Slashdot Mirror
New Internet VCR Service
owillis writes: "Recordtv.com allows you to choose
what TV shows you want it to record, then come back and play them in
realplayer. Legally, they're probably screwed ... but it's cool
regardless." The site isn't very slick, but claims to have 50,000
regular users. Their FAQ also says they have a grand total of eight (8) "VCRS" (video-capturing PCs), so that's the limit on what can be
recorded at one time right now. This seems even more primed for a lawsuit than iCrave
TV.
Then after clicking on click here for status I got a message noting that they had been hacked on the 13th and lost some files. It also said something to the effect that they would be too busy on Sunday to do much because of Something to to with a radio thing on Los Angelas 640 or something. I have not gone back to copy the message due to the /. effect
Poor guys Hacked on Saturday, /.'ed on Sunday. They will probably will get sued on Monday at the rate their luck seems to be going
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Because: Plugging a VCR into a wide area network (in this case:the internet) in order to seek revenues from banner advertisements amounts to redistibution with comercial intent without the expressed writen consent of the copyright holder.
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OK, there's obviously a market for this. So let's imagine how it could be done The Right Way (or at least within the law, until someone decides they don't like it and buy some new laws to make it illegal):
Imagine a company that NEGOTIATES broadcast rights with the networks, exactly like a local cable TV station, but does its broadcasting over the Internet. Preferably in MPEG but I could live with Real or QT streaming.
This company would effectively be a "regional cable company" where its "region" is the Internet. Local cable companies (like Time Warner) would probably complain, but it's still perfectly fair.
The company could do other interesting things too, like allow a personal VCR service like this place. Maybe do some shuffling of commercials for such timeshifted rebroadcasts.
I can imagine a "free" usage level, where the picture size is small and there are banners and commercials everywhere, then a "budget" level with a bigger window, no banners, but the usual amount of commercials, and a "premium" level with no commercials (black space during real-time broadcasts, deleted space on 'playback's) that would probably have to cost about $80/month to offset the lack of commercials (since the company would have to pay both the TV producers and advertisers some sort of royalty to cover the deleted commercials). Or maybe have special Internet-only content that doesn't interrupt the show for commercials, but places banner ads all around it in the browser window!
I like the idea of having this in MPEG, so I can download this week's Farscape or the episode of Law & Order where the kid hacked someone's pancreas (well, hacked the hospital and made them mess up a diabetes patient) and watch it again, without having to clog up my connection every time (and so I can just watch the good parts). But fat chance of that happening, even though there would be little risk of piracy - if the service becomes popular, why trade MPEGs if you can go get your own from their archives? Besides, it means more exposure for the advertisers if people DO pirate the shows, though without a means of tracking it; if the Internet cable company is fine with this, the networks shouldn't have a problem either, and the advertisers will CERTAINLY be happy. (Or if the company is worried, they can charge MPEG downloads at 10x the usual advertising rate, on the notion that the commercials will be seen many more times; the 'live' broadcasts could still be in a streamed format and the commercials sold at the usual rate.)
(Removal of commercials from the MPEGs once you download them: is this also a piracy issue? Not much difference in file size, so it's not like it'll be a mad rush to download the decommercialed version - especially if they adaptively compress it so the commercials are small to begin with. Plus the advertiser is already paid at the "ten people will watch it for every one that gets downloaded" rate anyway.)
Only the movie studios might be unhappy, since when Episode One gets shown on the nightly movie, anyone can download it, splice out the commercials (and ignore the 20 minutes that usually gets edited out of any movie to bring it down to length) and put it on Hotline for all and sundry.
Thoughts?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Believe it or not, I was actually in the process of starting up a service like this in the near future. I leased a server with RackSpace.Com and I had paid enough premiums to have my legal insurance kick in. Buuuuut...it looks like someone beat me to the punch, so I guess they get to test the legal waters and not me.
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I had a couple consultations with lawyers to review the various legal attacks that might be made on this "Internet VCR" issue. According to the 1984 Betamax decision, the courts have ruled that personal, time-shifted content is legal. So to all those bitching "this is theft": shut up, you don't know what you are talking about. We consumers can tape any shows that we are legally entitled to view. If we live in a region serviced by over-the-air broadcasts, we can record and time-shift over-the-air broadcasts. If we subscribe to cable, the same goes for cable broadcasts. If we subscribe to premium services, etc.
But even though the courts declared time shifting to be legal, it was understood that there was going to be some amount of infrigement going on. Person A would record a show that Person B could watch even though Person B wasn't entitled to view the show. Also, Person A could watch and re-watch a show and thus get sick of it and not watch it the next time it was available, thus hurting ad revenue and premium services (recording a pay-per-view movie to watch many times, for example).
My lawyers are still looking for this exact law/ruling but my understanding is that shortly after the Betamax decisio,n the studios and production companies had a tax or tariff established on all video media sold in the US (or expanded a previous one to cover video cassettes not just audio). This means that for every blank VHS (or Beta or whatever) tape sold, a portion of the price goes to a fund that compensates all of the various studios and companies that produce content for television.
Now, as I said, the lawyers haven't gotten back to me on the exact language, but the theory goes that this type of Internet VCR venture would be perfectly legal if:
A) You are able to restrict content based on right to view...this means both geographically and by service. Someone without cable in the 12345 area code should only be able to "record" and "playback" shows that you can get with an antenna in the 12345 area code. I had toyed around with the idea of having customers fax a copy of their current cable bill to allow/disallow access to cable channels and premium channels. If they did not want to fax in their most recent bill, they would be restricted to over the air content pulled from that area by an agent of the company in that area.
B) For every "two" (assuming SP quality) hours of video recorded, the company would have to purchase and sit on a blank video tape. In this manner, the media companies are being compensated. Cable companies have to pay to rebroadcast over-the-air broadcasts because they are not using the existing mechanism (purchasing recordable media with built in compensation). No one is compensated if you use digital media, hence the studio's resistance to allowing this.
But if one uses the existing compensation mechanisms by buying blank media, the only legal cases would be issues of symantics (is commanding a machine to push a button the same as pushing the button yourself, can VCR be in next room, next house, next state, and so on). Any such arguments would be a waste of court time and dismissed or very short, to the point legal events. I don't see how it should make an ounce of difference where the physical VCR is as long as tapes are being purchased and content is being properly restricted.
Once again, I Am Not A Lawyer, but I have been consulting with several and based on some preliminary discussions, this seems like a valid model for this type of Internet VCR service.
Regarding advertisements... How many people record stuff just so they can fast forward through commercials? On the other hand, how many times have you seen or been sent copies of really good commercials? (the farting SmartBeep commercial comes to mind) If commercials are good, people WILL watch them. But if it is crap like current Pepsi commercial (ugh, did anyone catch that absolute insult to Einstein?) then they WILL and should be able to fast forward or skip them. I don't see any problem with allowing this skip-commercial mechanism. There is no guarantee that just because an ad is airing eyeballs are staring at it. If the ad industry wants to turn this into that scene from A Clockwock Orange and FORCE us to watch commericials against our will...I say to them, good luck trying.
To all those people bitching about extra ads being adding: grow up. It called VAR...value added retail. I provide a service, I charge extra for that service. No one is making money by putting ads on someone else's copyrighted content. They are making money by putting ads on the mechanism that delivers that content. If someone wants to give me a free TV set with ads all over the bezel then, by golly, I'll take it. ABC shouldn't be able to take away that TV set because I'm watching ABC on it the manufacturer didn't compensate them for the ads I'm seeing. Content and delievry are two separate and distinct things and you are a fool if you think otherwise.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I tried it out. I asked it to record The Simpsons, which it did. I went to watch it, and it was the lowest-quality RealAudio stream I'd ever seen/heard. I'm sure that has in large part to do with the slashdotting, and they did say they're getting a new T1 in a few days.. but for now it's miserable. The picture is horrible and the sound is literally inaudible.
I have seen a number of posts referring to this service, and other acts of unauthorized copying, as "theft" (of cable service, or material, or whatever) and "piracy." Enough already.
While this service may violate some of the more draconian priveleged copy restriction legislation of the last couple of years, and might even be a violation of traditional priveleged copy restrictions, it is not theft.
Nothing is being stolen. If the commercials are left intact, then even the revinue stream of the original broadcasters and advertisers is enhanced, not diminished. Even if the opposite were true, it would still not be theft. A violation of law which allows for priveleged restrictions on copying information, yes, but not theft by any reasonable definition of the word.
To those who keep using such inaccurate terminology as "piracy" and "cable theft", let me reiterate: this is not theft. Piracy is an act of violent robbery on the high seas, involving armed robbery, rape, and murder. Theft and robbery both involve the taking away of property from someone, either by force or by stealth. Making a copy, legal or otherwise, involves none of these actions! The original is left intact, the original possessor is not denied the product which the various media moguls would have us believe was "pirated" away or "stolen."
What these folks are doing is foolish, yes, particularly in today's witch-hunt atmosphere. Their service is probably a violation of so-called "copyright" (what any society not communicating in newspeak would more accurately term priveleged copy restriction). However, this reflects more so on the appalling state of legislation granting priveleged copy restrictions and the overall state of so-called intellectual property law than it does on the ethics of those offering the service or lauding its existence.
It is bad enough entities such as the MPAA, the RIAA, the SPA, and others use their media muscle to inundate us with their propoganda and rhetoric day in and day out. If there is anything the DeCSS and MP3 struggles have taught us, it is that the least those of us who are a little informed could do is refrain from echoing their refrain, by refusing to use the perjerative terminology these propoganda moguls insist in foisting upon us.
Illegal != Unethical. just ask any black man in America last century, any Jew in 1930's Germany, any Mormon in Missouri prior to 1980, or any Muslim in Serbia today.
Unauthorized Copying != Theft
Unauthorized Copying != Piracy
Unauthorized Copying = Crime (Currently)
Being Jewish = Crime (Germany, 1930s)
Being Mormon = Crime (Missouri, until 1980s)
Finally, for those who miss the obvious:
Law != Truth
Law != Justice
Law != Morality
In short, think for yourselves. And please refrain from echoing official party line rhetoric ("piracy", "theft") until and unless you (a) really mean it and (b) can defend that stance with a well reasoned argument.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Has recordtv.com has already gone to CBS, ABC, NBC and AOL/TimeWarner to get the rebroadcast rights?
Have they signed a deal with the NFL, NHL, and the NBA to pay for the rights to show their games?
If the answer is yes then you are correct in every detail.
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Very true. However, like you said, there ARE national ads too. Although what these guys are doing does suffer from that problem of not being too smart for the networks because of the misdirection of local advertising, I'm sure they could come up with a network station over the net that had only NATIONAL ads and NATIONAL news, so that the ads would be targeted appropriately no matter where someone viewed them. I'd say national advertisers should pay a PREMIUM for that kind of targeting. But anyway, if they did that, there would be no problem with broadcast relays from different locales.
BUUUUUUUUUT...
that's not gonna happen. First of all, there's about 1000 unforseen issues with doing that... for example, making the video stream available on the net means someone can do the VCR thing, except cut out commercials and send it around IRC... or hackers can edit in a big black mustache onto Kathie Lee Gifford's face, and the local affiliates are STILL getting ignored, and even if you say that the network can distribute on the net, then who's to stop indie producers to hop on the bandwagon with new networks, or who's to stop production companies to be their own networks? (Kinda like if MP3 takes off, and the artists can just post directly on the net, they don't need a record contract, so the RIAA best not encourages online distribution) Second, they don't need to do it because the market is admittedly small right now (good enough excuse for them) and there's too many risks against their total control right now.
Hell, they FORCE us to buy a TV set if we want to watch at all (instead of having public TV viewing shops or allowing us to pipe it over the net), and pay for subscription cable (if we want cable channels that each wouldn't know the difference if we got them through any other means), and to buy a VCR (if we wanna watch "ER" any time other than 10pm Thursday). TV is not about empowerment at all - it's about control that you get lured into by entertainment. Prime time TV is basically infomercials with acting and news inbetween.
I seem like I'm going off the radical end of the cliff here, but here's my point: this is a new distribution method. They could try it out and see if they'd make money on it - and judging from the way a lot of people are, they probably could with some effort. Or, they could swat it down and keep doing things they way they currently are. Of course it's unethical to use intellectual property legislation to eliminate innovation at the expense of the consumer for the sake of corporate laziness and ignorance. But do you expect anything different from these people?
Personally, I wouldn't really make this issue a big deal. I'd rather be more concerned with those non-existent HDTV standards that everyone refuses to get taken care of. They're dragging their feet on that one too - luckily the FCC is gonna kick their asses if they don't get it taken care of on their own. In the meantime, online TV distribution is kinda looking like a bad idea just because it's simply not close enough to perfect yet. Seeing how MP3 turned out to be "perfect" for online music distribution, I'd be worried if I were the TV people. Or for that matter, the MPAA or the RIAA or any of the book/magazine publishers out there...
Woe to thee who crosses the annoying mullet-man!
Seriously tho - this is a COOL idea! Too bad this is probably about as illegal as re-selling warez!
[Connection closed by foreign host]
I couldn't help but notice the 4 banner adds per page they have on their site. Could it be that it's a vapor service just using the idea for clicks/impressions?
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As soon as sites like this get posted on slashdot they immediately get swamped, the service goes to hell, and nobody can use it... or it attracts attention from outside sources. This does not sound like a big commercial website that has backing for their systems by outside funding... and now they will be overun by slashdotters trying to use the service... Do you ask the permission of web sites before posting them on here? If not, that might be a good idea to let them know their system is gonna be clogged with users for the next week, or next few days at the least.
_joshua_
Why not? they say there's no such thing as bad PR!
From the FAQ:
9.We currently do not support Pay per view or pay channels (HBO etc.)for legal reasons, only commercial supported channels.
Does this make the service legal? If they are recording shows with Ads, Isn't it the advertiser that is paying for the content to get eyeballs looking at their product? From an advertiser point of view I imagine something like this would be a good thing(tm).
I guess this brings up the question- If you are watching a cable channel that is antenna broadcast, but not in your area, are you paying the cable provider for the content or for the service?
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air and light and time and space
What would happen if the actual TV companies made a website like this? That way we could still have the service and they could make some cash off of it (though a banner ad or something) and also still have the regular ads shown...
I, for one, would use the service a LOT.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.