At 04:25 PM 1/30/03 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: >http://msn.zdnet.com/zdfeeds/msncobrand/reviews/0,13828,2909517,00.html
>Dear Hollywood: Keep your hands off my DVDs >By David Coursey, AnchorDesk Thanks for posting this. Very interesting. Of course, the DVD CCA owns the DVD trademark just like Phillips etc. owns the CD logo, etc. So you can sell a "DVD" player (including soft players built on eg DeCSS) but you can't use the official logo if they won't let you play. Its a private trademark affair. Just like Sony can sell "CD"s that don't follow the Specs and don't play on CD (tm) Players, but it is *criminal fraud* for any such artifact to display the official "CD" compatability logo. TiVo can sell the same service too ---and since noone owns the word "television" they can still call their censor-channel-enabled boxes TVs. My VCR tuner lets you block whole channels. I can shut off the volume and play a different audio track. Its still called television. Modulo trademark issues (only), the box builders win, the content and copyright folks have nothing. (Except maybe a few congressvermin in their pockets.)
