The rights to even limited ownership of copyrighted stuff fought for by my generation right up to and through the Supreme Court of the United States are trickling away because of today's global paranoia over consumers stealing copyrighted books, movies and music. Encryption vs. the Black Box The explosive birth of the Internet economy permits the big companies that profit from lucrative copyrights to howl with undeniable justification about digital piracy and to shackle their customers with a bewildering array of proprietary formats, encryption codes, specially-built hardware and other multimedia manacles.
You know the drill: Apple's super-encrypted music and movie files sold through Apple's online store play only on Apple iPods. Microsoft's new Web music store will sell movies and music in files that can only work on Microsoft's Zune music players. Only special Sony Blu-ray DVD players can play the new high-definition movie DVDs in the Blu-ray format, but you need special HD-DVD players to watch store-bought HD movies.
Over the years these kinds of scorched-earth business strategies were challenged in the courts and on the workbenches of electronics hobbyists. In the courthouses, advocates won rulings that permit one to make recordings of duly purchased music and of movies as long as these recordings are for personal use only. Sometimes they needed to build devices, sometimes called black boxes, to exercise those rights.
In the beginning, fair-use rulings permitted making copies of duly owned books and song lyrics for personal use only. Over time the rights to make copies for wider distribution were somewhat expanded into music.
We grew complacent about things like making mixes of purchased songs first on audio tapes and now on CDs.
At first VHS movies were backed up too, until the studios started building copy killers into the cassettes. Propeller heads countered with black boxes that unscrambled the studios' scramblers. We consumers reached a comfortable balance over those years only to have the business side come back swinging hard using quite valid charges of digital piracy to justify draconian protection schemes that were never before possible.
The message of iPod and Zune and Blu-ray is that the fair-use balance has shifted dramatically to the business side.
But now growing numbers of computer users and other consumers are learning ways to skirt the heavy-handed file encryption to make sometimes crude, sometimes outstanding copies for personal use.
People learn that it still is possible to use old-fashioned recording techniques to make analog copies of their digitally encrypted music and then burn the resulting files onto CDs and DVDs as their own MP3s.
Often the trick is software that instead of trying to copy encrypted songs simply records the audio coming out of a computer's sound card and the video coming out of the computer's display hardware.
For example, a simple and free program called works in the background to record music into MP3-type open source files as it moves from the computer to the speakers.
Likewise, a raft of video programs typified by the open source from RenderSoft watches a section of the computer screen and records as AVI and other open format files whatever video is displayed there.
Sudden fascination with YouTube/Google Web video makes CamStudio a hot property because it smoothly and simply records those short video shows that otherwise play out on the computer screen and then go away.
With CamStudio in the background, a user draws a box around the window in which the video is playing and clicks a fat red "record" button, and the software captures the show frame by frame and saves it in the public domain AVI format.
Audacity does the same with music as it plays on the sound card, whether it's from a CD, a music file or a streaming radio station.
Beyond this, Audacity includes a large library of audio tweaking tools, as well as routines to prepare audio files for MP3 players by adding things like song name, performer and such. But you don't even need software to make fair-use copies of music and movies.
It's simple to buy a cable at RadioShack that will let users connect their computers to audio recording equipment like tape recorders and the new stand-alone DVD recorders.
Likewise, nearly all laptops offer audio- and video-out ports that connect to TV sets and video recorders.
Keep these software and hardware fixes in mind as your library of music and movies grows and your corporation-crippled player gadgets wear out.
As Dr.
Seuss might say, don't let the suits call it abuse when it's just fair use. 2006 Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved.
2006 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.
News RSS