kiri comes to mind.

2.b) Even if someone could prevent audio CDs to be read in a computer
(see above) it takes only _one_ person to leak the files (as
demonstrated some time ago by a Madonna record leaked days before it
went to manufacturing).

2.c) Anyway, given the audio quality of standard gear today, a single
digital.wav -> analog -> digital.mp3 pass is not going to degrade the
audio quality enough to bother anybody. In other words: connect a good
CD player to a PC with a good soundcard with a grounded gold-plated
cable and rip to .mp3 from the analog input, nobody will know that it's
not a direct CD audio track to .mp3 rip.

3. Finally, and although it is true that copyright infringement is very
often associated with P2P, I found myself downloading a lot of .mp3
files that I actually own on LP, simply because it's faster to download
the file than it is to rip it from the LP (I know because I tried: I
actually have a few CDs that I ripped myself from the LP). I bought the
33 1/3 album, I am entitled to a backup on another media.

Michel.