SOPA is at it again

[mikoyan29]

And please don't mistake this for me taking a side in this dispute. I'm not. I simply detailed why the likes of the RIAA and MPAA were retrying to get copying efforts banned despite losing 30 years ago.

I think it has more to do with making it illegal for people to buy cars because they're selling horse and buggies...

[Nekojin]

The arguments were for the information itself, not the medium.

The thing is that the media companies play both sides of this against the middle, arguing whichever suits them at the moment. If we're buying the content, not the physical medium, then we should logically be able to transfer that media in order to most effectively use it, and should be able to a new copy of the media at little or no cost when the original media gets damaged.

But the argument that we can't format-shift requires a focus on the physical media - that it can't come off the original media it was on; if we lose or damage that media, we need to buy a new copy. This is the "media-as-physical-goods" argument, which the media companies try to avoid invoking too aggressively, because that has too much of a chance of backfiring on them in some areas (particularly rentals).

The media companies (particularly the RIAA) have been quite plain in the fact that they want a world where they can charge for every time a particular piece of media is used, and for every person enjoying it. The RIAA creams its proverbial jeans at the idea of head-tracking to identify how many people are watching a movie at home, and charging for each and every viewer. They - all of them - don't want the consumers to have any personal stake, any ownership over media at all - they want to move from the world of product sales to the far more lucrative - and sustained - world of rent seeking.

And unless enough people make a big enough fuss about it, they could very well get their way.

[s_stabeler]

IIRC, how the argument goes is you are buying the disk the media is on, and the right to watch it on that disk.

to be honest, I agree that format-shifting should be allowed, with the caveat that you must retain the original disk. ( or have some form of proof you haven't sold it)