Have moderators good manners gone out of the window
 

Specifically pointed at JSCHIWAL who closed one of my recent questions here without even offering me the courtesy of a PM to ascertain whether or not any infraction of the rules here had been broken.

Of course, had he bothered, then he would have found out that I could have closed the thread as solved anyway as it WAS NOT an infringement of anyone's copyright (free European market and all that), but an error on the part of the Service provider. As it happens, I e-mailed them and they were extremely helpful, and indeed thankful that I had been able to point out their feed problem.

So while the topic may have been bordering on a breech of rules, the sentiment was not.

Maybe in future, a less knee jerk reaction would be better.

I will have to 'stand up' for the mod on the post you are referring. He was polite and did tell you why he was closing it. You were implying you wanted a solution to enter a site restricted either by accident or on purpose.

When you joined LQ, you agreed to our Rules. The one that applies here is:That is why your thread was closed, as jschiwal said.

LarryWebb,

Not saying he was not polite, but it is possible to be both polite and bad mannered at the same time. As I said, a PM would have sorted it out without the assumption on his part that anything untoward was afoot, which is quite frankly rather insulting on his part. I suppose we have different perspectives on bad manners depending on which side of the pond we live.

XavierP.

I suppose then, every post here (including but not limited to the 12 pages about libdvdcss) are to be removed, along with every post concerning the connecting of iPods, iPhones. The use of Ndiswrapper to circumvent Windows only drivers etc etc.

As it happens, my request did not amount to any piracy, cracking, fraud or any other nefarious activity, as anyone could see if they were to try the stream in question for themselves. I'll leave you to work out the stream details for yourself and as I pointed out, the stream provider were only to happy to recognise their technical issues, and equally happy to correct them.

Ergo, there was no need to close the original thread as it would have been marked solved by me anyway

Sorry, but ndiswrapper doesn't 'circumvent' Windows drivers...it lets you USE them. It doesn't hack Windows, reverse engineer the driver, or do anything else except let it function. And connecting a device that you OWN to a computer that you OWN, doesn't qualify either...again, it doesn't hack the iPod/phone systems, break encryption, or do anything else bad. Libdvdcss allows people who OWN DVD's to play them...no different than Windows Media Player being able to play them. I think you're misinterpreting things.
How was anyone here to know that you were going to mark the thread solved? And your request:
All we knew about the situation is what YOU told us. Your request was to get help getting around the restrictions placed on the content. From a personal standpoint, it stinks, and I hate DRM with a passion. But this request was (by what was posted), a request to 'break' the DRM restrictions on that content, which is against the rules.

I don't think he was rude or impolite. He was concise and to the point....the moderators here have 450k+ users, and lots of threads to check. Sending personal PM's would take up too many hours in a day. In that case, why didn't YOU send the mods a PM, and explain the situation, rather than complaining about it in a public thread, about how mean they were??

Sorry, I didn't see how it was impolite. It may have been edited but,

"Topics on circumventing... ... not allowed"

is the general facts.

Your post is about circumventing and not as you say bordering at all.


If I were to ask how to break into your account you would be offended.

Except I said it only SEEMS to be , not it that it was exclusive to it. As for TBone comments about libdvdcss. By allowing the rightful owner of a dvd to view it, when that encryption protocol, as weak as it is, is not licensed generally to Linux users. And given that the same library also allow said dvd to be ripped to other format quite clearly shows that it is used to circumvent copyright.

This is why I don't understand this holier than thou attitude about something that the moderator has without being in full knowledge of all of the facts pertaining to my original question.

Anyway, it seems to be going nowhere, so there seems to be no point in carrying on with this thread.

Cheers all anyway for a lively, if somewhat blinkered discussion.

Sorry, but your argument is flawed. You can play a DVD on a Windows box, and record the stream to another computer, leaving you with a ripped copy in another format. Quite clearly, that means that Windows Media Player is used to circumvent copyright. How is this different? You own the DVD and you're playing it. By any legal definition of fair-use, libdvdcss is completely legal, in the same way Windows Media Player is. If it wasn't, and there was some 'gray area', do you really think that (given the multi-billion dollar industry that is the movie business worldwide), it would be a big thing for them to fling lawyers at every distro out there, to make it go away? They don't, because they can't.
There isn't a holier-than-thou attitude. Reading your original thread, you didn't post all the information...and all anyone here can go on is what you post. You asked a question about circumventing location protection on content you didn't own, period. You then got upset that it was closed, and now you seem more upset that we're taking the moderators side on things.

"Blinkered"? Yes, indeed..couldn't agree more.

Hope they mark this as solved or closed.

Agreed.

i've nothing to do with anyone here but i'm just surprised about the life that this thread has been given.

As long as no distribution takes place, ripping a DVD is not 'circumventing copyright'. Its allowed under 'fair use' here and lots of other countries, even the US (and IIRC there was even a court decision in the US that said as much).

TB0nes quote (post #5) from your other thread basicly says that you want help to view content in the UK that "seems to only be avaialable to German IP addresses". From what was posted there and he rules here, jschiwal was within rights to close the thread.

If the moderator is not "in full knowledge of all of the facts" then that is your fault. ;)

That is the problem in a nutshell.

You will also find that there are mods, such as myself, who hate copy protection, think the laws involved are unconstitutional, yet cheerfully enforce this LQ rule w/o reservation, for the good of the board.

BTW, I read the thread in question.

I dunno, I would say that it would have been nice if the mod had asked more about it before closing, but it is not required, because it was clearly breaking the rules as you stated it.

I think in the future, you should structure your post so that it does not clearly break the rules, and provide more info and details.

Look at it from LQ's POV. This forum is about Linux and FLOSS, not about piracy and cracking. There are plenty of forums for that anyway, but this is not one of them. However, you can ask about things that will help you, but that are not clearly violating the rules. For example, in many posts people asked about how to play commercial DVDs. Well, you would use libdvdcss, but every time I recommended this, I made sure to warn them that it is illegal to do so in some areas, and to check this before installing and using this.

Remember, we aren't mind readers. We have to go by what you wrote, not what you were thinking, or meant to write, or thought you wrote.


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I had to have my ESP chip removed last week because it was interfering w/ my cell phone reception.
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