Fair Use

I wanted to write a post about Square Enix's upcoming movie Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. But ran afoul off some obstacles in Microsoft Windows DRM.

I wanted to see the trailer for Advent Children, which is a movie based on Square Enix's video game RPG classic, and fan favorite, Final Fantasy VII. I didn't know how the post was gonna come out but, one thing was certain. I wanted to include a screenshot of the trailer within the post; which I believe is fair use (not to mention free promotion for a straight to video film). I also wanted to talk about the mule, and how I use it to download these sort of things, big files, because dial-up tends to be shaky in my area.

Anyway, I was using my wife's new laptop, a capable Dell Inspiron 700m. I opened up the file and up comes Media Player to show me the trailer. I take a screenshot using Alt+PrintScreen as usual and then I paste it onto a new document in Paint. So far, so good. Caveat Emptor, however, the Dell has Windows XP on it as the operating system and when I saved the file... The image of the movie just... vanished. I thought I had done something wrong... So, I did the process again and this time double checked the filename before saving. Same result.

I opened up the My Pictures directory, which is where I saved the files. Of course the files where there, as expected. And when I selected them Windows showed them to me. Or rather it showed what was left of the image, namely, the borders of the Media Player application. Again, I thought something wasn't right . I have the DivX Player too and I did the whole process using that, again. The film's still shot vanished every time.

Stupid. Stupid me. Stupid Microsoft. Stupid Windows.

This is the consequence of Microsoft implementation of DRM in Windows XP. You see, the movie industry, the music industry and Microsoft created this scheme, this DRM. Which they say means Digital Rights Management, but would be more aptly named Digital Restrictions Management.

DRM means to protect content from unlawful use. But, it stems from the conclusion however, that you are a thief. That what everyone does is steal music and movies from the Internet. And, fair use? Fine, thank you... But it's not for YOU.

Lawrence Lessig's doomsaying hit pretty close to home... Oh yeah, you want to know how I got the image in this post at last? Well... Knoppix.

I booted the laptop with Knoppix, in less than three minutes I was watching the trailer again. This time using the Xine application included in Knoppix. Xine by the way has an icon straight in its control panel which takes a screen shot of the scene of the video being shown and saves it to your home folder. Just one step.

Well actually I did take another step which was to use the GiMP (also included with Knoppix) to convert the image into a nice, compressed and resized JPEG file.

The information soldier is an information-sharer...

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