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a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her
DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on
the VCR and waited.
Before I go further, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel
at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who
was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that
she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order
and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that every-
one in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her
or his family: Wouldn’t it be great if all our non-geek friends and
relatives were this clever and imaginative?
I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user.
She’s not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She’s not
making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She’s
not ripping it to her hard drive, DivX encoding it, and putting it
in her Kazaa sharepoint. She’s doing something
honest
— moving
it from one format to another. She’s home taping.
Except she fails. There’s a DRM system called Macrovision em-
bedded — by law — in every VHS that messes with the vertical
blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this
fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a
gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn’t know
that. She’s “honest.” Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid,
mind you — just naive.
The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts
what this person will do in the long run: she’ll find out about
Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids,
she’ll download it from the Net and burn it for them.
In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmak-
ers and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous
policy called anticircumvention.
Here’s how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock — an
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