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"Are they going to have tons of people going around changing dvd machines[?]" In the short term, maybe. In the longterm, this can be automated with robotics, and not even very difficult ones. Certainly feasible today, if not something a startup can quite just run out and buy. And of course, if they buy a hundred DVDs, why not shortcut the entire process and send a "cached" stream? What's the difference between a "cached" DVD and a DVD? This is one particular manifestation of something I've been saying for a decade now, which is that like it or not and regardless of the challenges sooner or later the law is going to have to give up the idea that the mechanical source of content has any meaning, because whatever rules you draw can be gamed. The only question you'll ultimately be able to ask is whether you have the rights to view a movie or not. And let me just underline the one particular manifestation bit one more time. Once the kind of people who frequent this site start really thinking about how to game the system in this style you can generate a dozen ideas in an hour, each of which the law really has no current answer to. One immediately obvious example is that if this is legal for DVDs it obviously ought to be legal for CDs, right? Why not a library that takes video of a book two thousand miles away and physically turns pages? (It wouldn't take much post-processing of a video stream to make that feasible.) Why not add caching of the streams to any of those things? If caching in general is wrong, is it OK for me to go ahead and advance the book one page while letting the reader read the previous page, so they don't have to wait for the robot to turn the page laboriously? What if I mix in some P2P, can I stream my neighbor's copy of something? And so on and so on for dozens of questions resulting in hundreds of lawsuits and brutally conflicting and downright gibberish precedents for decades, until someone finally manages to sit down and really straighten this out somewhere around 2050. |