On Thu, 30 May 2002, Nomen Nescio wrote: > This is absurd. In all the commentary on this issue, no one has made > the obvious point that the MPAA has no interest or intention in putting > watermark detectors into every ADC chip! They don't care about the ADC
If they don't they are screwed. > chip in a digital thermometer or even a cell phone. All they care about > are things like PC video capture cards, which are high fidelty consumer > devices capable of digitizing copyright protected content. And everyone outside the US will build their cards without the detector, or with a software switch to turn it off so they can sell more in the US. > Their white paper is a brief summary of their goals and intentions and > does not go into full technical detail. But let's use a little common > sense here, folks. Common sense says they are corrupt pigs who will stop at nothing to get their profits back up. > It's pointless to try to shoot down this proposal by raising all these > horror stories about ADC chips in industrial and technical devices > being crippled by a watermark detector which will never be activated. > If you waste time developing this line of argument, you will be left > with nothing to say when the actual bill focuses only on the specific > devices that the content holders are worried about. And what are they going to do when people build MP3 players from auto ADC's that don't detect watermarks? Make them illegal? > And sure, a sufficiently talented electrical engineer can produce a custom > board to do non-watermark-aware ADC, and digitize TV shows and music. > The MPAA has to accept that such activity will continue to go on at a > low level. They just want to make sure that consumer devices are not > sold that enable every customer to make easy digital copies of copyrighted > data based on an analog source, as they can now with the Replay DVR. And what's to prevent it from happening at a high level if there's enough profit in it? MPAA is a tiny market compared to the rest of the electronics industry - it will be easy to bypass the law on a huge scale. You don't need to be a "sufficiently talented electrical engineer" when you can go across the border, buy 1000 simple/cheap devices and bring 'em back in your pickup truck. > Please, let's use some common sense and not go overboard with an obviously > mistaken interpretation of the MPAA's intentions. That wastes everyone's > time. MPAA is definitly a waste of everybody's time. They need to be shot so we don't have to listen to them anymore!!! :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike