I am so very very sick of copyright issues.

[superboyac]

I know this has been discussed ad nauseam, and I don't plan on adding anything too much new to it, but I am so so so so sick of copyright issues.  I mean, you try to do the right thing, but it's so hard.  Especially for us computer geeks, who know how to configure everything and where all the "alternatives" are.

The latest example:
So Donovan scored that goal for the US in the World Cup.  Now I don't give two sh-ts about soccer, but I like a good sports story, so I at least wanted to see what happened.  Naturally, my first instinct is to go to ESPN.com.  Any highlights?  No.  As they do with many sports that they don't own the copyrights to (I'm thinking some tennis tournaments, etc...you know, the less popular ones), they don't have any actual highlights.  They just have talking heads discussing the game.  Like I want to listen to them.  And they trick you by putting a picture of the play as the static photo with the "play" button watermarked on it, but when you click on it, you just get the analysts.  So ESPN (THE sports website doesn't have the highlight).

The next obvious thing to try: google.  So I search for "donovan goal video".  What do I get?  Jack squat.  A bunch of stupid sites that for some reason have the word video and usa algeria, and all the other right words, but no actual video of the goal.  In fact, many of them don't have a video of anything.  Of course, many also have more people talking about the goal, but not the goal itself.

Great, now I think, "Oh! duh...why don't I just go to FIFA's website.  Surely, they must have the highlights."  Well, it looks like they do...but none of the videos play for me.  So I think maybe it's my ad muncher blocking it.  So I tweak the settings, and even turn it off.  no go.  I shouldn't doubt ad muncher anyway, since it's pretty rock solid with this stuff.  Then I research a little bit and I find out that FIFA blocks the videos in certain countries because of copyright issues.  Now, i don't know if that was the problem with me, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, what the F??  Seriously.  How does this not drive you crazy??  Give me one good reason why i shouldn't go get the torrent for this game and watch it in peace?  Heck, I don't even care about the game, I just want to see that goal!!  My experience is telling me that it's less hassle to download a huge ~4GB (I don't know how big it is) video file just to watch 30 seconds, than it is to go to the "right" places to watch it.

Now, please, i'm not interested in where all you guys watch the videos.  I'm sure some of you will tell me I'm not going to the right website..."Why don't you just go to something.com?"  That's not the point.  My point is, why do this to people?  It's wrong.  it's mean.  It's disrespectful.

Why do commercials on these highlight videos play quickly and flawlessly, and when the main content arrives, it loads slowly and is often choppy?  It's not an innocent mistake.  It's done intentionally.  Once again, it is disrespectful to the public consumers.

And speaking about ESPN highlight videos, here's a rant for you.  I go there to watch NBA highlights during the season.  Do you know what they do?  First of all, they make sure to compress the highlights into the shortest time possible.  No more than 30 seconds.  God forbid we actually get to somewhat digest the game.  not only that, but the first 15 seconds is an ESPN schmuck who tells you about the game.  I DON"T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT JIM BASQUIL...SHOW ME KOBE!!!  So now, the game video is only 15 seconds.  So how do the choose what to show in this precious few seconds?  Well, they normally start in the 4th quarter, because surly, nobody cares about the first three-quarters of the game.  In fact, the schmuck announcer often says, "And we go straight to the 4th...".  Now, to top it off, after you are blessed with 15 seconds of game video, you get about 30 seconds of a screen that shows the box score.  And the schmuck is talking this whole time as well.

So in this age where we have all this technology, we see even less than we did 20 years ago.  Why is there such a time restriction on the NBA highlights?  It's not like it's on TV, it's the internet!!  You can make it as long as you want, nobody is going to care?  Ah, but somebody does.  I suspect it's also a copyright issue.  I'll bet, and I'm not 100% sure, but I'll bet that the NBA only allows a certain number of seconds of video to be shown before ESPN has to pay additional copyright fees or something.  I can't logically explain it any other way.  Either that, or ESPN is truly an asshole and they just want to piss everybody off.

We have multiple camera angles, we have super slow motion technology, we have so much...yet we get to see so little.  We honestly see less than we did 20 years ago.  These corporations are so intensely focused on their copyright protection, that they protect their content all the way to zero-viewership.  They spend millions of dollars getting all the camera angles and slow motion capability, but the public only sees like 1% of it.  So what happens to the rest?  They store it somewhere.  Someday, when a millionaire producer wants to make a documentary, he can comb through those videos and find some footage for himself.  The rest of us?  Sorry.  Pretty great, eh?

[Paul Keith]

Thread needs more highlights.

[superboyac]

OK...well....I feel slightly embarrassed.  The highlight of the Donovan play is now on ESPN.  Fine.  Whatever.  My argument still stands for the  most part.  Maybe not for this specific case, but it still applies in general.

[alivingspirit]

I will widen the argument to all the raw movie footage that does not make the final cut. I would love to see all that footage given to fans to make complete remixes of movies.

[zridling]

SuperboyAC is right.

Problem is, now that corporations dominate large parts of the internet landscape, they see everything in terms of MAKING MONEY, not of sharing. They spend billions lobbying governments around the world for extremely restrictive legislation like DMCA, ACTA, ridiculously extended copyright lifetimes, and so on. If you're not PAYING to watch their "content," then you're stealing it (according to them).

Let your government know someway somehow that you want an open web, open content, open standards, open data, open source,.... and keep letting them know.

[superboyac]

SuperboyAC is right.

Problem is, now that corporations dominate large parts of the internet landscape, they see everything in terms of MAKING MONEY, not of sharing. They spend billions lobbying governments around the world for extremely restrictive legislation like DMCA, ACTA, ridiculously extended copyright lifetimes, and so on. If you're not PAYING to watch their "content," then you're stealing it (according to them).

Let your government know someway somehow that you want an open web, open content, open standards, open data, open source,.... and keep letting them know.

-zridling (June 24, 2010, 09:23 AM)

I wish.  But there aren't enough people annoyed by this.  People watch those ESPN highlights and they don't realize that they just watched 2 minutes of video with 15 seconds of actual game highlights.  We need more people to be bothered by this.  Cmon people!  Get annoyed!

[Renegade]

AMEN~! It drives me nuts. The way they segment markets is just far too much. It's a pain in the butt. And one of my pet peeves...

[zridling]

Glyn Moody has dealt with these issues for quite a while now. Great blogger:

http://opendotdotdot...gspot.com/index.html
http://twitter.com/glynmoody

[higherstate]

It goes wider than copyright as well, have you seen how FIFA attack anyone who isn't an official sponsor?  i.e. those Dutch supporters arrested during the game were facing criminal prosecution and jail (I am still not sure exactly what they did). I also heard that a company had to pull an tv ad after FIFA went after them it said something like "the unofficial airline for the 'you know what' tournament"

[Renegade]

See this thread for sickeningly Orwellian stuff on owning facts and this article.

I had someone tell me recently about 2 cases of companies "owning facts". Not sure about the veracity of that though.

[IainB]

I revived this old thread because the subject describes pretty much how I felt on reading this article - the subject of which was news to me:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

How copyright makes my home stereo sounds worse
by Stephan Kinsella on March 6, 2013

The other day I had my A/V guys over to make some adjustments to one of my systems. While there were there I asked them if they could take a look at a problem I’d been having for a while with my family room media system. I have an Anthem two-zone receiver. The first zone drives the TV and the speakers in the family room. Zone 2 drives speakers around the house through a speaker selector box. I often play music via the Apple TV on both zones 1 and 2, all around the house, say, on a Saturday. But I notice an odd echo effect between the sound coming from zone 1 speakers and that coming from zone 2: there is a slight delay, giving it a disconcerting feeling, if you are standing sort of between rooms.

I asked the media guys if there was maybe a polarity problem or an adjustable delay. They said that’s not it. Instead, all the big manufacturers of receivers have gimped their own systems due to copyright enforcement pressure from content companies: zone 1 is digital, but zone 2 has to be analog. What this means is that there is a delay in zone 1 because the DSP takes some time. So the sound coming out of zone 2 is slightly ahead of that coming out of zone 1. I said can I just buy a receiver with two digital zones? Nope, they said–the copyright enforcers don’t want you to be able to just duplicate that signal. So even if I am playing my own CD’s or streaming radio or spotify perfectly legally, I can’t have a device that digitally “splits” the signal to permit me to play it simultaneously on two zones. Instead, I can tap into the inferior analog signal and play it on zone 2, but then there are timing delays between the zones.

The media guys told me there are workarounds but they are complicated and not even guaranteed to work. I could buy some kind of add-on digital delay for zone 2, but the problem is you might never make it match up exactly, and further, the delay from zone 1 DSP varies by the type of music; it’s not necessarily a fixed delay, so there is no easy way to guarantee adding a delay to zone 2 will match it up to zone 1. I suppose I could buy two separate one-zone receivers, have all kinda signal-splitters at the output of my source devices like the Apple TV, but that’s kinda stupid.

Another example of how paying, law-abiding users are harmed by the copyright fascists.

[Renegade]

Another example of how paying, law-abiding users are harmed by the copyright fascists.

 

Yuppers.

One fellow who always has something interesting to say on the topic:

http://falkvinge.net/

Everyone pretty much knows about the EFF, Tech Dirt and Torrent Freak, but Falkvinge is another there with some very insightful things to say.

[40hz]

I think a lot of this IP protectionism is indicative of a loss of confidence on the part of many. The only people that try (in my experience) to wring every last nickel out of everything they come up with are the people who fear their creativity is a finite resource. That they only have so much originality in them - and once it's gone, it's gone.

I've had more of my own original work (ideas, words, music) than I can shake a stick at "appropriated" by others over the years. Does it ever bother me? Maybe a little every so often. (Mostly when I'm feeling very tired or am unusually short on sleep.) But so what? I'm a clever chap who doesn't mind working. Nor do I ever plan on retiring. I'll just write new stuff. I'm never one to be at a loss for ideas - or come up short on creativity.

So pilfer away AFAIC. There's plenty more where that came from.

[Target]

I think a lot of this IP protectionism is indicative of a loss of confidence on the part of many. The only people that try (in my experience) to wring every last nickel out of everything they come up with are the people who fear their creativity is a finite resource. That they only have so much originality in them - and once it's gone, it's gone.

-40hz (March 13, 2013, 09:00 PM)

not quite, seems most of it is generated by people that have no creativity (accounting doesn't count) and are banking (literally) on wringing everything they can out of someone elses efforts, ie most any of the media vendors, publishers, the families and/or estates of long dead creators...

[40hz]

the families and/or estates of long dead creators...

-Target (March 13, 2013, 10:19 PM)

Well...at least in their case, creativity is a finite resource since the dead certainly don't seem to be producing as much these days - unless you buy into the "channeling" thing.

[superboyac]

I think a lot of this IP protectionism is indicative of a loss of confidence on the part of many. The only people that try (in my experience) to wring every last nickel out of everything they come up with are the people who fear their creativity is a finite resource. That they only have so much originality in them - and once it's gone, it's gone.

I've had more of my own original work (ideas, words, music) than I can shake a stick at "appropriated" by others over the years. Does it ever bother me? Maybe a little every so often. (Mostly when I'm feeling very tired or am unusually short on sleep.) But so what? I'm a clever chap who doesn't mind working. Nor do I ever plan on retiring. I'll just write new stuff. I'm never one to be at a loss for ideas - or come up short on creativity.

So pilfer away AFAIC. There's plenty more where that came from.

-40hz (March 13, 2013, 09:00 PM)

Good point. That's how I feel about it also.  I also feel that a lot of creative people, either due to ignorance or intentional lying, are not aware of how they copy others for their own creativity.  It's a messy argument, and definitely not legally sound in any way, but in my mind it's impossible to create something new that is not built upon the generations of creativity that came before it.  There may be a new twist or a new element, but to argue that you came up with the whole thing is impossible for me to accept.  All my favorite people, those that are called "the geniuses" by most, whenever I study them, I find clear cut examples of who they learned their craft from.  If someone asked me about ANYTHING I've done, i can tell you almost exactly where each element is inspired from.