|
|
|
obeying the DMCA
Wednesday, August 29 2007
In the mail today I received Warnings/Promises, a CD by a Scottish rock band called Idlewild. On my Pandora.com station, I'd been repeatedly impressed by their song "Love Steals Us From Loneliness," so I'd wanted to sample a thick slab of that sort of pop music goodness. Unfortunately, though, this CD came with a form of copy protection called Copy Control which prevented me from doing what I always do with my new CDs: ripping them immediately to MP3s. I'd never owned a CD having copy protection before, but I was pretty sure this was a minor bump in the road. One doesn't have to wade far into Google to find a solution to this particular problem. The easiest for me was to simply put the CD into my iBook and rip it in iTunes, as the copy protection was only designed to foil rippers using Windows. According to the DMCA, it's a federal crime to sell or use mechanisms allowing for the bypassing of copy protection, which (in this case) puts both me and Apple Computer Inc. in complex legal situations. If I'd tried to rip the CD on my iBook to begin with, it's hard to say that I'd be guilty of anything. Does it matter that I first tried and failed on a Windows machine? And what about Apple? Doesn't the existence of their nonstandard platform allow people to bypass copy protection? Wait a second, does anyone really give a fuck about obeying the DMCA anyway? Isn't that law just another case of lawmakers daydreaming about bathroom sex while lobbyists wrote their laws for them?
Warnings/Promises is a poppy album with an unmistakable REM influence. Their earlier stuff was unremarkable punk rock, but on this album they've slowed things down and let their folk flag fly. "Love Steals Us From Loneliness" has the sort of crunchy guitar intro that was so wonderfully jarring when the Cranberries first borrowed it from heavy metal in their song "Zombie," but its true power is in its lyrics. I also like "I Understand It" and "The Space Between All Things," but some of the songs are weak (for example "I Want a Warning").
Throughout the day Gretchen and I went on something of a Dexter-watching marathon. Dexter is a Showtime original series about the life and times of "Dexter," a serial-killer-gone-good in Miami. Dexter works as a blood spatter forensics expert for the Miami Police Department but moonlights as the emotionlessly clinical vigilantee killer of other serial killers (for which Miami is apparently something of a hotbed). We'd first encountered this series on Showtime back when I'd ordered it to watch the television version of This American Life. But we'd canceled Showtime before Dexter was over, leaving us wanting (vaguely) to know how it all went down. Today we watched four hour-long episodes spanning two Netflix'd DVDs. Unfortunately, the final episode lives by itself on one DVD that we didn't yet have, leaving us hanging just as all the shit was going down and Dexter was on the verge of discovering the truth about the repressed childhood memories that have left him a cold, affectless sociopath. The show is a bit cheesy in a cliché-teevee kind of way, complete with predictable mood music and plot twists. But the characters and story arc have been complex and intriguing enough to keep us engaged.
This evening I tried to modify the Multiport cover on my Evo N410c by using a heat gun to melt and stretch it. This cover is made of polystyrene, the same kind of thermoplastic used to make LegosTM and plastic model aircraft carriers. I was hoping that with a little more volume beneath it, I could get it to accommodate the tiny naked circuit board from a USB WiFi dongle. But I made a perfect mess of things and the cover plate ended up as a wrinkled, lumpy mess. Since I will need something to put a proper finish over the USB dongle (allowing me to obscure the custom electronics and get the laptop through airport security), I went around the laboratory looking at all the random plastic things I have in hopes of making one into a suitable cover I can epoxy in place. The closest thing I found was half of the housing of a DVD player remote. It was reasonably flat, having somehow been spared the dildology going into the design of nearly all small objects these days. In the end, though, it wasn't suitable, so the the dongle remains duct-taped in place. I'll eventually go looking for the ideal cover at P&T Surplus (on the Rondout in Kingston), a treasure-trove of random object shapes.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070829 feedback
previous | next |
