[mythtv-users] Boxee/Hulu?

[Eric Sharkey]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 5:53 PM, David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote:
> If you don't like the agreement under which someone is presenting their
> content, nothing's forcing you to view it.  Taking their stuff and then
> ignoring their terms because you think they're "stupid" is trying to have it
> both ways.

We live in a society with laws that govern control over copyrighted
information.  These laws specify restrictions on what recipients may
do with copies they receive.  The copyright holder may choose enforce
all of these restrictions ("all rights reserved") or to relax these
restrictions, perhaps going so far as to place the work in the public
domain, but they may not tighten these restrictions.  The copyright
holder has no rights to eliminate fair use or first sale or anything
else like that.  A book author cannot place a disclaimer in the front
of each copy of his book that re-selling the book on the used book
market is forbidden and expect that this disclaimer is a binding
contract.  "All rights reserved" means "all rights allowed by law
reserved", not "all rights allowed by law plus some other restrictions
I'd like to make".

Recently copyright holders have been trying to push their dealings
into the direction of contract law, under which terms are more
flexible.  This seems to work pretty well in the enterprise software
world where each sale is in the six figure plus range and an actual
contract is negotiated by lawyers and signed by both sides for every
sale, but this sort of thing doesn't scale down well.  Hulu is not
going to negotiate a contract with each of its users.

So the government provides a framework for small scale transactions.
This is copyright law.  If a copyright holder wants to add additional
restrictions beyond what the law allows, then they need to do it they
way they've been doing it for decades (by buying congressmen and
having them rewrite the laws).

Eric