[mythtv-users] Boxee/Hulu?

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 28 February 2009 16:47:54 Eric Sharkey wrote:
> 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).

Right. HuLu is trying to have it both ways: they want the benefit of a 
negotiated contract without the bother of actualy negotiating one.

Certainly copyright law makes no distinction between viewing "content" on a TV 
set or a computer monitor, that would have to be a contractual agreement, 
though I'd love to see the "definitions" section of that one.

The validity of such "click through" licenses has been challenged many times, 
I'm not really sure what the final determination was (if there was one).


-- 
beww
beww at beww.org