Consumers’ digital rights debated
This tape was purchased in Chinatown in Washington, D.C.,” he said, reading from its cover. He told the subcommittee that tools by 321 Studios LLC produced the tape, and he pointed to a warning label indicating that reproduction for commercial use is prohibited — drilling home his point that labels and good faith hardly prevent illegal sales of DVDs.
While Jack Valenti has a point that it is increasingly easy to obtain high-quality forgeries, I think he’s missing the gist of the communities arguements.
* Preventing piracy is not important enough to justify making it illegal to exercise fair use rights
* Industry claims of actual losses are exaggerated
* Industry pricing contributes to a great degree of piracy
My question is: If I’m truly just licensing the content on my DVD, why can’t I get a new one if I scratch it, for some reasonable $3-5 cost to cover the price of the physical media? Or, why can’t I rip my DVD to a portable iPod like device. Or keep a computer jukebox on my laptop?
Just upgraded the site to MT 3.0, and everything seems to have gone through fine, so we’ll see how it goes.