Re: eBay: Burn DVD movies onto CD?
At 06:15 PM 6/21/01 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, David Honig wrote:
My argument, to any judges reading, is that its *not* circumvention if you've bought the damn thing, no matter how you decode it.
If you paid for satellite TV but you build your own descrambler, its *not* illegal circumvention, even though your gizmo (legally) circumvents access controls. Get it? [Rhetorically; Riad is not the problem :-]
Hint: its only illegal if its fraud. DeCSS has nothing to do with fraud. "cp" does. Actually, only humans do, "cp" is not a moral entity.
Actually that won't hold up. There is a distinction that you are missing.
What is that distinction?
Do you legally purchase service from that cable vendor? If so then even building your own cable descrambling box may be illegal if the contract says so (you're depriving the cable company of contractual income, fraud?).
1. yes, contract law always holds; however govt-backed (eminent-domain, spectral allocation) based monopolies should be as open as possible (cf ATT cable in SF) 2. no one has a 'right to income' only the terms of contracts The only(!!!) way that I can see building your own descrambler
and getting away with it is if you have no(!) connection to the vendor, hence they have no claim to a 'loss' since you're not buying any service in the first place.
Generally a bit provider requires that you have some equiptment to make use of their bits, however you have no obligation to use their equiptment. Bit provider = ISP | DVD producer. Equiptment = cable modem | DVD-licensed player
On 22 Jun 2001, at 7:39, David Honig wrote:
At 06:15 PM 6/21/01 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, David Honig wrote:
My argument, to any judges reading, is that its *not* circumvention if you've bought the damn thing, no matter how you decode it.
If you paid for satellite TV but you build your own descrambler, its *not* illegal circumvention, even though your gizmo (legally) circumvents access controls. Get it? [Rhetorically; Riad is not the problem :-]
Have there been test cases which have stated this? I pretty much agree with you as to what the law should be, but I think you might be mistaken as to what the law is. When I first read this, I couldn't think of any reason you'd want to use your own homemade descrambler box instead of the one that the cable co supplied (assuming you've actually paid for the channel), but I was ablt to come up with a couple reasons. 1) you want to tape stuff while you're not there, and the cable box doesn't come with a way to change channels at a specific time. Maybe you'd even like to tape 2 things at once, which I think is legal but not practical using their box. 2) You don't like the color, and you can't paint their box, because you only rent it.
Do you legally purchase service from that cable vendor? If so then even building your own cable descrambling box may be illegal if the contract says so (you're depriving the cable company of contractual income, fraud?).
Well, obviously you're not depriving them of any income if for some reason you decide to use a homemade box and stick the one they rent you in your closet, but has anyone ever actually done such a thing, and gotten hauled into court? George
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