Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, if you’re not sure whether something you’re doing is infringing upon copyright, the best answer is to seek legal advise.

1. The Default

   Above all else, unless the copyright holder has given you explicit permission to do so you may not copy, alter, modify, redistribute or similar actions anything that anyone has created.

   Everything is copyrighted when it is made. You have no right to do anything with it unless you’ve been told you can.

2. Public domain

   Certain items fall into public domain automatically. If an item is in the public domain you can do whatever you want to it. It normally doesn’t apply to any trademarks or logos contained within the item though.
   Some of the items in this category are many documents released by the Government or its departments.

3. Fair Use

   This terms is often used as a broad defense against copyright infringement and it only really covers a few cases. There are a lot of edge cases, these require you to seek legal advise about because it is a very complex part of copyright law. In general though, you may use a copyrighted works for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.

4. Copyright Expiry

   Copyrights expire on works after different lengths of time depending on when they were created, and for what purpose.

   From Wikipedia‘s article on New Zealand Copyright law:

   • Literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works; 50 years from the death of the author
   • Artistic works industrially applied; 16 years from when the work is applied
   • Artistic craftsmanship industrially applied; 25 years from when the work is applied
   • Sound recordings and films; 50 years from when it is available to the public
   • Broadcasts and cable; 50 years from broadcast
   • Typographical arrangements; 25 years from first publishing.

   In the US, the terms change depending on when the item was created. For items created after 1978, the term is the life of the author + 70 years for things created by an individual. Work done for hire, for example created by a corporation it is 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shortest.

5. Written Permission

   If the copyright holder gives you written permission, you may do with the works are described in that letter.

To answer the original question, modern TV shows are copyright, downloading copies of them is copyright infringement under NZ copyright law and you can be taken to court for downloading and/or redistributing copies of them. Just because you had the privilege to see it (or miss it) on free-to-air broadcast television, it doesn’t mean that copyright doesn’t apply anymore.

Remember, the TV station paid a fair amount to buy you that privilege, they only bought the rights to show you it on their station.

If you need any more detail on these points please have a read through these links. If you have any corrections or notice any major omissions, comment and I’ll update the post.

References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States
• http://www.copyright.org.nz/basics.php
• http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____7290.aspx
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

There are a few articles around detailing why this is and many more showing how to solve it.

The problem is around the fact that the Windows Bootloader doesn’t seem to treat ISO9660 file version numbers correctly. To make a disc work and boot in EFI mode on these machines, you need to rebuild the ISO with ISO9660 version numbers suppressed.

However, all of these solutions required running Windows utilities to recreate the ISO. As I recently installed a new harddrive in my Macbook Pro I didn’t have a version of Windows installed that I could rebuild the ISO with.

I decided to find if I could create a compatible bootable Windows 7 DVD using only tools that are runnable under Mac OS X.

I used an article from jowie.com as a reference. It describes how to recreate the ISO with the fix using a 3rd-party Windows utility “Imgburn”.

I downloaded the latest version of “cdrecord” (formerly “cdrtools“) which includes the latest version of “mkisofs“, a *nix utility for creating ISO files with advanced options.

I managed to find the correct set of arguments to create a bootable DVD. DVD-RWs are my friend, although it only took 4 or 5 tries.

My machine is running Mac OS X Snow Leopard but I don’t see anything that won’t work on Leopard. These steps require the Mac OS X Developer Tools to be installed.

If you’re at this post, you may have already burned a copy of the Windows 7 DVD ISO (or a copy of Windows 7 Retail). I did, so I got the files for recreating the ISO from the DVD, you may choose to simply extract the contents of the ISO to a folder on your harddrive instead.

If you choose to use a folder, replace occurances of “/Volumes/GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD” with the folder you extracted the DVD to.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Put the Windows 7 DVD in the drive or extract the ISO.
2. Download the latest version of cdrecord from:
   http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdrecord/
3. Extract the archive and run the following from Terminal:
   make
make install
4. Once again from Terminal:
   cd /opt/schily/bin/
   ./mkisofs -N -UDF -iso-level 4 -no-hfs -U -V GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD -no-emul-boot -b efi/bcd -c boot.catalog -o windows7rc.iso /Volumes/GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD

5. Now burn the new ISO to a disc. You can use Disk Utility, Toast or any other ISO burning tool to do the job
6. If you haven’t already, make sure you have either free unpartitioned space or a spare partition to install Windows on to.
7. Reboot your machine, hold down Option to bring up the boot menu
8. Insert the DVD into the drive (if it isn’t in there aleady).
9. Select the Windows CD, Windows 7 should now boot without problems

That is it.

Once Windows 7 is installed, insert a Snow Leopard disc to install the 64-bit Boot Camp drivers. If you don’t have Snow Leopard, you can download the latest Boot Camp drivers from Apple’s download section.

Anyway, this post is about Windows Vista. More specifically, installing Windows Vista Business (64bit) onto a Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa).

The Apple Bootcamp drivers that came with my laptop don’t support Windows Vista 64bit so I had to do some digging around to find the drivers that worked and get everything running smoothly.

This information is out there on the web but I found some of the instructions on exactly which driver to choose a little had to understand. Below is a list of the drivers I used to get Vista Business 64bit working on this Macbook Pro.

Video

Hardware: nVIDIA 8600M GT with 256MB RAM
Drivers: nVIDIA ForceWare X 167.62

Audio

Drivers: RealTek R190

Keyboard/Fan

Drivers: Input Remapper 1.0.04
NB: Screen backlight control is not supported on the nVIDIA card yet

Wireless

Drivers: Atheros v7.6.0.83

Ethernet

Drivers: Marvel Yukon v10.57.3.3

This information is mainly from two sources:

http://rumblingsfromdeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/12/macbook-pro-and-vista-64bit-x64-issues.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=149395

With these drivers I got a Windows Experience Index of 4.9
Processor: 5.2
RAM: 4.9
Desktop Graphics: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 5.5
Primary Hard Disk: 4.9