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Matthew Poole <> wrote:

>On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:51:23 +1200, someone purporting to be Philip didst
>scrawl:
>
>> Have A Nice Cup of Tea wrote:
>*SNIP*
>> FTA or not, we will see substantial pressure here, sooner rather than
>> later, for wholly unwarranted extensions of copyright terms,
>> restrictions of format shifting and lockdowns of equipment, all in the
>> name of protecting against "piracy".
>>
>Dunno where you live, but in NZ it's already illegal to format-shift
>anything.
>
>> We do particularly badly in all of this because the content companies
>> would like to see region coding recognised as part of copyright
>> protection - which at present it's not by default in NZ and by court
>> decision in Oz.
>>
>Wasn't region-encoding dropped in HD-DVD and BluRay?
>

Nope. It's still there but less of them and most likely harder to
bypass.

Have A Nice Cup of Tea <> wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:11:23 +1200, Philip wrote:
>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> The Yanks are at it again..
> >>
> >> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336
> >
> > If ever there was a reason to refuse a "free trade" agreement with the
> > USA, this is it.
>
> Why? Surely we don't need a reason not to have a free trade agreement.
>
> And besides, there is a perfectly good Open Source, patent free and
> unencumbered codec in the form of Ogg Vorbis. Available for all platforms,
> and indistinguishable from MP3s for comparitive quality.
>
>
> Have A Nice Cup of Tea

I thought Ogg Vorbis did a better job compressing audio, while keeping
the same or better quality than comparable MP3s?

Regards,
Jamie Kahn Genet
--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Hi Philip

Philip wrote:
> Geopelia wrote:
>> What are MP3's?

> MP3 means that you can take a sound file that was 6 megabytes and
> reduce it to 2 or fewer

Uncompressed audio weighs in at more like around 10mb per minute

> This process, called format shifting, is illegal in NZ

Under review, recommendations of the Government Intellectual Property Policy
Team are that some provision should be made for private format-shifting of
legitimately purchased copies of sound recordings without infringing
copyright.

Cheers!

Jamie Kahn Genet wrote:
> Have A Nice Cup of Tea <> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:11:23 +1200, Philip wrote:
>>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The Yanks are at it again..
>>>>
>>>> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336
>>>
>>> If ever there was a reason to refuse a "free trade" agreement with
>>> the USA, this is it.
>>
>> Why? Surely we don't need a reason not to have a free trade
>> agreement.
>>
>> And besides, there is a perfectly good Open Source, patent free and
>> unencumbered codec in the form of Ogg Vorbis. Available for all
>> platforms, and indistinguishable from MP3s for comparitive quality.
>>
>>
>> Have A Nice Cup of Tea
>
> I thought Ogg Vorbis did a better job compressing audio, while keeping
> the same or better quality than comparable MP3s?
>
> Regards,
> Jamie Kahn Genet

It does, marginally.

In article <444f1973$>, Philip <> wrote:
>Have A Nice Cup of Tea wrote:
>> On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:11:23 +1200, Philip wrote:
>>
>>> wrote:
>>>> The Yanks are at it again..
>>>>
>>>> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336
>>> If ever there was a reason to refuse a "free trade" agreement with the
>>> USA, this is it.
>>
>> Why? Surely we don't need a reason not to have a free trade agreement.
>
>Both the leading political parties in this country are presenting it as
>desirable.

It is ... if agriculture is included and certain stupidities are excluded.
It won't be and they won't be

Bruce

----------------------------------------
I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good
people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and
only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

Lord Vetinari in Guards ! Guards ! - Terry Pratchett

Caution ===== followups may have been changed to relevant groups
(if there were any)

Philip wrote:
> Geopelia wrote:
>> What are MP3's?
>>
> It is a measure of the cubic capacity of Members of Parliament to pass
> daft laws, and is therefore unbounded. In the case of Jonathan Hunt, it
> is a measure of his cubic capacity after lunch, and is therefore
> unbounded, unless he has already burst, messily.
>
> A secondary meaning is that it names a system of sampling and reduction
> of a sound file that makes it smaller without affecting the perceived
> sound quality too much, though hi-fi enthusiasts and people with sharp
> (or even more than one) ears might disagree.
>
> MP3 means that you can take a sound file that was 6 megabytes and reduce
> it to 2 or fewer, so it fits in some portable memory device like an iPod
> or anther MP3 player. It therefore allows people to record sound tracks
> from CDs and convert the resulting files to MP3s, which take up much
> less space and can be sent across the Internet, which enrages some
> welathy ASmericans called the RIAA (Really Idiotic Attorney Actions) who
> have recently filed lawsuits for sharing MP3 files against a person who
> died in 2004, and another suit against a family that doesn't even own a
> computer.
>
> This process, called format shifting, is illegal in NZ, and therefore
> cannot legally be recommended, although everyone does it, except the two
> deaf old buggers in the pub sitting underneath the Sky screen, and about
> another quarter of the population, does it and the music and home
> electronics industries make a deal of money from it. The recoridng
> industry denies making any money, ever, from anything, until people stop
> exchanging MP3s. This is an item of religious belief in the music
> industry, which worships many false gods and wishes it was still selling
> brittle black shellac records at 1 shilling and 10 pence at Marbecks,
> because they sounded pretty poor the first time round and it is a pig of
> a job to copy them.
>
> The MP3 process was refined at the Fraunhöfer Institute in Germany, and
> they own the rights to the process, although they are not about to come
> round to your place and yell at you for using it.
>
> There are other audio compression systems, including the wondrously
> nambed Ogg Vorbis, who sounds like an enforcer for Baycorp, and wmp,
> which is a system devised by the Voles of Redmond, aka Microsoft, so to
> seed the file that it will only allow itself to play once, or refuse to
> be copied, or some other such restriction.
>
> These restrictions relate to what is called Digital Rights Management
> (DRM) which is best compared to a book publisher that sells you a book
> and then says well, you can only read it once and all the words will
> fall out, or you can read it as many times as you like but only in the
> lounge room, and if you want to read it in bed you have to buy another
> copy.
>
> It is truly a mad world we live in, my masters.
>
> Philip
>
>
> .
>

Licensed mp3 encoders are available quite legally in itunes and windows
media player codecs. An open source encoder project called lame is
available, but is not distributed as a built binary by the likes of
Redhat and Debian because of the patent issue.
Decoding is free it doesn't use an algorithm, the madplay mp3 decoder
meets the Debian free software definition.
There is plenty of non copyright material now being distributed in the
form of podcasts in mp3 format. The file format itself isn't subject to
any legal constraints.
The copyright status of the content is irrelevant to the patent status
of the encoding technology, and copyright infringing content can just as
easily be distributed with Windows or Apple proprietary codecs.

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 14:02:26 +1200, shannon wrote:

> There is plenty of non copyright material now being distributed in the
> form of podcasts in mp3 format.

Translated: There are plenty of mp3 files of material in the public domain
now available on websites.

If it is not in the public domain, it has copyright.


Have A Nice Cup of Tea

--
1/ Migration to Linux only costs money once. Higher Windows TCO is forever.
2/ "Shared source" is a poison pill. Open Source is freedom.
3/ Only the Windows boxes get the worms.

wrote:

> The Yanks are at it again..
>
> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336

No doubt the files still play just fine on existing players.

Either way, my daughter bought an *.ogg capable player.....just in case.

iRiver.....

<> wrote in message
news:...
>
>
> The Yanks are at it again..
>
> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336


Funny, they are illegal here already.


-KENT

Kent Smith wrote:
> <> wrote in message
> news:...
>>
>> The Yanks are at it again..
>>
>> http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13336
>
>
> Funny, they are illegal here already.
>
>
> -KENT
>
>
No they're not. Some uses of the MP3 technology, and other compression
technologies, are not lawful in NZ, but the technology itself is neither
legal nor illegal.

Philip