6 ms·

Catalog of Missing Devices: Gadgets that could exist if not for copyright laws

69 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

mmcconnell1618 9y ago
This is a list of devices that the EFF suggests would/could exist if not for bad copyright laws. It is not a comprehensive catalog of ideas for devices that should exist.
- dang 9y ago
  Ok we'll change the title above to use your phrasing. Thanks!
jstanley 9y ago
> Third party consumables for 3D printers FYI, this is already the norm in 3d printing. The companies that make filament are (almost?) all entirely separate from companies that make printers.
- js8 9y ago
  I am sure somebody will come up with a proprietary filament nozzle profile (like say Torx screwdrivers) to make sure you can only buy the filament from the one supplier..
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    The 3D printer industry currently is mostly full of hackers smart enough to do research and avoid products that try to pull this kind of stuff.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    How would you engineer a material that would only pass through certain shapes of nozzle or tube, but not other shapes? For example, a fluid that would only flow through square tubes, and would not flow through traditional tubes. If this were pulled off, the possible uses extend far beyond 3d printer consumable copyright(?) enforcement. It could act as a simple filter, when given a mixed material, it would allow one type of material through while not accepting the other. Wouldn't the molecules of the material have to be nearly the size of the nozzle/tube, so it would be more like pushing a square peg through a square hole, instead of numerous tiny round spheres through a square hole?
    - jstanley 9y ago
      There are already different types of filament that are mutually-incompatible. You can't load 1.75mm filament into a 3mm extruder and expect it to work without any modifications. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine different cross sections. The equipment required to melt down plastic and extrude it into a new filament of the appropriate type is still too expensive and inconvenient to be popular.
      - FridgeSeal 9y ago
        Can filament be heated back up and reused once it's been printed? Because if so, could you solve the issue by getting your stock filament, and then printing it into filament with a different cross-section?
        jstanley 9y ago
        You can re-melt it as many times as you want, but you probably can't print with sufficient accuracy to create a new roll of filament. And it would take several days of printing to get through a whole roll of filament. And besides, if you already had a 3D printer that could print with the filament you have, you could just print things with that filament instead of printing filament that isn't compatible with your printer :p Here's a project to make a machine that produces filament for printing, but it's at about the stage hobbyist 3D printers were at ~10 years ago or more, in terms of reliability and ease of use: http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-3d-printing-filament-factory-Filame/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-3d-printing-f...
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Come on, that would be simple. The solution is even related to the given example of Torx screwdrivers (although those actually serve a purpose instead of just being a nuisance): make sure the filament has to have a certain shape, say 'penta-lobe filament', sell the idea as 'improved heat transfer filament' with a 'large surface area ensuring quick melt with lower heat requirements'. Patent the shape - no matter that it represents a trivial 'innovation', defending against patent infringement is expensive - and do some creative advertising.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  12 years ago, one of my biggest customers for RFID tags was 3D Systems. They put them on their consumables exactly for this purpose. I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point. And, for anyone interested they were ISO 15693 tags operating at 13.56MHz made by Texas Instruments.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    > I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point I do. If what you describe was ever more than an aberration, it is at least no longer the norm. I don't even know of any printers that have the capability of checking an RFID tag, let alone any company that sells filament with RFID tags in it.
    - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
      I’m a hobby 3D printer user with four printers, and none use chipped filament. But then at work they don’t consider machines below $5000, and many of them use proprietary feedstocks. We recently got the new HP Jet Fusion printer [1] which produces wonderful functional parts from nylon and while I don’t operate that machine, I can only assume HP has made it rely heavily on proprietary software and consumables. [1] https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8 https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        You don’t buy cartridges from HP (these are user refillable) you do need to buy their agents or authorized agents you can’t just dump any PA12 powder in it and hope for the best. High end printers especially powder deposition ones use pretty complex chemistry and the consumables have to be up to spec.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    It’s more for inventory and process control than it’s for DRM. Manufacturing has a lot of idiot proofing and everything has a barcode or an RFID chip in to track what goes where and that the correct thingie went into the correct thing.
UncleEntity 9y ago
I'd like to add this to the list: a Catalog of Missing Devices that can be easily read from a cellphone.
- pronoiac 9y ago
  Here are some rough summaries: * Physics Barbie, a toy that talks physics * Meme-Making DVR, which would let you edit and remix video * Rein N Train, letting you selectively block private data, like loyalty cards or GPS for auto insurance * Ad-Free YouTube Kids * Machine Translation, for translating video based on subtitles or automated speech-to-text then translation * Text-to-speech, for ebooks * Third party consumables for 3D printers * Fonts on e-readers, just being able to choose and change them * Arielle, which chooses the appropriate soundtrack for whatever you're reading or watching
bborud 9y ago
This was somewhat underwhelming as an information effort both when you take into account the attention span of the average reader and the kind of stuff shown. It is easy to come away thinking "meh". If they really wanted to get the message across they could have focused on two things people tend to care about: youtube and music. There's tons of nonsense in that area that may be more relatable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Giorgi 9y ago
what? China does not give a shit about US copyright. If any of these ideas worth anything they would do it. But physics talking doll? What?
abetusk 9y ago
I find it disconcerting to see Cory Doctorow talk about restrictive copyright issues while he hasn't, to my knowledge, released anything substantial into the commons. The work that he does put a "creative commons" license under is always with a restrictive "non-commercial" license. I'm glad that he advocates for freedom and liberty and it's not like hypocrisy makes these arguments any less valid but it does leave me feeling a bit weird.
- slavik81 9y ago
  Is it actually hypocritical? There's a lot of room to make copyright less restrictive without entirely abolishing it. For example, by only granting copyright protections to DRM-free works. Or requiring renewal every so often, so that abandoned works can still be used. We don't need to make the world CC BY-SA to fix copyright. It helps where we do, but it's not the only way.
Rjevski 9y ago
All of that nonsense for what is essentially a dig against DRM, while in reality most DRM gets cracked in no time as soon as there's a compelling reason to crack it, so those devices would've been created anyway if there was actual demand for it. Don't take it wrong, I hate DRM as well, but was a stupid and laughable way to make their point.
dogma1138 9y ago
I usually like EFF content but this is pure bullshit. None of these seem to be limited by any copyright laws or patent laws. A Physicist doll: what exactly stops anyone from making one? The fact that you can’t call it Barbie? I can name at least 3 Barbie like dolls which directly compete with the Barbie brand and I’m pretty sure that Mattel made a scientist Barbie before they made a few doctor ones for sure. Meme-making DVR: Why can’t this exist? Rain and Train: what??? Ad free YouTube: why not? Machine translation: no problem other than technical challenges Text To Speech for Ebooks: again not a problem there are even a few products that target that directly: Fonts on Ereaders: kindle can’t a few others have no problem with custom fonts. The soundtrack thing: there are a few products that match music to the video content and theme preset for quick editing so again what is the problem.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Meme-making DVR: Why can’t this exist? Mandatory copy protection on HDMI output controlled by TV station, analog signal distorters on the crappy analog outs, and to top it off if you're using material under "fair use" that does not stop rightholders from lawsuiting you jnto bankruptcy. In addition the DVR may not be legal to sell as it may be used to strip DRM. > Ad free YouTube: why not? EULA violations at the very least, and if you're saying "x supports YouTube" without licensing the trademark, you're at risk of being sued.
- realo 9y ago
  It is not about making a new Barbie doll. It is about selling something that would modify the programming of the current, actual Barbie you bought and change its behavior.
- SllX 9y ago
  > Ad free YouTube: why not? This already exists in the form of a $10 monthly subscription, $15 for a Family Plan and is included with Google Play Music All-access (and vice versa). Just make sure you're subscribed, signed in and bam, no ads. True you could just use and ad-blocker, and I have an ad-blocker, but if you stream as much off YouTube as I do, it's worth it to be a paying customer rather than a belligerent user.
Iv 9y ago
What I miss is the P2P revolution that never was. Internet was not supposed to be about centralized "cloud-based" solutions. YouTube is a bad solution to a problem we should not have. And I also miss the paywall-free science and the Wikipedia of music we would have without copyrights.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jcranmer 9y ago
This is the sort of evangelizing that is more counterproductive than is helpful, because it's arguing a fairly extreme version that distorts the truth. To wit: * Physics Barbie: The complaint here is that a doll that gets its spoken facts from the cloud can't be overwritten by parents to have STEM-friendly phrases. Of all of the things, this is truly a stretch because... just buy a different doll if you really care? * Meme-making DVR: It would be more accurate to say "you can't get HDCP content in a form you can composite for clip-making." * Rein-and-Train: This is basically a complaint of "the manufacturer won't let me edit the code on my hardware devices." This has nothing to do with DRM or DMCA or even copyright law. * Ad-free YouTube: Ad-blockers do exist. And they're not illegal, not even under stretchy definitions of DMCA. If you had the ads more or less burned into a HDCP stream, then building an ad-blocker for that might have legal repercussions, but the ad servers aren't going to want to do that for other reasons. * Machine translation: the complaint here is effectively that the audio-extraction tools could run afoul of the DMCA's anti-copyright-circumvention provision. This is a bit of a legal stretch, but any tool but that one step would definitely be in the clear. It's worth noting that the fansubbing tools actually turned out to push the edges of video editing and distribution technology, and fansubbing is the sort of thing that is almost certainly illegal. * Text-to-speech: Assistive technologies are, I believe, fully exempt from the copyright laws (particularly if solely for personal use). I don't know if the exemptions are only limited to Braille book production or other technologies, but you could probably get in a ADA lawsuit if you were so inclined. * 3D printer ink: no idea what's preventing the thing here, especially because the recent Lexmark v Impression case more or less holds that you can legally do some creative things to get around the RFID DRM stuff here. * E-Reader fonts: Again no legal issue here other than "the manufacturer won't let me do something." * Adaptive music for mood of books: Similar issue with machine translation. Of course, given the granularity of data, the e-book metadata (which isn't encrypted in the DRM formats) is probably sufficient to drive what you'd want anyways. Nothing in that list is persuasive that anything in copyright law is wrong, especially because half of the list doesn't actually correspond to copyright issues.

69 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

This is a list of devices that the EFF suggests would/could exist if not for bad copyright laws. It is not a comprehensive catalog of ideas for devices that should exist.

dang 9y ago
Ok we'll change the title above to use your phrasing. Thanks!

jstanley 9y ago

> Third party consumables for 3D printers FYI, this is already the norm in 3d printing. The companies that make filament are (almost?) all entirely separate from companies that make printers.

js8 9y ago
I am sure somebody will come up with a proprietary filament nozzle profile (like say Torx screwdrivers) to make sure you can only buy the filament from the one supplier..
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  The 3D printer industry currently is mostly full of hackers smart enough to do research and avoid products that try to pull this kind of stuff.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  How would you engineer a material that would only pass through certain shapes of nozzle or tube, but not other shapes? For example, a fluid that would only flow through square tubes, and would not flow through traditional tubes. If this were pulled off, the possible uses extend far beyond 3d printer consumable copyright(?) enforcement. It could act as a simple filter, when given a mixed material, it would allow one type of material through while not accepting the other. Wouldn't the molecules of the material have to be nearly the size of the nozzle/tube, so it would be more like pushing a square peg through a square hole, instead of numerous tiny round spheres through a square hole?
  - jstanley 9y ago
    There are already different types of filament that are mutually-incompatible. You can't load 1.75mm filament into a 3mm extruder and expect it to work without any modifications. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine different cross sections. The equipment required to melt down plastic and extrude it into a new filament of the appropriate type is still too expensive and inconvenient to be popular.
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      Can filament be heated back up and reused once it's been printed? Because if so, could you solve the issue by getting your stock filament, and then printing it into filament with a different cross-section?
      - jstanley 9y ago
        You can re-melt it as many times as you want, but you probably can't print with sufficient accuracy to create a new roll of filament. And it would take several days of printing to get through a whole roll of filament. And besides, if you already had a 3D printer that could print with the filament you have, you could just print things with that filament instead of printing filament that isn't compatible with your printer :p Here's a project to make a machine that produces filament for printing, but it's at about the stage hobbyist 3D printers were at ~10 years ago or more, in terms of reliability and ease of use: http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-3d-printing-filament-factory-Filame/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-3d-printing-f...
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    Come on, that would be simple. The solution is even related to the given example of Torx screwdrivers (although those actually serve a purpose instead of just being a nuisance): make sure the filament has to have a certain shape, say 'penta-lobe filament', sell the idea as 'improved heat transfer filament' with a 'large surface area ensuring quick melt with lower heat requirements'. Patent the shape - no matter that it represents a trivial 'innovation', defending against patent infringement is expensive - and do some creative advertising.
18pfsmt 9y ago
12 years ago, one of my biggest customers for RFID tags was 3D Systems. They put them on their consumables exactly for this purpose. I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point. And, for anyone interested they were ISO 15693 tags operating at 13.56MHz made by Texas Instruments.
- jstanley 9y ago
  > I don't follow that industry, so I have no idea what goes on at this point I do. If what you describe was ever more than an aberration, it is at least no longer the norm. I don't even know of any printers that have the capability of checking an RFID tag, let alone any company that sells filament with RFID tags in it.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    I’m a hobby 3D printer user with four printers, and none use chipped filament. But then at work they don’t consider machines below $5000, and many of them use proprietary feedstocks. We recently got the new HP Jet Fusion printer [1] which produces wonderful functional parts from nylon and while I don’t operate that machine, I can only assume HP has made it rely heavily on proprietary software and consumables. [1] https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8 https://youtu.be/XeTdo-w6Qx8
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      You don’t buy cartridges from HP (these are user refillable) you do need to buy their agents or authorized agents you can’t just dump any PA12 powder in it and hope for the best. High end printers especially powder deposition ones use pretty complex chemistry and the consumables have to be up to spec.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  It’s more for inventory and process control than it’s for DRM. Manufacturing has a lot of idiot proofing and everything has a barcode or an RFID chip in to track what goes where and that the correct thingie went into the correct thing.

UncleEntity 9y ago

I'd like to add this to the list: a Catalog of Missing Devices that can be easily read from a cellphone.

pronoiac 9y ago
Here are some rough summaries: * Physics Barbie, a toy that talks physics * Meme-Making DVR, which would let you edit and remix video * Rein N Train, letting you selectively block private data, like loyalty cards or GPS for auto insurance * Ad-Free YouTube Kids * Machine Translation, for translating video based on subtitles or automated speech-to-text then translation * Text-to-speech, for ebooks * Third party consumables for 3D printers * Fonts on e-readers, just being able to choose and change them * Arielle, which chooses the appropriate soundtrack for whatever you're reading or watching

bborud 9y ago

This was somewhat underwhelming as an information effort both when you take into account the attention span of the average reader and the kind of stuff shown. It is easy to come away thinking "meh". If they really wanted to get the message across they could have focused on two things people tend to care about: youtube and music. There's tons of nonsense in that area that may be more relatable.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Giorgi 9y ago

what? China does not give a shit about US copyright. If any of these ideas worth anything they would do it. But physics talking doll? What?

abetusk 9y ago

I find it disconcerting to see Cory Doctorow talk about restrictive copyright issues while he hasn't, to my knowledge, released anything substantial into the commons. The work that he does put a "creative commons" license under is always with a restrictive "non-commercial" license. I'm glad that he advocates for freedom and liberty and it's not like hypocrisy makes these arguments any less valid but it does leave me feeling a bit weird.

slavik81 9y ago
Is it actually hypocritical? There's a lot of room to make copyright less restrictive without entirely abolishing it. For example, by only granting copyright protections to DRM-free works. Or requiring renewal every so often, so that abandoned works can still be used. We don't need to make the world CC BY-SA to fix copyright. It helps where we do, but it's not the only way.

Rjevski 9y ago

All of that nonsense for what is essentially a dig against DRM, while in reality most DRM gets cracked in no time as soon as there's a compelling reason to crack it, so those devices would've been created anyway if there was actual demand for it. Don't take it wrong, I hate DRM as well, but was a stupid and laughable way to make their point.

dogma1138 9y ago

I usually like EFF content but this is pure bullshit. None of these seem to be limited by any copyright laws or patent laws. A Physicist doll: what exactly stops anyone from making one? The fact that you can’t call it Barbie? I can name at least 3 Barbie like dolls which directly compete with the Barbie brand and I’m pretty sure that Mattel made a scientist Barbie before they made a few doctor ones for sure. Meme-making DVR: Why can’t this exist? Rain and Train: what??? Ad free YouTube: why not? Machine translation: no problem other than technical challenges Text To Speech for Ebooks: again not a problem there are even a few products that target that directly: Fonts on Ereaders: kindle can’t a few others have no problem with custom fonts. The soundtrack thing: there are a few products that match music to the video content and theme preset for quick editing so again what is the problem.

mschuster91 9y ago
> Meme-making DVR: Why can’t this exist? Mandatory copy protection on HDMI output controlled by TV station, analog signal distorters on the crappy analog outs, and to top it off if you're using material under "fair use" that does not stop rightholders from lawsuiting you jnto bankruptcy. In addition the DVR may not be legal to sell as it may be used to strip DRM. > Ad free YouTube: why not? EULA violations at the very least, and if you're saying "x supports YouTube" without licensing the trademark, you're at risk of being sued.
realo 9y ago
It is not about making a new Barbie doll. It is about selling something that would modify the programming of the current, actual Barbie you bought and change its behavior.
SllX 9y ago
> Ad free YouTube: why not? This already exists in the form of a $10 monthly subscription, $15 for a Family Plan and is included with Google Play Music All-access (and vice versa). Just make sure you're subscribed, signed in and bam, no ads. True you could just use and ad-blocker, and I have an ad-blocker, but if you stream as much off YouTube as I do, it's worth it to be a paying customer rather than a belligerent user.

Iv 9y ago

What I miss is the P2P revolution that never was. Internet was not supposed to be about centralized "cloud-based" solutions. YouTube is a bad solution to a problem we should not have. And I also miss the paywall-free science and the Wikipedia of music we would have without copyrights.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jcranmer 9y ago

This is the sort of evangelizing that is more counterproductive than is helpful, because it's arguing a fairly extreme version that distorts the truth. To wit: * Physics Barbie: The complaint here is that a doll that gets its spoken facts from the cloud can't be overwritten by parents to have STEM-friendly phrases. Of all of the things, this is truly a stretch because... just buy a different doll if you really care? * Meme-making DVR: It would be more accurate to say "you can't get HDCP content in a form you can composite for clip-making." * Rein-and-Train: This is basically a complaint of "the manufacturer won't let me edit the code on my hardware devices." This has nothing to do with DRM or DMCA or even copyright law. * Ad-free YouTube: Ad-blockers do exist. And they're not illegal, not even under stretchy definitions of DMCA. If you had the ads more or less burned into a HDCP stream, then building an ad-blocker for that might have legal repercussions, but the ad servers aren't going to want to do that for other reasons. * Machine translation: the complaint here is effectively that the audio-extraction tools could run afoul of the DMCA's anti-copyright-circumvention provision. This is a bit of a legal stretch, but any tool but that one step would definitely be in the clear. It's worth noting that the fansubbing tools actually turned out to push the edges of video editing and distribution technology, and fansubbing is the sort of thing that is almost certainly illegal. * Text-to-speech: Assistive technologies are, I believe, fully exempt from the copyright laws (particularly if solely for personal use). I don't know if the exemptions are only limited to Braille book production or other technologies, but you could probably get in a ADA lawsuit if you were so inclined. * 3D printer ink: no idea what's preventing the thing here, especially because the recent Lexmark v Impression case more or less holds that you can legally do some creative things to get around the RFID DRM stuff here. * E-Reader fonts: Again no legal issue here other than "the manufacturer won't let me do something." * Adaptive music for mood of books: Similar issue with machine translation. Of course, given the granularity of data, the e-book metadata (which isn't encrypted in the DRM formats) is probably sufficient to drive what you'd want anyways. Nothing in that list is persuasive that anything in copyright law is wrong, especially because half of the list doesn't actually correspond to copyright issues.