Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

There was also the famous decision in the Jaffa Cake case where the VAT treatment depended on whether or not a Jaffa cake was a cake or a biscuit https://standrewseconomist.com/2023/12/31/let-them-eat-cake-...

The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.

This is akin to Fox News arguing in court that it is, in fact, entertainment and not news, despite it's name.

I think Steven Colbert hosted a show using himself as the host. I’m not sure about the tax implications though.

I'm not from the UK, but wasn't there also a cake Vs biscuits thing for tax reasons?

Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)

Snuggies are "used" and not "worn" in their promotional materials, because it's better to be taxed as a blanket than a garment.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/02/snuggies-ar...

Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.

Some trade war from the XIX century or something? Or maybe because dolls were historically thought for girls?

In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.

The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."

This. It’s a pretty reasonable answer to a stupid question. Dolls depict people.

Probably lobbying from a local doll maker

did you get a second glance? did you figure out why they are taxed differently?

IIRC the PS3 Linux option existed because of this same tariff.

I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.

I wish supermarkets would put them on the cake aisle instead and keep the biscuit aisle pure.

I would eat that.

Which legally probably also makes it a fairy tale

"It's a nice story and the court won't prevent you from telling it, but legally these beings in that story are clearly NOT humans"

Hilarious.

Pretty much fits. It probably wouldn't be such an issue if they were just human.

And also, they are an "on your face" depiction of the dehumanization of the Holocaust victims...

This was also the reason for the (in)famous BRAT seats:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaru_BRAT

Technically the ones they got in hot water for were from EU to get around the Chicken Tax.

FT Alphaville is such an excellent column

Of course. Below a selection of some user manuals, with the texts copied verbatim.

From Nikon D500 User Manual [0], page 22:

From Nikon Z6/Z7 User Manual [1], page 236:

Sony has a similar note for A9 [3], but can be grouped under here, which is almost the same:

AVC Patent Portfolio License: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/ OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND / OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. S EE http://www.mpegla.com

From Canon R5 User Manual [2], page 939:

“This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.”

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (''AVC VIDEO'') AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM

[0]: https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive3/4qUKV00WD5Bh04RdeC...

[1]:https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive5/8Yygr00R9Ojb058Kwq...

[2]: https://cam.start.canon/en/C003/manual/c003.pdf

[3]: https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/1830/v1/en/contents/TP0002351...

Nowadays, MP3 is an open audio codec. The patents have expired.

> Best use an open audio codec instead.

You will still need a separate license (or multiple separate licenses) for commercial purposes.

Music licensing is unbelievably complicated

Nominally, yes. These are checked before your movie is being distributed, and you'll most probably face legal consequences if you don't pay for your licenses.

Not getting caught for some time doesn't count either. You'll pay retroactively, with some interest, probably.

Licensing page is at [0]. Considering the previous shenanigans they pulled against open video and audio formats in the past [1], these guys are not sleeping around. These guys call people for patent pools in a format, and license these pools as format licenses.

[0]: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/avc-h-264/avc-h-264-licen...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#Criticism

But is it a phone that records movies or a movie recorder that can make phone calls?

[I jest, but these were almost literally the questions being asked by various commissions]

I’m not sure. Like how color printers write their serial numbers and date and whatnot on every page, these devices might be watermarking every video subtly, and we might not know it.

I'm not, and that's the reason why I went Canon. There is also CHDK for cheaper Canon cameras. Canon seems to be less litigous when it comes to hacking their firmware.

Every legal allowance I disagree with is a "loophole", every legal allowance I take advantage of is intended functionality.

> making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy

I have never seen this as anything other than the death penalty for evading taxes. If the tax were designed to reduce consumption across the population, it needs to scale with income or net worth. Otherwise, it's just a tax on the poor.

I’m not sure how this is different from what I’m saying?

Couldn't they just make it taste bad, for safety's sake?

Here, that's commonly called red diesel (despite them changing to green decades ago) and it's sold for agricultural use. There are a number of cross border smuggling operations where criminals remove the dye and resell it for somewhere between the two prices.

Though primarily done to trucks, there are occasional fuel tests done by police. Even if your tank is currently clean, they'll occasionally pull out the fuel filters and check those for dye.

> I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines

There's always the risk of getting your fuel tank dipped if you're on road. Moreso for trucks, but some jurisdictions will set up inspections and check for dyed fuel and tear you an absolute new one when they catch it.

Importantly, Subway bread is not bread for tax purposes. For food standards purposes, it is.

> My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread

Because it is not. Cola is not water either.

Patchworks of rules and exceptions can be beneficial. It allows for experimentation and/or competition as well as the fact that regulations can often enough not keep up with change and they can be more entrenched if done at a higher level. Where, when, and what is better harmonized across a whole market VS allowing variation is a matter of debate.

I have a family member of retirement age who got into the habit of anonymously expressing their love of the EU in the comments section of a local newspaper.

After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.

I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.

So American and Asian consumers can pay the same price for the same device that can do more, but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?

It is I the customer who will pay the tariffs (they are always paid by the importer) - the manufacturer gets the same amount per unit.

I reject this view of the law completely at least in Portugal. The law was introduced to add a tax to every storage media one can purchase with the premise that a percentage of that storage media will be used for what they call piracy. This in effect means everyone is assumed to be breaking the law in advance and paying for it in advance.

As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?

> This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access

Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?

> blank media

But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.

> the alternative is that you are not allowed

But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.

> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything

The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.

Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.

In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.

> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...

That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.

The alternative should be that you can backup the stuff you own for free.

> The long term revenue hit you get from pissing off your customers is nearly impossible to measure or attribute.

As people become accepting of this practice I worry there won't be a long-term hit.

Tech consumers don't understand what kind of services actually warrant a subscription because there's a recurring cost to the provider (renting CPU or storage capacity) versus those that are just rent seeking (ahem-- "recovering development costs").

I was heartened when mainstream media was up-in-arms over auto manufacturers trying to charge monthly fees for features like heated seats or remote start. I worry that consumers can't identify those kinds of gouging behavior with technology and will just accept and normalize these practices.

Where do you get that idea? It's in no way implied in GP's comment. These practices don't have to benefit the company at all. GP is just saying, as long as enough people keep buying despite the practices, then the practices will continue.

Unfortunately there is no port of ML to my specific model. I did some porting work myself by running the camera firmware in QEMU, but to be able to run it on hardware I apparently needed some signing key that only the Magic Lantern lead dev has. By the time I was doing all of this he was busy with real world stuff so ultimately I just borrowed a friend's Nikon camera.

ML doesn't work on a lot of cameras - yet. It's quite far behind the last generation of SLRs and stays away from the flagship models.

USB 2.0, that bog standard version from 2000 that is assumed to be the lowest common denominator possible for any new hardware...

Edit: 4am math correction...

480Mbit/sec transfer; Uncompressed, that's ~333333 pixels per frame for 60FPS. Not even considering overhead, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class 1.1 support from 2005 includes Motion JPEG (low compression, all patents probably expired given it was developed in the 90s) and MPEG2 (also sufficiently old, to be unencumbered now).

However, if they'd use USB 3.0 ~ 5gbps, ideally over a USB-C port, the connection would be more modern, and easily able to handle even 4K video with now free from patents and well supported compression algorithms.

Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?

OP is using a camera as a webcam that's not sold as a webcam. That's fine, I do the same with mine, but it's also fine of the manufacturer to allow for that by simply providing A/V interfaces instead of trying to account for every use case.

Convenience is always extra

A word of warning on capture cards: I first bought a no-name off Amazon, thinking to save money. The video quality was abysmal. Artifacts everywhere.

I returned it and got an Elgato, which has worked great from day one.

Same setup here, down to the brand.

For those who don't know, the dummy battery is a power cable with a battery-shaped adapter that plugs in where the battery would go to provide continuous power.

None of my stills cameras focused continuously out of the box, probably to save power (moving potentially heavy lens elements around requires energy). My Olympus mirrorless can be told to focus all the time, but it's not the default.

I can force my (canon) camera to autofocus while not recording but usually you want to avoid that. It really hits the battery because the lens is permanentely adjusting.

Most mirrorless cameras a hybrids and you usually do not need this feature while takting stills.

To be fair, I also have the dummy battery + HDMI capture + desktop clamp mount + live view faff for my D7500, but once you set it up it's just... there. I don't need to fiddle with it much further. It's a bit of a cable mess but I intend to upgrade to the Z6iii together with an upgrade to a desktop (so I can have a PCIe capture card), which will cut down the number of dongles all over.

Not a big deal at all.

The outrage in this thread is incredible. Buying a couple A/V adapters to adapt a non-webcam camera into a webcam is somehow seen as a terrible burden.

If someone doesn't want to do that, perhaps they should buy...a webcam. No adapters needed.

A camera comes with more power at the cost of simplicity for this use case.

Canon's webcam software was until recently free. It was the sole reason I bought a Cabin camera. This is a rug pull.

A7RV + A6700 here. If you plug in a USB cable, it shows the usual "usb selection screen", but it includes a "USB streaming" option. It works immediately, flawlessly, on windows and macOS. For remote shooting, there's still the "PC remote" option.

My older Sony cameras (A6300 is my newest "old" Sony camera) don't have the feature (unless you use that terrible software you mentioned) Im surprised to read that even the reasonably modern A7SIII doesn't support it. It must be one of the last models without USB streaming support.

> For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job

They mostly don't, though. The standard "high-end" streaming setup is whatever second-hand mirrorless camera has a clear HDMI output, and an HDMI capture card.

I have only watch the first 1/3 of it and sent it to three friends. It is that good.