[Blitz_Lightning]

From newscientist

The End User License Agreement displayed during installation of the patch requires users to agree to any future security updates related to "digital rights management", i.e. preventing copyright infringement.

[wEvil]

This is why I rip out most media player files manually and stick with the buggy POS divx Playa and other things.

[Styxx]

Meh, so tipically Microsoft. The problem is, most corporations are becoming like MS lately...

* walks off to write own movie player *

[Zeronet]

Originally posted by Blitz_Lightning
From newscientist

 

You can agree, but they cant force you to download.

[Redfang]

I've never liked MS....

[vadar_1]

Originally posted by Zeronet


You can agree, but they cant force you to download.

Its micorsoft, it they wanted to, they could.

[BlueFlames]

Fulfill my curiousity here:

When did everyone start thinking that they're above the law?  Theft has been illegal since about the time governments really started to come into existance.  Copyright infrigement isn't anything more than theft, so why does it suprise so many people that it's being treated that way?

All MS is doing is telling you not to use their product to break the law.  I doubt they'll hunt you down for breaking their EULA, but as far as legalities go, you can't call them an enabler/accomplice for giving you tools to aid in acts of piracy.  It's like chess.  They're thinking three lawsuits ahead.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by BlueFlames
Fulfill my curiousity here:

When did everyone start thinking that they're above the law?  Theft has been illegal since about the time governments really started to come into existance.  Copyright infrigement isn't anything more than theft, so why does it suprise so many people that it's being treated that way?

All MS is doing is telling you not to use their product to break the law.  I doubt they'll hunt you down for breaking their EULA, but as far as legalities go, you can't call them an enabler/accomplice for giving you tools to aid in acts of piracy.  It's like chess.  They're thinking three lawsuits ahead.

As I see it it's a case where some have to break the law. Record, video (all formats) and games companies and distributers are in a position to charge any price they deem appropriate, very rarely is action taken against these companies due to the western legal system. They can tie up a matter for years whilst working on figuring out loopholes in the event that they are actually found to be breaking the law. In effect the public can't win, therfore more people turn to a cheap and increasingly more accessable distributer of these products; pirates. So the companies initially responsable for driving the prices up see that they could be loosing money and drive the prices up further and as a result piracy increases. It's a vicious circle.

I for one will never buy an album on CD before downloading it and giving it a good listen to. How many albums have people bought that have 2 or 3 good tunes on them and a whole bunch of filler? £14 or whatever the equivalent is is pretty steep for a few tunes you might listen to a couple of times before you figure out that you aren't really fussed on them. On the other hand if I do like the music then I'll buy the album and everyone wins.
How many playstation games have people bought and regretted it? The machine is rife with dud games that shockingly are given good reviews by dodgy publications that will get cash for putting a good word in. I'd rather make a copy of a rented game, play it and if I like it buy the legit version, unless of course it costs £40 which is pretty horrendous considering how much the creators get. Copy it and send them £20, you'll probably be giving them twice as much cash as they would have been getting had you bought a legit copy.

Anyway people will always attempt to get an item as cheaply as possible, free is as cheap as it gets.

[an0n]

Originally posted by BlueFlames
Fulfill my curiousity here:

When did everyone start thinking that they're above the law?  Theft has been illegal since about the time governments really started to come into existance.  Copyright infrigement isn't anything more than theft, so why does it suprise so many people that it's being treated that way?

~-=™! The law is simply people forcing their religion based beliefs on others. The law was invented to set boundries for disputes not control peoples lives. Eg if you were speeding and hit someone then it would be your fault, but if you were under the speed-limit and hit someone it wasn't your fault. But then it got perverted and they started arresting people for exceeding the speed limit (over-simplified but you get the idea). And given enough money, anyone can be above the law (no, not through bribery but through aquisition of resources) !™=-~

All MS is doing is telling you not to use their product to break the law.  I doubt they'll hunt you down for breaking their EULA, but as far as legalities go, you can't call them an enabler/accomplice for giving you tools to aid in acts of piracy.  It's like chess.  They're thinking three lawsuits ahead.

~-=™! So MS are forcing American copyright laws onto a global market, great idea. !™=-~

[Kitsune]

One of these days they're going to release windows as a yearly-lease program.  (They're already talking about it.)

Forcing the user to pay out every year what they think is acceptable for the useage of their OS.

When that happens it's time to go back to school, get some programming under my belt and switch to another os entirely, then start ripping games and re-writing them to work on that os.

And as for whether or not I like a song?  I listen to the radio, request a few times if need be.  Games?  GO rent some.  $5 isn't a lot to get something for a few days to figure out if I'm gonna like it or not.

And when all else fails, use quicktime player to view movies or stuff...  It runs mp3's, avi's, mpg's too.

Personally I would rather have winamp play video in the mini-browser, it'd be cool if it did that as well, just dump a directory in the playlist, and let it figure out what's what.

(BTW!  NEVER run a mpg in winamp...    Tried running one, claimed the 5min amv was 50-odd minutes long, played the sound but with this odd pinging noise as well. (extra data trying to process I suppose.)  But after two attempts to play like that it locked up any program that used sounds.  

Eventually hard-locked my machine.

But still, winamp3 is around the bend...

[Top Gun]

Originally posted by BlueFlames
Fulfill my curiousity here:

When did everyone start thinking that they're above the law?  

The Boston tea party was a very good example. Copyright Law (the DMCA/EUCD) Stinks. If the law was considered by every man and woman to be the divine truth then we'd still be living in caves and stoning people to death

Originally posted by BlueFlames
Theft has been illegal since about the time governments really started to come into existance.  Copyright infrigement isn't anything more than theft

Ha! What a load of bollocks. First of all, you have to buy into the concept of interlectual property, then you have to to liken it to a physical object and then you have to be stupid enough to buy that before you can even think about comparing copyright infrngement with theft.


If I stole a car then I would deprive the original owner of the car because making cars takes a great deal of time, effort and money to make each one. "Piracy" is just copying, it does not deprive the original owner of his/her property because it makes a copy of it

Originally posted by BlueFlames
you can't call them an enabler/accomplice for giving you tools to aid in acts of piracy.  

And I guess you'd say that Ford is responsible for bank robberies?

It's morons like you that allow the RIAA, MPAA and BSA to exist as they are. I hope you and people like you pull your head out of your ass pretty quickly before we're all living in a World where our hardware is locked down and Proprietized and you have to pay to read anything above a nursery rhyme.

http://action.eff.org

[CP5670]

Yeah, I would agree with Top Gun there. It is true that you lose something when information that you invented is copied (the uniqueness of it), but you would already have forfeited that anyway if you released the stuff into the public domain in the first place. Besides, I am a warez fan as far as productivity applications go.

As for the original topic, it doesn't really matter what Microsoft (or any other company) does, since there will always be other media file players and hacked versions of existing players around.

[betterthanyou]

Indeed, I barely use Media Player now as it is. DivX is my player of choice and Winamp is my music program so WMP is limited as it is right now. If they start being even bigger jackasses though there are several hundred programs out there right now and a few are likely to be 10x better than MP anyway.

[Top Gun]

Now forget Media Player for a second because in the grand scheme of things it's not the worst threat to out freedom by far. Microsoft's new Palladium is though.

The next relese of windows will include DRM (Digital "Rights" (Restrictions) Management) in it and will work in conjunction with Intel's Trusted computing inititive (in the form of a DRM chip in the hardware) to make sure that the hardware is Proprietized and not open, preventing "untrusted" (GPLed) sofdtware running on it and preventing users from gaining proper root access to computers they've bought.

Things should be allright as long as there's hardware that comes without this chip (or there's ways of disabling it), but if there isn't we're buggered, seems as only two PC CPU manufacturers have the best part of 100% of the market between them.


Here is a report by a cambridge professor on it: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

[Fineus]

Correct me if I'm wrong but won't that only serve to loose even more customers for Intel? I'm assuming here but AMD seems to be kicking them every way they turn and their prices certainly don't help. I fail to see why people would pay up to three times as much for a chip thats also handicapped by non-optional hardware that limits what the user can do. Unless I'm missing somthing everyone would switch to AMD following the introduction of that kind of thing.

[betterthanyou]

Yeah I had heard about this. Whether you use things that the DMCA would deem illegal or not, doesn't this seem wrong? To me it seems to infringe on our freedom in all respects and seems to destroy the shred of privacy we have left in this world. So backups are out? And so is tinkering with my own system? Well I'm glad I have my unalienable rights...

Although they say it can be turnedoff I am weary of having it in my system to begin with. If my goverment has the means they are likely to use it, wether or not is in indeed legal. Looks like it's time for one or more of us to create new systems and OS's.

[an0n]

I'm actually quite glad they're starting to install all anti-piracy crap because it means all the "AOL Lamerz" will be forced to learn more about computers in order to circumvent anti-piracy stuff. Thus, less lamerz. It will also make more people turn to custom building their PC's and eventually create a black-market in un-fux0red PC components where I can make a killing.

I couldn't care less what methods they impliment on a client-side scale as it's not that difficult to get around. Just means I've got to get a few more burns and cuts to get it out. It's when they start getting ISP's to scan incoming data for pirated content, and blocking it, that you've got to worry about, but still, you can get around that by using Camouflague.

[Fineus]

Because it's not directly warez related I'll let that stay - but don't post stuff like that up again ok? It's not exactly... policy strong. I mean it could look bad if 3DAP see us with lots of that kind of thing on here. Just a friendly reminder

[an0n]

It's nothing nefarious, basically it's WinZip but with the ability to stick a picture file over the zip.

[Top Gun]

Originally posted by Thunder
Correct me if I'm wrong but won't that only serve to loose even more customers for Intel? I'm assuming here but AMD seems to be kicking them every way they turn and their prices certainly don't help. I fail to see why people would pay up to three times as much for a chip thats also handicapped by non-optional hardware that limits what the user can do. Unless I'm missing somthing everyone would switch to AMD following the introduction of that kind of thing.

But then there's always the danger that AMD will incorporate this into their CPUs. Of course it's less likely because AMDs are generally used by a more technically minded class of users with less tolerance of crippling. However there's always the G4. I doubt steve Jobbs would sell his soul to the MPAA, RIAA and BSA and of course the Chinese may use this to kick start their CPU industry.

Anon: Are you telling me that you're actually capable of removing such offending chips from the motherboard? because that's one hell of a lot of soldering you're going to have to do and you'll have a hell of a lot of broken ones on your hands before you succeed (this is no magic marker thing here). Not to mention that it'll be stuck on the CPU before long which is a very different story.