US: Stop Congress from making iPod or VCRs illegal

[Fyron]

bumpie

[PvK]

My feeling is that if anyone broadcasts any signal through my house and/or body, no one should have the right to prevent me from receiving, decoding, and recording and replaying that signal for personal non-profit use. Period. It seems damned obvious to me. But some people want to own and control everyone else, because they are tyrranical bastards. Die, tyrants!

PvK

[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Grenade.gif[/img] [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]

[Fyron]

You are misunderstanding the point... only a small number of television stations are actually broadcast... most of them are only available via cable or direct satellite link... Certainly the 9 or so channels that are broadcast through the air are free to use as you want, and it is perfectly legal to do so...

[Gandalf Parker]

Imperator Fyron said:

Broadcast television of a handful of syndicated network channels, yes. There are a lot of stations for which you have to pay for cable, satellite, etc. acces to see... such as Comedy Central and Sci Fi channel.

Those are services. The rules are very different for services and FCC licensed channels. There are many things that your TV might receive thru cable and satellite like music or pay-per-view movies or even interactive tv like webtv or internet. All of those have very different rules.

In fact, in the case of THOSE services you are very limited in saying "I pay for and have a right". The aired channels will give you alot of rights. The private services can be much more restricted.

[Randallw]

Just the other day I was thinking about Radio without the annoying inane announcers or ads. Wouldn't it be great if you just had song after song, with a minimum interruption to say what will be played for next hour. Of course the Radio station has to make a living. Is there such a thing as pay radio?.

[TerranC]

Randallw said:
Is there such a thing as pay radio?

http://www.sirius.com/servlet/Conten...=1018209032790

[PvK]

Imperator Fyron said:
You are misunderstanding the point... only a small number of television stations are actually broadcast... most of them are only available via cable or direct satellite link... Certainly the 9 or so channels that are broadcast through the air are free to use as you want, and it is perfectly legal to do so...

As was mentioned, the BBC assert the right to track down and punish people for decoding signals in their own homes. Satellite TV companies assert similar rights.

I appreciate there are other issues about what people have the right to do with data they get from a cable service or the Internet. I tend to feel similarly about those, and that it's ultimately futile to try to assert that people have no right to receive, decode, record, and even share such data, because technology has advanced to the point that it is just getting more and more trivial to do so. It's akin to telling people they have no right to see, hear, listen, understand, remember, write or talk.

PvK

[magnate]

Alneyan - yes, the BBC is completely free of commercial ads (it does show some ads for its own shows and products). It's great - it means those "one hour" american shows only take 45 minutes to watch!

Seriously though, this anti-piracy garbage makes me puke. Give us reasonable prices and we won't "steal" IP. Screw us for US$30 for a music CD and $60 for a PC game and we start to think about it.

CC

[Fyron]

magnate said:
Seriously though, this anti-piracy garbage makes me puke. Give us reasonable prices and we won't "steal" IP. Screw us for US$30 for a music CD and $60 for a PC game and we start to think about it.

Usually it is more like $10 to $15 US per song, due to most CDs only having a couple of worthwhile songs, the rest being crap...

[Instar]

Supreme court will strike the law down, given the precedent set by the "Betamax" decision. Then again, this is a conservative court, being the Rehnquist court.