Reports from the Intellectual Frontlines…
Concerns over Intellectual Property law are beginning to come to a boil, and more reports are coming in every day from the Western Front. Take the case of Thomas Giovanetti. Giovanetti is an MPAA/RIAA apologist who has published screeds defending DRM in the marketplace, characterizing all anti-DRM speakers as pirates and criminals, and who has attacked Rep. Rick Boucher’s attempts to reform the DMCA to allow for fair use. Giovanetti’s blog now reveals that he has his own problems as a result of DRM – and he’s none too happy about them. [link via The Technology Liberation Front]
The problem is, we have been using the PVR to record 2 years worth of a Spanish language curriculum that is broadcast over an educational channel, and we’ve been using this content to teach our son Spanish. Now the curriculum is gone. It’s not like I’m just inconvenienced in not being able to watch my “24” episodes. An educational curriculum is lost.
There is no way to hook any kind of backup device to the PVR unit in order to back up this content. And since PVRs use hard drives, they are ALL going to fail, eventually.
Of course, Giovanetti is still not quite there yet. After all, he’s still clearly superior to the rest of us pirates and hoors. He’s not talking about “24,” fer cryin’ out loud – he’s talkin’ educational programming. For his son. Of course, people who are incovenienced by not being able to watch their “24” episodes are not likely to be storing two whole seasons on their PVR.
What I find sadly funny about this story is the fact that Giovanetti has recognized the problem he’s having, but he has yet to recognize that it’s exactly what he’s been arguing against all this time. People want the ability to make back-ups of material they’ve paid for and the ability to use the media that has entered their homes in a way that is in line with their fair use rights.
Meanwhile, the devious thought-criminal pirate hoor Geek With Family offers a full confession of how he wantonly broke DRM in a quest to – gasp! – actually watch the video he had just rented.
Disney’s Atlantis the Lost Empire was one of a few discs at the time that were mastered with bad audio flags (including Pearl Harbor and Jurassic Park 3), that in combination with my Onkyo AV receiver output a few seconds of audio mixed with a few seconds of silence every few seconds.
Disney DVD’s solution was to try a different receiver. Onkyo’s solution was to avoid Dolby Digital and run the DTS track, only available on the $40, non-rentable Atlantis Special Edition 2-disc set. Both of these solutions were unacceptable. I turned to the internet for answers. I found you could re-encode the Dolby Digital track with proper flags with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. So all I had to do was grab the separate video and audio tracks from the disc, repair the audio and then burn the fixed movie to a DVD-R.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
Oh – and, Giovanetti, perhaps you’d be interested in building your own PVR. Of course, it wouldn’t have that DRM goodness – but it would allow you to back the durn things up.