Slashdot Mirror
Does HDCP Herald The End Of Time-Shifting?
"In researching HDCP I've found that HDCP encrypts the content between the HDTV tuner and the Display and/or HDTV recorder. HDCP allows the content provider to choose if you have the right to record the programming that comes into your home. According to this article HDCP also allows supports a master lists of devices not to work with (a.k.a. Key Device Revocation). For example if the APEX of the HDTV recording world is unleashed the content provider can instruct your HDTV tuner not to send it any content. That's a least what I'm reading into it.
Are we on the verge of having our right to timeshift taken away? Will all the consumers have won with the Sony Betamax suit be lost in one swoop that is the DMCA and HDCP? Or, am I reading too much into this and the MPAA has our best interests in mind?"
We could find a way to "update the blacklist" to be empty...
You have violated DCMA, by conspiring against it. We are coming for you, will kick down your door and imprison you until you confess you are guilty and then we put you in jail for life, for comming an insidious crime of conspiring with communists and terrorists to bring down righteous content control system, and making possible to steal all information from everybody and distribute it without any consent of original creators. YOU WILL BURN IN HELL!
Or point a video camera at the tv screen. Crappy res, but let's see them stop that!
All audio formats must at some point be audiable to the ears and all video formats must at some point be visible to the eyes. I'm sure this pisses the MPAA/RIAA off to no end.
But everyone doesn't use recreational drugs.
A better analogy: the DMCA turning everybody into "pirates" is a lot like the Federally-mandated 55 MPH National Maximum Speed Limit turning 90%+ of drivers into lawbreakers.
As a society, we've come to recognize that any law that defines 90% of the populace as criminals is probably not a good law. Once the Supreme Court is given a chance to revisit Sony Corp. of America v.
Universal City Studios (464 U.S. 417) in the context of the DMCA, I believe it's safe to say the DMCA proponents will be in for a grave disappointment.
Bad lawmaking is bad lawmaking, and as the repeal of the NMSL demonstrated, eventually even Congress gets the clue. So it is indeed a "good thing" that the manufacturers are moving to restrict our fair-use rights to such an overt and inflammatory degree. It'll hurt, sure, but it'll be over quicker that way.
Device Revocation
The HDCP system is revocable. If the display device has been compromised and the secret device keys are exposed, the licensing administrator places the KSV that matches the compromised device key on a key-revocation list. Each display device carries a unique set of keys and KSVs, so revocation is confined solely to the specific compromised (or "hacked") device.
The key-revocation list is carried by system renewability messages (SRMs). The host manages the SRMs and updates them whenever it is presented with a valid, new SRM. SRMs can be fed to the host from a prerecorded or broadcast source.
Sounds like if someone cracked the "licensing administrator" they could broadcast lots of revocations and break millions of TV's and VCR's.
I wonder if they included a provision for un-revocation?
I have the JVC D-VHS recorder. It's a fantastic machine, but until now, I haven't found a way to copy a DVD digitally on tapes. The reason is the 3 copy protections a DVD has. The first two are the regional encoding and the macrovision copy protection. These two are easily hacked, and it's enough to remove them from your player to record in VHS or SVHS. But for digitalk copies....no way until now. There's a 3rd copy protection in DVD, something called the Line25 copy protection. The 25th line in a DVD movie contains a code which is not seen on TV. This code basically tells the VCR that you are trying to make a digital copy of the DVD, and the VCR simply refuses to record. I really like to hear from other people if they succesfully prevented their players to send the Line 25 code to the VCR.
... why don't they macrovision all current television broadcasts? Go ahead, moderate this down... "-1, troll". Because slashdot isn't about truth, it's about personal agendas.
It is part of the compensation the general public gets for the station's exclusive right to transmit on a particular frequency. Can't expect the broadcasters to get it "for free" either.
The last TV show I watched on a regular basis was Star Trek TNG. After that ended in May 1994, I decided to stop watching TV completely. My TV watching had been dwindling for months before that as my favorite shows slowly went away. I discovered music and later computers to occupy my time. It may also seem shocking to most people that I also haven't been to a movie theater since the summer of 1985 when I saw The Jewel of the Nile, which, like most movies, was a total waste of money to go see.
I've come to see TV, sports and movies as low brow, garbage entertainemnt for the most part and a complete waste of your precious life. We exist in this world a mere blink of an eye and what do most people waste a very large amount of that precious time doing? We already waste a third of it asleep. Another nearly third at school or work. And the remaining third, we sit on the couch while our bodies turn to mush and our mind is irreversibly polluted with whatever trash Hollywood decides to throw at us. We're told what to think and how to act. The mindless millions are robots that can be programmed and told how to behave. If we didn't have to mow the lawn and cook and clean and do laundry, what would people do with that spare time? Watching even more TV. People blast down the interstate at 10-20 over the speed limit so they can get home faster so they can do what? Sit in front of the idiot box and waste their life doing nothing worthwhile. In a hurry to do absolutely nothing.
People centuries ago would be appalled and disgusted that this is what the future holds.
And centuries from now, our ancestors will look at this as a great tragedy and will shake their head in amazement that people in the 21st century in the most advanced country on earth could be so stupid. Wake up people.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If you did, you would become a conservative-liberal Linux zealot who thinks Windows is the greatest thing since KDE/Gnome. You would become terminally split-personality and commit suicide by pouring hot grits down your pants.
This is either really interesting, or total BS. Do you have a reference?
I would say it was the 'death of a thousand cuts' one. But then, I don't have any form of TV or cable in the house...
Basically in Britain we have a non-commercial broadcaster known as the BBC.
Now, the BBC is not funded by the government, but instead through a license fee. This license fee allows them to provide programming (for both Radio and TV, but you don't need a Radio license) without requiring advertising or sponsorship. And the BBC does produce some good stuff.
The license is set by parliament (think Congress), and is currently about £102 (about $160 or so) for a year, although this can be paid in installments, and people on benefits have their TV license paid for them, as well as some other groups.
The license has some issues which have annoyed people - you have to get a license for at least 3 months (which gets students) and you have to pay even if you don't actually watch the BBC.
BUT, it is nice to watch programs without commercials, and the BBC is not particurly government controlled (and of course, there is always competition from ITV, a terrestrial broadcaster which is commercial). Aside from this, the BBC has produced quite a lot of quality programming, such as Red Dwarf, Blake's 7 (remember this?), Dr Who, and a raft of other shows.
If you buy a TV you have to have a license but you only need one per property, so, for example, your house can have 5 TVs, and only one TV license. And also you can live with non-relatives, but for example, in student halls, each student must have a license because you effectively have a room (sort of like an appartment), which can suck as us poor students aren't loaded and don't get any discounts.
That's a basically summary, and if you look at www.bbc.co.uk they probably have more information on when you need a license in the UK and how much it currently costs (mine was about £102, but it might have recently gone up).
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over.
The entire existence of Macrovision, from its implementation to its inclusion in all VCRs to its legal support, should prove this was never the case.
Think about it. Any pirate with half a clue knows that you can get equipment for as little as $15 that defeats Macrovision. It's only John Q. Public who doesn't know how to defeat it, so it *only* restricts "casual" copying.
Make no mistake. "Big time" pirates may be feared by the MPAA, but they use them as an excuse to stop casual copying too -- because that could possibly cost them money.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Is it truly the role of government to protect us all from any infringement of our interests, even the ones we are equipped to handle ourselves?
At the very least, government should not be in cahoots with the infringers. See DeCSS, DMCA, Macrovision, etc.... It is a government agency that ruled that 2600 can't provide DeCSS source or links to it.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The answer is that the broadcasters need to come up with compelling content.
Or they could just wait 'til the analog signal is shut off in 5-10 years. I personally couldn't care less about HDTV. It seems to me that all the restrictions and expense are not worth the increased image quality. Not by a long shot.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
So far, things don't seem to be looking so good for fair use. The judge in the 2600 case basically said that Congress overrode fair use with the DMCA since, according to his interpretation, it conflicts with fair use. Since the DMCA is the newer law, it takes precedence. Hopefully this will be overturned. I wouldn't count on it though.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
well you can also just intercept the analouge signal and record that. It's not what the corps are worried about, they're worried about flawless copies of their digital masters.
Then why don't they just have the new equipment overlay a 'bug' in the lower left (since the lower right is taken already) corner of the screen rather than absolutely prohibit copying? Or just introduce single bit errors that will multiply with generational copying?
I suspect that this time they're more worried about not being able to make everything pay per view and not being able to force you to actually watch the commercials (or at least not fast forward through them).
So they DO track the reading habits of patrons. Okay, maybe not on an individual level, but they do know what they're checking out most frequently. And they're computerizing more, so they should be able to track patrons on an individual level.
Libraries have always done that. Otherwise they wouldn't know if a book was overdue (or never returned at all). Their shelves would be empty in a matter of weeks.
Yeah, but they don't keep any statistics ... they just need a list of all books you have borrowed and not returned, and when you return the book, they zap it from that list ...
you get the picture, right?
Actually, until they computerized, my local library system used microfiche to record checkouts and returns. If you had a late book, they would mail you a copy of the book id (on the inside cover) w/ your card next to it and the datestamp underneath.
Aggregate stats could always be done based on which shelves were the emptiest and what the librarian saw being checked out.
Besides, how do you know they didn't keep statistics? Sombody already had to look to see what was overdue. They could just as easily make hash marks on a sheet of paper while they're at it.
True. Sorry, I phrased myself bad there. What I meant was that it's not necessary (sp?) for the library to keep a record of what sort of books you as an individual is loaning just to make sure they know who doesn't return his books ...
Agreed. There is no reason at all to keep stats on an individual. Aggregate stats are good (so long as they are aggregate) to better serve the patrons.
Can anyone name an incident where copy protection really worked and there was no way to get around it. I can't even think of something that wasn't fairly easy to get around. Of course I am only 19 and don't have the history that some slashdot people do, but I can't remember anything that was really impossible to manipulate.
So far, none. However, all of those were broken when it wasn't a felony to manufacture the needed devices. If you read the ads for the various devices you'll notice that they all claim to be useful for some other purpose. Macrovision defeating devices claim to be video stabilizers. When the content is being delivered with crystal clear digital quality, what excuse will there be for a device that tricks the VCR into letting you record something the broadcaster explicitly set the 'no copy' flag on?
Keep in mind, under the DMCA, if the excuse doesn't hold water, it's a felony with very little wiggle room. Look at what has happened so far with DeCSS in spite of having a legal use!
Unfortunately, the DVD licencing crew periodically check on this. I recall they reduced some of the licencing fees for R4 players in exchange for no more region-free players.
Wade.
not a Wizard. A Dremel. Wizard is the CHEAP ASS PIECE OF CRAP IMITATION.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I have DISH network, and so far, I'm very impressed with the signal quality. The decoder box they sold me also has a lot of TiVo like features - it's a HD recorder. Plus it has a "skip 30 seconds" button (that my TiVo did not had) - they charge an extra $10 a month to enable the "recording" service - but then they pipe high-quality digital content to my home, and give me tools to skip commercials (I now almost can't stand to watch live TV anymore - the commercials just drive me nuts. BTW - they're running 15-30% of the time length of MOST programming - you notice that when you can watch a half-hour TV episode in 20 minutes). I can also permanently archive to tape, any program, and I can use the skip button to rough-edit commercials out as I record. (a comparable experience to anyone watching while another person is operating the remote).
I love this service, it's far superior to anything any cable company ever offered. And I'm quite certain that DISH Network loves providing this service to me for my money. (I don't view PPV content).
So when ALL HDTV's come out with this copy protection, I'm quite sure DISH network will be happy to sell me an HDTV set that works fine with their box. THey have an incentive to provide systems that work for people who will pay. - and when their PPV content and charges get too obnoxious, of course they'll feel it in their bottom line.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's what Rand-ites call the "invisible hand".
And what I call the "invisible hand-job".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think what most people are complaining about is pretty much the same as what they're complaining about with the whole Napster thing.
PPV charges are often obscenely high. Viewing a movie at a theater is similarly pretty high, but at a second run theater, approaches the realm of reasonable. Is it really worth 8 bucks? How about the $40 or more people pay to watch a big fight or other sporting event on TV - without having the luxury of actually BEING there!
Right now, I think most people equate the annoyance of having to watch 25 minutes of commercials for every 35 minutes of Friends as roughly equal to twenty-five cents. But the big bad networks disagree. So they're going to lock down the content, and make you pay $8.00 for an episode of Friends. Maybe $10 for an episode of X-Files ($15 if it's not a MOTW episode, or if Scully wears a miniskirt).
Well, that's all academic, who knows how much they'll charge? Lame ass statements from Sony execs were to the effect of "music downloads for $5.00/single". Fact is, if they have it locked down as tight as THEY THINK they will, they, in theory, can charge whatever the fuck they want. We consumers can live in fear that, no matter how much they charge, there will be a segment of society out there with enough bucks and enough stupidity to pay for it. Perhaps they'll have to reach an equilibrium point somewhere - but there's a lot of rich stupid people out there - so maybe the price will settle somewhere around where only 10% of the population can afford to see it. The rest are have-nots. And the networks make just as much money off of that 10% as they would off of the 50% that could afford it if they lowered the price.
Eventually, the stupid rich people will no longer be rich, (except for the Network Execs), and nobody will be able to afford the content anymore, and they'll have to lower the prices.
But the fact is, sometimes you just want to have a collection of all the Simpsons, or whatever. You can't access that from the networks no matter how much you pay them. Some days, you just want to pull out a tape and watch the Rear Window episode. Well, we watched the commercials once - hell, so FUCK them if they want to make us watch commercials, while they're charging us to watch, and want to make us pay for watching the same commercials AGAIN.
And what I can't figure out is- music videos. Originally, they were promotional spots for Pop bands. Then, MTV made them into entertainment. Okay, so the CONTENT itself is actually a commercial. You had to PAY the cable company extra for MTV, it wasn't included in basic service, so how twisted was that? People were fucking PAYING for nothing but commercials! So what happened? That was totally fucking sweet - why don't they play videos anymore? I don't get it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Although I'm certain the MPAA has nobody's best interests at heart except its own, here's what I think will happen based on the situation with Digital TV in Europe:
The copy protection scheme will be enabled on certain channels (e.g. Pay per view video-on-demand channels) but not enabled on traditional channels.
This is exactly how it works with Macrovision protected broadcasts in Europe. Timeshifting is such a well established habit, the consumer won't tolerate losing it, and the broadcaster doesn't object to short-term timeshifting (as opposed to taping all the Simpsons and keeping them in an archive [oops]).
Pay per view video on demand means there's no need for short-term timeshifting any more, and so the consumer has less of a legitimate reason to gripe.
I can see this being the case until some bright spark comes up with a way to enforce a "use-by" date on recorded material (a la DivX) such that the broadcaster can set a maximum time during which timeshifting is allowed. That'll be a nuicance, but to be fair, entirely within the copyright holder's rights.
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- extra quality that they don't really notice anyway
Um. The quality difference is startling. Only the legally blind will fail to notice the improvement in quality.Your point is quite valid, however. So you get awesome quality... why is it valuable when the current quality seems acceptable. The answer is that the broadcasters need to come up with compelling content. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
In the United States, the plan is to leverage the popularity of America's State Religion: Football[1]. If you need a solid demonstration of the primacy of Football in American pop culture, note that the arrival of dot-com companies into mainstream society was heralded by advertisements during the Super Bowl[2].
In 1983, Sony and Phillips introduced a new format called the "Compact Disc." This was a plastic disc, roughly 5 inches in diameter with music encoded on it digitally. A laser was used to read binary data encoded in "pits" and "runs" on the surface of the disc. It sounded like a great idea, but it was immediately plagued by the same problems we are about to see with HDTV.
First was the equipment cost. A laser was needed to track a spiralling stream of runs to an accuracy less than the width of a human hair. Did anyone expect this system to be anything less than exorbitantly priced? Compact Disc players started at $800 apiece. Meanwhile you could buy a decent record turntable at any Radio Shack for under $100.
If you think that price differential was stupid, get this: due to the expense of studio-quality digital recording equipment and the manufacturing cost of the high-tech discs themselves, a Compact Disc release of an album was typically twice the price of the vinyl release. The same music for twice the price! Where's my checkbook?
Of course, pretensious stereophiles argued that people would shell out the extra dollars for the improved quality (sound familiar?). They were too wrapped up in their obsessive little world to realize that terms like "16 bit sampling" and "dynamic range" were never going to be anything other than gibberish to the general public. Another argument was that by allowing 90 minutes of continuous music, you could listen to an entire symphony without breaking to flip the disc to side two. What percentage of the music-buying public lies awake at night fretting over a side flip in the middle of a symphony? Most people buy records containing popular music broken down in songs, allowing for a natural break between Side 1 and Side 2. Bottom line: no one cares about having to flip sides.
Ironically, Compact Discs were touted as being more durable than vinyl. The fact is that a properly cared for LP might last centuries while some engineers predicted that the reflective metallic layer on a Compact Disc might oxidize to unreadability in as little as 20 years. If you bought a Compact Disc in 1985, what would you do if it was becoming unreadable today in 2001? Make a copy of it? No, Compact Discs aren't recordable! Back it up onto a cassette tape? Sure, but you'd lose your precious "digital quality" so why buy the Compact Disc in the first place? I know! You could back up the data to your personal computer! Of course, since a Compact Disc might contain up to 650Mega (not Kilo!) bytes of data, you probably couldn't find enough storage space for more than one of your albums unless you owned IBM or something.
In the end, we're much better off because the Compact Disc failed to supplant vinyl. One reason that is seldom explored is the effect the Compact Disc would have had on the variety of music. Go to see any up-and-coming local band and most of the time you'll find them selling a vinyl EP of their music for a few bucks. Had the Compact Disc become the dominant format, music publishing would have become the exclusive domain of those with enough money to buy the newfangled digital recording technology (a studio-quality digital recorder cost upwards of $100K at the time!). Goodbye independant record labels. Goodbye garage bands.
HDTV is just the latest attempt by the large players in the entertainment industry to put an entire art-form into a chokehold by introducing an unwanted technological "innovation." Last time it was music, this time it's TV. What next? Film? Am I going to live to see a day when the next Disney animated film is "all digital"? (Would "Snow White" or "Fantasia" have been better "digital"?)
I predict that my children won't remember what HDTV was the same way teenagers today have no idea what a "Compact Disc" was.
- consumers will eventually win. The free market demands it.
"Market Forces" are the "God's Will" of secular society. Why not just say that God will take care of consumers? It's equally meaningful.The fact is that market forces serve the market, not consumers. Market forces drove down the price VHS VCRs and made them as common as dirt. Market forces didn't force Sony to license the Beta standard to other manufacturers and Beta disappeared. The consumers did not win.
You are correct that consumers are used to being able to record TV shows and watch them later. There's nothing in the proposed technology that will stop them. I expect that HDCP-compliant receivers will gladly pipe output to an HDCP-compliant Tivo. This HDCP Tivo would only deliver the content back to a display device, but not to a media recorder of any type. Thus, Joe Sixpack can timeshift to his heart's content, but he can't record "Battlefield Earth" off HBO-HD, transfer it to HD-DVD and resell it on Ebay. His HDCP Tivo will refuse transfer that valuable intellectual property to the DVD recorder.
Sure, there will be some way to make a copy of the HBO-HD broadcast of "BattleField Earth," but the pirate copy will be robbed of the full glory of the original digital clarity, robbing the viewer of the full effect of the spine-tingling special effects.
Of course, you will also be prevented from doing something perfectly legal, such as making a "Best of the Simpsons" compilation for your own personal use. You lose. The question is, will the market care? My money says "no".
- However, at high framerates and definitions, this is not the case. The id can no longer seperate fantasy and fiction
Wow! If I could invent an extremely high resolution image with no flicker at all, I could control the world! I'd give this terrifying new technology some kind of fancy name, with a Greek root or something... How about photograph?Even bad copies will stop their real intention, to force people into a system where they pay per view, always. They also don't want to allow you to fast-forward through commercials.
They will not stop until the signal is piped directly into a chip implanted in your brain, and modifications are made so you are incapable of describing the signal to another person.
Fortunately, two decades of ordinary VCR's will prevent The Industry from putting an end to time shifting. Consumers have gotten used to the idea.
The bottom line on this kind of stuff is that consumers will eventually win. The free market demands it. From a technology perspective, bulletproof copy protection is impossible. Every single attempt has been defeated. From the errors on Track 40 of a Commodore-64 floppy (and the copy programs that put those errors on the duplicate), to Macrovision on VHS (and the sync repeaters that worked around it), to CSS (and DeCSS), technology has proven time and again that you can't give a consumer access to some sort of media and completely lock out the ability to copy it. The only sure-fire way to prevent copying is to deliver all pay-per-view programming with an accompanying lawyer, policeman, or whatever in the consumer's living room. And that ain't gonna happen.
Big Media scumbags tried to prevent the consumer public from gaining access to cassette recorders, and later VCR's. Why should this round be any different?
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The consuming public has ultimate power. If enough people refuse to participate in supporting a product through its purchase, the product will disappear from the market.
The key, as with anything, is that enough people have to do it.
If the public would get half a fucking clue, it could enact real, significant, positive and long-lasting change in the way our governments and corporations operate.
But it's the frog-in-boiling-water thing: until things get so excrebly untolerable that the mass public literally can not stand it any more, they'll put up with the moderately intolerable.
Which is to say, that which is untolerable, generally isn't. People adapt, get used to it, suck it down, and live with it.
It's a pretty fucking sorry state of affairs, and it certainly makes one worry for the fate of future generations. Will the mass public demand ecological change, in time to keep the environment from going kaput? Will the mass public demand government change, in time to keep democracy from becoming lenient corporate dictatorship? Will the the mass public demand freedom to view/listen to media as desired, in time to keep it from becoming a pay-per-view, each-view, each-person event?
Frankly, I doubt it. The mass public is too apathetic. It's gonna be a bugger apologizing to our kids for letting things get as bad as they will...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The other issue that this brings to my mind is the increasingly short lifespan of media formats. I'm still trying to replace my rather large record and tape collection with CDs -- and no, while it's not ideal, I don't mind paying for better-quality CD versions of my old vinyl -- but there's a lot of stuff that isn't available on CD, and in case you haven't noticed, finding decent turntables (and styli for them) has gotten expensive and really good cassette decks have been extinct for some years. The story is the same here as with TV -- the harder they make it for me, the less likely I'm going to bother with it.
Like I said, TV per se isn't my issue, but the general principle applies to other things. I'm voting with my dollars and buying more grossly overpriced books instead. Alphabetic text on a substrate of pressed vegetable matter has been in continuous use since about 4000 BC, which is a record I doubt any modern medium will surpass, even if the modern version contains acids that will destroy the paper within a century or so. If I'm still around then, I'll spring for a Xerox machine.
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I dunno what the situation is in the states, but in Australia (where HDTV broadcasts have just begun) the general conclusion amongst retailers is that HDTV's are going to struggle anyway. Why? Because people are happy with their existing TV's, and aren't going to pay ~8000 AUD for extra quality that they don't really notice anyway. For fsck's sake, most people are happy with AM radio, MP3 and VHS video!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I have no objections at all to a 'copy once only' limitation similar to that on DAT being put in place on TV broadcasts, films I've bought on DVD (and video) etc.
What I do object to is putting the limitation in place in the same way as on DAT - DAT tapes are useless to someone recording (for instance) their own music with a view to sending out copies to everybody they know. The media just wont allow for free redistribution, even when the content creator and copyright holder actually wants that to happen.
~Cederic
I don't think that the TV licence here in the UK is a comparable situation.
The licence fee here goes to fund the BBC, who do not receive commercial funding (although their natural history unit is highly profitable commercially anyway). Personally I love the fact that we have a TV company that does not rely on commerical success, and can therefore justify making programs that appeal to minority and unprofitable audiences. Apart from the various programs that became successes, there are a lot of other programs out there (Newsnight is a good example) that I think it is good that we have available, even if most people don't watch them.
Failing to pay for a TV licence is silly. Regarding the "young welfare mother", if she doesn't want to pay the licence, then she shouldn't watch TV. I believe that people truly in poverty receive assistance with the licence fee, and I do not believe that TV is an essential service.
~Cederic
Hmm. I am paying 59 pounds a month (lets call it $85) for television services.
Some of the channels I receive I do not directly pay for. But I have to subscribe to an entire package to get them, and so indirectly I am paying for them.
Some of them I am paying directly for. FilmFour I pay £6 ($8 or so) for, and it's not part of a package. I think it's well worth that money, which is why I pay. But, since I am paying for it, if a film is shown while I'm not around (they show some very good stuff at 12-2am, while I'm in bed, midweek) then I want to be able to record it. And since they show films that have already been at the cinema, available to rent/buy on video/dvd, and often shown on other TV channels already, those films have often made their money back many times already. So I'm paying for provision of the service and for a diverse and interesting selection of films. I am not paying for new movie production, for tv program creation, and especially not for advertising.
Note that a lot of films I watch on that channel I have already paid to see at the cinema, on video, or occasionally I already own on video (you're flicking channels, suddenly you find yourself watch Shawshank Redemption for the 49th time, and you can't switch away, even though you want to, even though you own it on both video and DVD).
There are other channels - movie, sports, music channels - that I am paying a lot of money for. And most of them also show me advertising.
So what I'm saying is, I pay to receive far more TV channels than I have any hope of watching. In return I expect to be able to watch the things I want to watch on those channels, even if sometimes two are both showing something I want to see at the same time.
Then again, I don't expect to record a PPV movie and keep the tape. For one, I never use PPV (I prefer to support my local video shop, as it offers more choice and better service, and I can pause the film and I can chat to the staff there and get recommendations). For another thing, I am happy to financially support people who provide me with good entertainment. This is why I subscribe to FilmFour (they do actually fund a lot of movies too - but generally not mainstream, which is another reason I love them), and why I have a small but growing collection of DVDs and videos bought from shops (and Amazon.com).
In an attempt to stay almost on topic, I'll just add that although I support funding the things I like and use, and so I will buy films and pay $85 a month for TV, I'm not going to accept and don't think I'll ever need to accept outrageous restrictions from content providers. Hence owning a DVD player that can be set to any region (and automatically switches itself) that also has macrovision disabled. Technology can provide answers.
~Cederic
While Im sure its possible, I wonder how difficult it would be for mortals to build in there basements a induction amplifer to hang beside the cable wire.
Here the filters need a special tool to remove them..
They aren't transmitting flawless copies of their digital masters. They are transmitting heavily compressed MPEG data streams that have visible digital distortion artifacts.
Digital does NOT mean flawless.
And quoting Gallager, "There's a brightness knob, but it don't seem to work."
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I don't think that in the end, any current US TV watcher has much choice. The gov't is mandating a change over to digital/HDTV broadcasts in order to free up the part of the spectrum currently used by broadcasters.
Am i to understand that not paying royalties back to the authors/artists is a good thing?
The market being what it is, and consumers being what they are, I'm guessing that this "Key Device Revocation" won't last too long. As HDTV becomes more and more the standard, consumers and/or companies will begin to complain and of their respective losses (quality or the ability to record for the consumers, ability to make money off the consumers for the companies, and probably all sorts of little things in between). In short, I don't expect this "problem" to be much of a problem when HDTV takes over.
Consumers have bitched for years about being sodomized by the cable TV industry and nothing has come of it. The cable TV industry just jacked up rates again, worsened picture quality and hired another pack of crack-heads to work in customer service. If you think for a minute that the "industry" will ever believe that relaxed copy protection = increased sales, you've been smoking crack, too.
When the analog signal goes off the air everyone has to make a choice between buying an HDTV or having learn to live without the magic tube.
There's a third choice: rioting in the streets.
If analog TV gets turned off without substancial numers of people having the ability to watch Jerry Springer, there will be rioting. Government will back down.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Frankly, I don't really see the point of forcing customers to be at home to watch a program; the only reason I can come up with is that they can't fast-forward through the commercials. We are so used to taping programs for our use, no-one will accept such measures.
As for the video-blacklist: yes, that's a shame. And no, I don't think the MPAA has the best intentions for the consumer's right, only their own.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
HDTV, HD Recorders, and the copy protections that will appear therein are supported by the entire industry. The copy protection will probably be in all devices and those devices will be sold in all retail outlets. There will be no choice, more than likely. Either you buy one of these protected devices or you don't partake in HDTV. In 10 years that will probably mean that your choices are either a)submit to this or b)don't watch televsion.
TiVo like devices don't require a standard behind them, but when Mr. Bob decides to record the football game in the living room, and then watch it in his own room that night, he'll want to move the media. This is completely opposite of the dual TAPE VCRs that have been hitting the market lately, now THOSE things make corportations shy.
As I said before, these corporations have an interest in keeping this industry alive. That includes tapes and/or media. I believe that the future home system, will be most hampered by the inability to copy purchased movies easily, and to copy time-shifted shows easily as well. This is not much different than what's going on today, and no doubt, in the future there will be devices designed to make copies easily, just like there are today.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
There is currently such a large market for VCRs, and Tivo like devices, that most major electronics companies have a vested interest in keeping these products alive. Remember, it doesn't benifit the ones making the electronics, only the ones making the media. Kindof like the whole Hard drive copy protection business.
Further there is no really defined standard for an HDTV recorder. We'll probably have something like the Betamax vs. VCR wars again in this next couple of years. Hopefully the nonproprietary standard will win again, bolstered by consumer confidence. I don't put the lack of VCR like products for HDTV on some conspiracy, but the simple facts that: 1. Extremely few people own a HDTV, so the market is little. 2. These people are probably watching off broadcast anyway, as most HDTV signals aren't really there yet.(There's been more than a few technical problems, and last I heard unless you were sitting on station, it doesn't work all that great.) So they have VCR's. 3. These same people are probably only using the HDTV capabilities to watch their latest DVDs anyways.
Just my $2.00.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
You had better believe libraries track. I've had some MLSs (master of livrary science) tell me some very uncomfortable facts about trends among libraries.
Think about all the intra- and inter- library loans too. It's not just the corner library that has access to your information.
Gee, they're going to force me to stop taping the Super Bowl so I won't be able to watch all those good commercials? Or will they turn off the "never copy" flag during the commercials? That will be convenient, if I don't have to watch that football that keeps delaying the commercials.
I've also gone through two winter buying seasons without buying DVD stuff. When I can put DVD players in my Linux boxes, then I'll invest in DVD media and compatible home DVD players.
Given the rampant copying that goes on, I don't blame them, but quite frankly if I can't record a show and take it over to a friend's house to watch or loan it to them, I'm simply not going to use the technology at all, on principle. But if I can't time shift, the technology is completely useless, because my schedule is just never going to mesh with the broadcast schedule. Having had Replay for a year or so, I can't stand to watch live commercial TV anyway. They're just shooting themselves in the foot if they don't allow these capabilities because it will be DOA.
No matter how they want to spin it, none of these methods are copy protection or anti-piracy. Macrovision is anti-piracy. An encoded, and easily decoded system is meant for PAY PER VIEW.
Once these systems are out there, everywhere, THEN THEY WILL CHARGE YOU FOR EVERY SINGLE @#!! THING YOU WATCH.
Channel surfing, and accidentally view 1 second of the progam? They'll bill you.
If this were copy protection, then there would be stiffer fines, longer jail sentences, and some way of enforcing it on foreign soil. Since none of these are a part of copy protection, then it MUST be aimed at the consumer.
Yes that's because the information chain between people is still channelled thru very global nodes of information: news paper, tv, radios.
we can only hope that the general public will start using todays technology (internet?) more and more as its source of information. There the sources of information are more and more distributed and less controllable. Less concentration => less power of advertising.
It's just a question of beeing sufficiently disconnected from the major media channels.
Of course production of media content is not always cheap... Well perhaps the public will just turn itself to look into cheaper media/art. (nothing in the word entertaining implies that it has to be expensive to produce)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
The difference here is that media is not scarce. Anybody is able to produce art. Even if hollywood and the big companies would like you to believe you can't have good quality content without them. They will realize, once the general public will be too pissed off by protection techniques and will begin to look into other sources of content, that they don't have a monopoly on creativity.
We don't NEED any of their productions. Face it, and make them feel that way.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
This will stop some geeks in some western countries, but it will not stop those who make money out redistributing the things in other parts of the world.
;)
/N
I go to diffrent parts of asia two or three times a year and always returns with a bag full of new VCD records home.
And I very much doubt that any kind of copy protection stuff that hollywood makes up will change that.
Rudyard Kipling wrote:
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
And IMHO, the chinese subtitles adds value to the experience of watching it.
i believe you would be surprised at the number of people who have at least tried recreational drugs. look at the current prision population to see the results of the war on drugs. two weeks ago, i was at the busstop in the middle of pittsburgh on fifth and bigelo and someone lit up a joint.
the major difference between this and the dmca typ stuff is that corporations are using copyright/property laws to get what they want. ie. theft of content is taking something you dont own even if it is digitally. drug laws are more closely related to legislating morals. people who buy drugs work with you, eat at the same resturants you do and piss in the same toilet as you do. dont be fooled into thinking its only homeless/poor people who do them.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
True, very true. However, nothing says that entertainment and leisure have to come in bite-size chunks, individually packaged and foil-wrapped for your protection. There's a whole world full of entertainment and leisure out there which is (mostly) outside the reach of the 'entertainment industry', from live music at the local pub (or other locations) through learning to make it (no matter what :-) yourself to the 'alternative' media, etc. People, real people, not canned ones, await you at places like that. People who say things they mean to say, not things which have been written into some script 'cause someone paid them to say it.
The 'entertainment industry', and probably the whole 'media industry' has outlived its welcome. They have shown their true colours, which are dark. Pretty soon - when ever more stringent laws prohibit advertising for more and more products - the products of the media industry will be virtually indistinguishable from commercials (if they are even now distinguishable from them...). Who wants to endure hours and hours of commercials?
...
I know I don't...
So, tune out, turn off and live your life the way you want, not the way they tell you to live it...
--frank[at]unternet.org
In Britain it's illegal to watch broadcast analog TV without a non-cheap license. The police have vans which pick up the tiny signals leaked by every working TV set. They drive to houses of non-subscribers, and when their probes detect a signal they fine you for stealing broadcast TV.
Failure to pay the fine results in months of jail time. Michael Moore's TV nation once showed a clip of a young welfare mother who was in jail because she couldn't pay the fine.
That's the treatment you can expect from a western democracy.
Do you really think a *corporation* is going to let you off any easier?
I hate to break the news to y'all, but consumer demand for HDTV is probably going to be /increased/ by copy protection. The forced rarity of digital video recordings will only make them all the more precious.Remember how the masses reacted to the introduction of the compact disc?
/like/ the idea of restrictions, so long as said restrictions entail some sort of superior status and/or higher quality. Makes 'em feel all special. The only people who'll avoid copy-protected hardware will be those who have ethical issues with copy protection, and the poor, who have financial issues with it. (Incidentally, it is the very exclusion of the latter category which will make copy-protected TV so very popular).
"Yeah, I know, it's shitty that I can't record like I could with cassettes, but OTOH the sound is _amazing_ and I just spent X hundred dollars on my new incredibly elite sound system and music collection using the very latest in technology that is an obvious symbol of my supreme power as a well-moneyed consumer, blah blah blah...."
People
Hell, with society's current configuration you could probably sell *amputation* to the middle classes, provided limblessness was both expensive and a status symbol. Hell, Joe Q. Sixpack would give his right hand to be a classy amputee!
- undoware.ca
You can get your playstation modified in chinatown so that it can play COPY disks of games. Who is better positioned and motivated to make black-market add-ons than owners of under-utilized factories that make the key components of the legitmate product?
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Fortunately, the people have learned; just one week ago, the Memory Stick Walkman was dropped by CompUSA, and dropped in price from $399.99 to $299.88
Do note that when the price of an item goes from XXX.99 to XXX.88 in most any U.S. store, the 88 cents means the item is either discontinued or the store is reducing the price to get rid of it because they will no longer carry it. It is this way at Wal-Mart, CompUSA, Staples, Office Depot, etc.
I'm sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK? First, they try and control what you can and cannot record... now they're controlling what you can and cannot record it WITH???
This has got to stop. It's gone beyond the point of rediculous into new unxplored areas of stupidity.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
But I can listen or view it at least ONCE, right? Then who cares if "the entire universe" is protecting it. If I can view it then I can record it in some fashion. For a quantum physicist, this guy seems a little dumb.
Since the early days of VCRs, the Courts have upheld the individual's right to record broadcast programming for the purposes of time shifting under fair use. However, content that arrives in a non-ephemeral medium, such as tape or disk, seems to be allowed to incorporate copy-protection because there is no need to duplicate for fair use. This appears to be the rationale behind technologies such as Macrovision which prevents DVD to VHS duplication.
As we are all painfully aware, content providers have recently been fighting tooth and nail to stop any form of duplication, fair use or otherwise. Although people of good conscience can argue about the fairness of music swapping services such as Napster, recording of broadcast programming for private time shifted use is clearly within the already accepted bounds of case law (IANAL).
Therefore, content providers have shifted the debate to the 'perfection' of digital-to-digital duplication. Since a D->D copy is exactly identical to the original, natural controls on duplication such as generational degredation disappear. Content providers argue that the removal of this barrier will cast the world into a miasma of unbridled piracy which, in turn, will stifle creative pursuits, destroy the global economy and perhaps send the Earth hurtling into the Sun.
Such arguments have been used to incorporate copy-once protection into consumer grade DAT devices and appears to be the motivation for this new round of copy protection efforts. (It is interesting to note that Macrovision protects against a form of copying that already includes generation degradation, however a sense of irony is not a strength of the MPAA/RIAA.) The motivation of content providers is, not surprisingly, to implement as much copy protection as they can and then to let the Courts push them back a little later. IMHO, the important issue is to keep the quality of duplication out of the debate over the limits of fair use. This may lead to a copy-once scheme similar to DAT but that would represent a compromise between the rights of content owners and users. As some smartypants once remarked, we must give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
There's a used bookstore on the other side of town at which I've gotten all sorts of old documentation. I've used a check card (==credit card as far as they're concerned) to pay for stuff there on numerous occasions.
About the only opportunity for publishers (and authors, by extension) to get screwed is with "stripped" books. Many paperbacks are so cheap that it'd cost more to ship overstock back to the publisher than to throw them out. The store rips off the front cover, throws the book out, and reports to the publisher that the book has been destroyed. The publisher then issues a credit for the cost of the book. An unscrupulous bookseller can retrieve those stripped books and sell them. (That's why you see that notice about stripped books near the front of many paperbacks. Hardcover books are expensive enough that they usually don't get this treatment.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I dont know about you but I watch two types of bootlegs, camcorder jobs for the movies that are currently in the cinema and dvd rips for everything else. The dvd rips are pure digital. Digital off the dvd, pump it into virtual dub, recompress it with divx (and press "never show me this warning again" when it detects it) and fuck around for 15 minutes getting the sound just right.
How we know is more important than what we know.
when the publishing house takes most of the loot, sure.
How we know is more important than what we know.
yer. Like when everyone uses recreational drugs... oh wait.
How we know is more important than what we know.
well you can also just intercept the analouge signal and record that. It's not what the corps are worried about, they're worried about flawless copies of their digital masters.
How we know is more important than what we know.
better yet, buy that book from a second hand book store. Chances are they wont even accept your credit card and they dont pay any royalties.
How we know is more important than what we know.
very true. I believe the masters are all uncompressed (so called D1 masters), do these ever leave the studio? Say, could you ever go to a cinema and watch a master?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Apart from the fact that this is fictional, what difference does it make how you copy the data? The tenet of this (fake) physicist's (fake) system is that observation of the data destroys the data, including all copies that have been made. So yes, you can record it in some fashion but that recording and all copies made of it will revert to random bits as soon as any of the copies are viewed. So stop thinking so hard and laugh already.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Physicists have developed a software only form of data streaming that just might send hackers packing. The technology, based on the Hiesenburg uncertainty principle, makes it possible to send a digital song or movie over the internet without fear of the data being intercepted or copied at the final destination. Dr Peter Hackinsack from the University of Southern California explains:
"It's truly amazing. When we first started thinking about sending quantum data over the Internet we were talking about optic fiber and very complicated optic only switches."
Electromagnetic fields have been shown to disrupt the stability of quantum super states and has been a major hurdle in quantum computing.
"Then one day we decided to try measuring a quantum state but not actually observing the calculations until they had passed over the Internet as normal data. We expected the results to be skewed and indeed they were. It was during this process that we discovered that we could shape the data into any form we wanted!"
Dr Hackinsack continues to explain how the data passes through a complex encryption mechanism that is the key to the data's encoding. Dr Hackinsack ensures us that the encryption process is very fast and can be done on a media company's web server in real time. The data then passes over the Internet to the user's home computer where a program such as Windows Media Player or Winamp can deliver it to the end user.
"They can store the data for as long as they like and make as many copies as they like. But once the song or movie or whatever is actually istened to, all the copies revert to random garbage!"
The process is called "quantum state destablization" and is observed daily by researchers in quantum computing. Dr Hackinsack and a number of associates who requested not to be identified have formed a startup company and secured funding from the MPAA.
"Oh we're going to make the SDMI obsolete. There's no reason to rely on big numbers when you've got the power of the universe to protect you."
But securing funding has not been easy. Describing the process to media executives has been grueling for scientists who deal with this kind of physics day by day.
"They were such a pain. We tried everything. They didn't want to learn about the technology and they didn't understand the demo we erformed. In the end we got some undergraduates to explain it and they seemed happy. Well they gave us the money!"
Deployment of the product is still some months away.
Read other fake news..
How we know is more important than what we know.
No, one of the functions of government is to protect the people so they don't have to pay attention to this kind of crap. It's not up to the consumer to determine which things marketed as "food" are not poisonous, nor which things marketed as "motor vehicles" will not explode within 5 days of use. That's the government's job. That's why we're paying politicians. If a government is not protecting its citizens, that government should be replaced. Same goes with a social or political system.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Let's face it, we're a special interest group. We have no lobbyists; We have very little money, authority, and influence; We don't have an advertising campaign. We can't kill this type of thing on our own.
We need the help of those with money, authority and influence. As things stand, I don't see anything we can do, directly, about the MPAA. However, as we have started to notice, musicians are getting very, very tired of the RIAA, and for good reason: Of all the millions of dollars the music industry generates, the musicians -- the ones actually causing the income -- are getting very little. These musicians are very influential. If enough of the best musicians band together, they could form their own record company that does things in their and their fans' interests (ie. mixing cheap internet distribution with conventional radio/TV/CD/concerts ). This would liberate them from the RIAA, not to mention giving the musicians much more wealth, and hopefully this would sway public opinion in the process.
Once the RIAA is not in a monopoly position, it would have to play fair, or be abandoned. This would also set a precedent for the MPAA, pressuring it to conform.
To make a long speech shorter: we can't do it alone, but we can do it with help.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
I might go ahead and buy one of those DSS decoder test cards if I could be sure that the law's on my side. -jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They seem to keep forgetting that, if you really want to be "secure," you can never trust the client. Of course, consumer media consumption will always require a client... so there wil lalways be a way to work around whatever fuckage they put into the product.
I doubt they will ever learn to not do it, though. I do imagine that they will make their next target open-source systems.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Four letters: D I V X
;-p
What the hell is this guy smoking? DVI is a digital video connection, mostly used for flat panel displays. Firewire is serial SCSI. DVI is similar to Firewire in as much as they both pass bits, but that's about it.
People will hook up a device with a tiny LCD and a digital camera on opposite ends of a hood, like the 8mm -> VTR converters, if they have to. Most people will deal with the tiny amount of degradation.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Don't ya wish you could convince people to unplug for a while?
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
What does this mean to us geeks? It means that although manufacturers can make copy-protected TV's, they don't have to. Companies (e.g., Apex Digital, makers of the best $170 DVD player ever made) can simply choose to make TV's and VCR's etc that ignore this copy-protection scheme, just and Hedrick has gotten T.13 to do with CPRM.
I would deffinately have to agree. In a society like ours, psuedo capitalist, money is what count. Vote with your money. I won't by a digital TV for a long time for several reasons. One, the price is too high. I refuse to pay that much for a TV. Two, I am not going to buy somehting that may limit my ability to timeshift shows, specials, news, etc. I am not home 100% of the time, and most Americans are not home either. The ability to record a special, or a show, is needed.
In the long run, I don't think this will catch on. If you can't set a timer and record a show, then their some of the pontential audience will be lost. SO what you may say, but that makes a difference to the people buying advertisements during those time slots. If the show is a special, it usually costs more, and if the people can't record it, viewers will be lost. If viewers are lost, the TV Stations will then start to realise (probably slowly given they can be dense) that what they are charging for the advertisement isn't worth it because people weren't able to record it, and thus viewers were lost.
Even if we fast forward during the comercials, we still see them, and if you pause them out, someone had to watch at least the first and lst to pause out the comercials--thus they have an audience!
Eventually the entertainment industry will realise this idea of limiting the ability to record shows will hurt them. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT RECORDING HAS OR WILL HURT THEIR BUSINESS!!! They already make incrediably large amounts of money. They are not hurt, and they are deffinately not starving. This is just pure and simple greed.
Let's say this does pass, what you might see is a charge to record shows. In other words, you pay a fee for the rights to record a show(s). So the content provider would probably have a deal the maker of the content to split the profit from it. You could end up with all kinds of pricing sturctures. Structures to record a whole serious, specials, movies, a show, and so forth. The only thing they would have to do is provide a reliable way to determine wether a show will be a repeat, and a method to know how many episodes would be in a show/special. This would also require them to continue a show till they finish the number of episodes people have paid to record.
I probably shouldn't have said these things because I don't want to give them ideas, but these are a couple of ways things tend to be going. Everybody wants into the business of providing a service for a fee, and the entertainment industry is no different. They see big dollar signs ahead!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
how long before we have a distributed project to crack this crypto? i can see it now, an optical cracking machine so we can record video on our digital vcrs. or, i could just rent a flick at blockbuster.... -n-rs-
Oh fuck that...
everytime someone wants to take our rights to use something away... someone has to suggest an alternative... hay, can you watch the SuperBowl on a book? No.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
I suspect that the main reason that networks wouldn't want people to be able to record their content is the ability to cut out commercials. Many people do this with their Tivo or ReplayTV type devices with all their watching. I'm tired of commercials every 5-8 minutes, anyone else? It's definately made me appreciate PBS.
Where I live, PBS is the only place I can get Britcoms.
Pay per view? No. Well....maybe, just not in its current form. If the fee was small enough and it allowed me to watch whatever the hell I wanted whenever I wanted, then it would be worth it (to me at least but I know I'm probably the minority in this.) For me, a show looses so much when it is interrupted so often. And the idea of paying for something to watch when someone else feels like airing it doesn't appeal to me. I realized a while ago that TV is hard for me to get into because it's so passive. The only thing you control is what channel you view.
By the same token, who would be interested in DVDs that cost very little but are interrupted frequently with commercials that you can't fast forward through. Disney did something like that in the beginning of Tarzan I think it was. Something like 5 minutes of Disney commercials that you had no control over. Ick.
/paraphrase
No one can stop you from creating artwork.
/paraphrase
My ass.
I want to write and direct artworks. I want to support fans of my work who want to translate it.
If the media hardware is made by publishers, I'm going to get raped by the pricing of recording hardware, which would make it impossible for me to concentrate on projects where need to express superceeds the need to make a killing. Both me and my fans, who could do better at advertising my work than anyone else, will get fucked over by the blacklists and all the rest of the paranoid psychosis that seems to have bewitched publishers.
I have no problem with artists designing hardware. However, publishers are in a position to fuck everyone on both sides, consumers and artists.
I'm forced to sacrifice opportunities because a bunch of publishers can't get their heads out of their asses to use the net rather than screw it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I've been "speaking with my dollars" for years, and it's done this much good: None.
Think about how it looks from the manufacturers' perspective. It's a null event. They would have to infer, from all the other data they collect, that you would have made the purchase if not for this one feature. Think about how unlikely they are to make that connection. Unless you explicitely state to that manufacturer that you are not purchasing their product because of this feature, you have no chance of them noticing your claim. If, on the other hand, you DO write a Letter, then they get to handily ignore you, because they've got no reason to believe that you didn't just fire off 15 letters to 15 manufacturers with no intent of ever making a purchase. Call me cynical, but I can't think of any way to win in a situation like this. There is no mechanism outside of the lawsuit to communicate consumer displeasure to a large corporation.Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
Let me guess? You also thought the movie people were stupid when they made movies in color since, obviously, they couldn't be shown on your TV and no one would EVER want to spend the money for a color TV! And no one would ever need more than 640Kb of RAM.
I was very sceptical of DVD until I watched my first DVD movie. I can't watch VHS anymore. I've never actually seen HDTV but I'm excited about the possibilities.
Mmmm.. Donuts
--
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Nothing to see here. Mooooove along...
We're talking about a digital ID that the HDTV reads off of the VCR, right? So, if this thing comes to pass, some enterprising young geek will market a little black box that goes between your VCR and your TV and will mask the ID. Simple but effective. Best Buy and Radio Shack will make a ton of money on it, the MPAA will not have changed anything, and HDTV manufacturers will eventually drop this silly idea.
Well, duh.
Not wanting to belittle your comment, but did you ever think that one of the reasons we see so many commericals is on the off chance that you may forget to fast forward through them? How about the fact that while channel flipping you see the same spots on all the channel?
The programs cost them money to produce or buy the rights to air. They want programs that will get more people watching so their commercials are seen by more people.
So you are in favor of pay per view?
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Pay Per View is not a useful model for making much money. It allows for incremental revenue to an already released product, porn and other *quality* programming, but I doubt that anyone is seriously thinking that PPV will be a long term moneymaker for broadcasters.
BTW: In case you haven't heard, the FCC has been sold to the highest bidder.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I think I see one way in which this may backfire. Say 50% of the people that watch a popular show can't watch it at the time it airs, and have to record it. Suddenly, they can no longer record it. Half of these people are so devoted that they change their schedules to accomodate. That still leaves 25% of the viewers not watching the show. So, ratings go down by 25%, ad revenue goes down by 25%.
Oops.
I would expect some of the less reputable manufacturers to come out with hardware that spoofs the ID of a more reputable manufacturer. Perhaps they would make the ID somehow software changeable so that users could input whatever ID they wanted. This could cause all sorts of problems for this type of scheme.
Don't they have to be able to track books on an individual level to know what books need to be returned when? I've never heard of a library that does not have this ability on some level.
-no broken link
You think DIVX died in spite of lots of people liking the idea? :-)
Apparently, of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.
Its basicly a TiVo at the digital signal levbel off my staellite dish. This emans 12 hours not 20 of rcird time but I get a signal quality equal to the original digital signal.
All this means is that there will be crackz available, and averything is digital, so you get a good quality picture with a new ROM with embedded Linux.
And like with the DVDs, there will come cheap chinese equipment where the producer couln't afford the copy protection circuits, and left them out. My DVD player is all regions. And they use the cheaper video chip that can't generate Macrovision noise to confuse my video.
I tried to Americanize my dog. Alas, it's still a dog.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
With the recent advancments in hardware reverse engineering protection, maybe it will be much more difficult than anything before to crack, then again people are persistent, and this may breed a new form of "hardware hacker" or whatever.
/NOT/ to buy into this technology, as your marvelous HDTV compatible VCR that will allow you perhaps to record a lower quality version of the stream will stop working as soon as some guy on the other side of the planet cracks the technology and it is considered "compromised".
/REALLY/ pisses me off.
Just because they make attempts to break it open and look inside doesn't mean it can't be broken, indeed the key length is "only" 56 bits (ahh, those export restrictions) and the algorithm is your basic XOR affair, maybe it wont be too long before this is cracked by simple observing the outputs. maybe not.
suppose the television companies are kind enough to broadcast zeroes along the stream for a bit, the "encrypted" stream that comes out the other side will actually be keys used to encrypt the stream, perhaps the TV companies will never broadcast this, and give supposed blackness and silence an artificial noise. maybe not.
The section about connecting an illegal device, and how the thing stops streaming within 2 seconds if it detects an illegal device. excuse me but how does it do this, whats to stop you from connecting a data logger to the system from the start, that doesn't shout "hello I'm intecepting your stream!". That sort of thing, (ability to tell if recieved/data has been intercepted or not) is in the realms of quantum cryptography surely.
Another thing that i noticed about this was the key revokation feature discussed, does this not sound like another ideal argument
I'm sure this will generate many happy customers when a popular device is compromised, imagine the backlash that would have resulted to this revocation feature being present in DVD players, as soon as some c*nt from the DVD/CCA notices this illegal circumvention device called DeCSS floating about, he could disable all DVD players in the world at the press of a button.
This sort of thing
but i find solace in that it will be broken.
Conclusion: It wont work.
I am happy to be corrected on any of my points.
skiy. www.Smokedot.org Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
If you asked the average consumer in the market for a VHS recorder what MacroVision is, you'd only get a handful that had any idea or even heard of it. Nor will most of the people in the market for DVD players know what region and CSS encoding is. The reason being is that none of the so-called safeguards against this -- journalists and the media, who's jobs it is to inform people of such issues have the authorization or space to report such stories since it's always filled with more 'glamorous' stories of crime, etc. The other issue is the same companies who are supposed to be reporting this to the average consumer are owned by the same companies that don't want this information public.
We can whine about this on Slashdot and on the EFF websites until the end of time, but unless there's a way to inform the general public via a media outlet they have access to, public outrage will never materialize and nothing will change. People are being kept in the dark on purpose, make no mistake, since consumer enlightenment of the nitty gritty details serves no purpose to those with power and influence in the media.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Yes, but the case won't be tested on this particular hardware - the DVD case will set the precedent, and this will simply follow it - unless a reason can be found to argue compellingly that there is a significant difference between the two cases.
Salocin.com
Well just refuse to buy it, and make a point of writing to JVC to tell them why you will be buying a competing product. They won't bother trying to sell a product no one wants
The FCC is not a lawmaking or institution, it is a commission.
You'd have to violate something in here first. Everything else is a civil offense.
The FBI doesn't investigate things under state jurisdiction.
CPRM isn't a law...
As usual, IANAL.
That would be the FCC, not the FBI, as the original poster asked. Anyway, as part of the executive branch of the federal government, they don't make laws - they enforce laws created by Congress, not by JVC/Sony/Panasonic/etc's lawyers.
Just in case it caused any confusion as to what I meant, my original response had a spurious "or" in it.
Just as an aside, the last two digits of prices are frequently codes for the items status w/in the company inventory. $x.88 usually means it's a closeout item and being discontinued.
- - - - -
- - - - -
automatictaxistopelectriccigarettelovebaby
The point is, progression of quality is constent because whoever can do it gets an edge. HDTV is better - and not just by a little bit. People will want everything they can get and high resolution is enough of a leap to make people spend more money.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Have you ever seen HDTV? I am guessing you haven't because it looks incredible and I think that anyone who has seen it is pretty excited about the possibilities. You are right though that content matters more than quality, that's why people go back to playing emulation and bootleg movies on the internet. HDTV is great, and I think that once people see it, it will be hard to go back.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Can anyone name an incident where copy protection really worked and there was no way to get around it. I can't even think of something that wasn't fairly easy to get around. Of course I am only 19 and don't have the history that some slashdot people do, but I can't remember anything that was really impossible to manipulate. Cable TV seems like the hardest to me and even then there are cable descramblers and such all over the place.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
If I could invent an extremely high resolution image with no flicker at all, I could control the world!
Or you'd just sell it for $4,000 as an Apple Cinema Display. 1.6 megapixel, and LCDs have no flicker.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
As with any major market shift, it only takes time. Just look at where we are with CDs...
why this is such a big deal? Don't get all bitter and flame me but as one of those people that just don't record anthing from TV, I'm a bit lost. Is everyone getting pissed off 'cause this is a "death of a thousand cuts" strategy from the hardware/content providers or is this the "One big thing" that could end it all? These debates are a bit lost on me as I don't really give a shit about recording anything from TV. Last time I recorded something from TV was when I was interviewed on the local news. Like 5 years ago. If I understand this correctly, certain devices won't unload their content onto other devices if they don't like their certificate or "ID". This will provide the content people with some form of assurance that their stuff isn't being copied?
First off, can you enlighten me as to the amount of the "fortune" the napster people have made? I don't recall that they've "made" a cent.
Second of all, I'm not sure that there is this vast untapped market for hacks and workarounds that you do. I suspect that the vast majority of people could give a shit about how their VCR/DVD player encrypts or transfers the signal. All Joe 6-pack wants to do is stick his porn DVD in the player and have it work. Sure, he might be a sheep but he could care less. I, too, am of this mind. If I want to watch a movie, I can do it via PPV or go to blockbuster. If I want to watch it several times, I'll buy the fucking thing. In essence, I could care less how it works, as long as it works. I will, however, agree with you on region controls. I'm baffled as to why this is such an issue with the content industry.
These "Casual pirates" DON'T cause a problem. If people subscribe to a TV channel, its a lot of effort to tape things for any purpose other than time shifting. Very few poeple are interested in recording PPV movies since people really only want to see it once anyway.
However, this will most likely add to the price. Surely the people who are having their content protected should subsidise this.
Would analog go off the air if the majority of TVs out there were not analog? The congresscritter's phones would burn up from the calls if suddenly everyone had to go out and buy a TV they don't want (or need) because the old ones stopped working. Video tapes sell well, still, as do new VCRs. With as much balleyhoo over DVDs, DVDs still don't sell as many vhs tapes.
Yeah, but they don't keep any statistics ... they just need a list of all books you have borrowed and not returned, and when you return the book, they zap it from that list ...
you get the picture, right?
True. Sorry, I phrased myself bad there. What I meant was that it's not necessary (sp?) for the library to keep a record of what sort of books you as an individual is loaning just to make sure they know who doesn't return his books ...
ooh! small shiny object! you can examine it, take it apart, find out how it works, and use what you learned for bigger and better things.
hmmm. hdcp and tv. you can look at what they tell you to look at; just don't think about it, learn about it, or, heaven forbid, find out how it works. what fun is that?
"forget about your silly whim, it doesn't fit the plan"
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Have you ever tried doing that? It won't work, guaranteed (refresh rates don't match - it won't work). However, it should be fairly easy to get to the analog signal inside the decoder box/TV. They have to convert to analog at some point, even if it's inside a chip. Who says you can't make a decoder box to convert from the RGB signals that go to the CRT, or whatever device they will put there. Also, it's impossible to lock anything if you have the key - it's just that principle that's flawed. Any piece of hardware can be reverse engineered - not by a 14 year old, of course, but some company in China could easily make a clone of whatever chip they would put in the decoders. How do you think they make clones of video game joysticks or fake Adaptec controllers or stuff like macrovision removers? Assuming there'll be some incentive (and there will be, because not only geeks and nerds use VCRs to tape shows), this stuff will either get cracked or will not even appear on the market.
Uhm, since when do you not have to pay for cable, or satellite? I'm assuming you just use your antenna. And if you are paying for TV on a monthly basis, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE PAYING FOR?
Whatever. Until they force me to install cybernetic devices in my eyes and ears that control what I can see, I can always record the signal.
In the end, sound is nothing more than patterns of air molecules vibrating, and video is merely photons coming from a glass surface.
Like I said, I'm not concerned yet.
I'm just moving out into my first appartment and plan to get a satalite dish of some sort instead of cable and I only have a DVD player, no VCR. What I plan to do is get a TV tuner card in my computer and record TV shows onto my harddrive. Then I will burn them to a V-CD and watch it on my DVD player. It should work wonders.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
I haven't paid a dime for TV for over a year now. We seem to do just fine with the handful of stations that we are able to pick up. I don't live in Nebraska or Utah. I live in Vancouver, Canada, where the greater metropolitan area covers a population of about 3 million people or so. Not a _huge_ city, by any means... but not exactly hicksville either. I _could_ spend $30 a month to get another 7 dozen more channels or so, but I really can't be bothered because most of it is utter crap.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The difference here is that media is not scarce. Anybody is able to produce art. Even if hollywood and the big companies would like you to believe you can't have good quality content without them. They will realize, once the general public will be too pissed off by protection techniques and will begin to look into other sources of content, that they don't have a monopoly on creativity.----->
While you are correct in stating that they do not have a monopoly on creativity, Hollywood does have a de-facto monopoly on PUBLICITY. That's why you don't see many (or any) high-quality independent films at your local theatre.
I know. I own one. (A theatre, that is.) And if a movie doesn't have multiple millions of dollars pumped into pre-release advertising and so on then no matter how good the film is, the chance of it finding its way to your friendly local theatre is just about nil.
The film companies, by and large, do not provide the "creativity" or the "talent". They do provide the money, though, and without that you're pretty much out of luck.
So I agree completely that there are a great many high-quality films available. There are also a great many high-quality books and so on. But how many of them do you see? And how many of those that you do see are you seeing because of the associated advertising campaign rather than the actual content.
I could have the very best movie in the whole world playing at my theatre right now. If nobody knows that I've got it, who's going to come and watch it? Further, if it's something that you've never heard of, are you likely to come and see it, or just zip over to the next theatre and watch the latest James Bond instead?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
When is someone going to wake up and start an up-front "legit" business to get around all this content control stuff? There's a LOT OF MONEY TO BE MADE from makind region-free DVD players, content-control-free HDTV stuff, and so on. /.ers keep whining about the legitimate applications being oppressed - serve them! Make a buck! If Napster can openly make a fortune helping people steal music, then surely someone can make a fortune getting past all this oppressive tech by serving legitimate uses!
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
This just seems to feed into (and off of) the ongoing cult of victimization : "Ooh, look, it's not my fault things are mucked up, even though I directly supported the system with my $$$." The fact of the matter is, the government is as likely to mess this up further as to protect our true interests for us. And, heck, I even believe in government, and I say this.
Here's my proposal: Manufacturers and "content providers" should be allowed to use whatsoever encryption or protection they want... but use of such protection -- use of any mechanism which interferes with the rights of Fair Use, First Sale, timeshifting, spaceshifting, etc. -- obviates and renders null the copyright.
No, really, hear me out. A copyright holder would then have two mutually exclusive means to secure control over copying. The first is the traditional one; that is, the courts and the rule of law. If someone infringes a copyright, let the whole weight of the legal system fall upon him or her. The second mechanism is technical means of protection, such as encryption. In this case, if someone is clever enough to defeat the protection, the copyright holder would have no legal recourse. The work would be public domain.
I think it horribly unfair that, under current practice, copyright holders get to employ the full use of the courts and get to employ mechanisms that abridge my rights as a legitimate user/owner of media. They should have choose one or the other.
After a few glaring failures and compromises of the encryption, I'm betting they'd concede and go back to enforcement of copyright against people who actually do break their bottom line, leaving us legitimate users alone.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
You haven't tried voting twice yet, have you? ;-)
Trust me, slashdot _knows_ what you check, which computer/IP you used to check it, and when.
If you are logged in like me they even know who checked it.
But I'm ok with that in this case. I feel safe in putting at least that much trust in CmdrTaco.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
On a different note, it really is demand that controls how much we pay for supply, and what gets supplied to us. If you want to timeshift digital TV, would there be a tuner that you can pull an analog signal out of for your analog VCR, or would there have to be some sort of masquerading device that you can put between your 'bad' VCR to make it look like a valid recorder?
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
You're seeing the piracy issue, good for you. This isn't about that.
Know that disclaimer at the end of most sporting events (like Major League Baseball games)? Or other re-transmission disclaimers on many TV shows?
Most of them mention not only the illegal stuff, but specifically do not include recording it for private use. If you aren't re-transmitting it or profiting from it in any way, then it's generally legal.
Note this generally only applies to something on TV, not to rentals, etc. Don't think it applies to Pay-Per-View either, could be wrong.
Dark Nexus
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
-Channel give money to production house
-Production house produces show to give to channel
-Consumer gets show from channel for free
-Consumer then complains they can't tape show they didn't pay for (?)
Do we have any right to argue this? It's not like the DVD situation where some people have argued against me (quite vehemently) that when you purchase a DVD you should be allowed to make copies for yourself. This is a one-time show deal from a content-producer which you are getting for free. How could we possible argue that we need to tape these shows?
-
-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Actually, I inquired to the head of the Wake Co. Public Libraries why we have so many romance novels and so few reference books in our libraries. I was told that they want to encourage use of the library, and that's what gets checked out most frequently.
So they DO track the reading habits of patrons. Okay, maybe not on an individual level, but they do know what they're checking out most frequently. And they're computerizing more, so they should be able to track patrons on an individual level.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Seems like in their jihad to crush all piracy even at the expense of their customers... they choose to break the law. IANAL, but I'm positive the Home Recording Act says this kind of BS is illegal.
Maybe this will be the issue that'll bring the DMCA under judicial review, I certainly hope so.
er, I was going to flame you, but it really isn't worth it.
But it is good to know that if I put ya in a room with uber high res wallpaper of an open field, and maybe get some kind of fan blowing in there I can sit around for a few hours and watch you run into the walls.
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
hehe, he got ya
check the last line:
Read other fake news..
(the word 'read' was a link to segfault.org)
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
You're a customer. Don't put up with this crap. I've bought one DVD in my life, and that was for the purpose of testing the Linux DVD players. The DVD CCA pisses me off, so they don't get my money.
Same goes with any manufacturer who supports SDMI (I've already returned one portable player). High-definition TV that limits my freedom to timeshift or make copies for friends is no different. A certain dorm room at Georgia Tech will not be equipped with one of these.
If enough people do this, it'll stop happening. If enough people don't do this (the likely case), we deserve what we get.
-John
It often leads me to wonder why people contribute to a discussion if they have little of value to add to the discussion.
If I'm reading about HDTV, I don't want to see the word "book."
- Ando
Umm... Why did this get posted in the "Slashdot.org" meta-category?
The majority of the consumers will either not care about this or they will be beaten into submission by the relentless PR machine of the content producers. In either case they will go and buy a high-definition TV sooner or late. When the analog signal goes off the air everyone has to make a choice between buying an HDTV or having learn to live without the magic tube.
I totally agree, could somebody tell me what, of everything I watch on tv, needs to be in high definition? I use tivo, and that REDUCED the quality of the picture, but I watch more tv because tivo makes it easier- if I'm an average consumer, what does that say about us, and how we'll accept HDTV?
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
YES I HAVE, it looks cool, but who cares? I go to the movies too but I'm not bitching about the dust and hair I see projected on the screen. Consider the millions and millions of people that dont have perfect eyesight and cant see the screen perfectly. Consider all those people that had a bit of money to spend and they bought those projector tvs. Those SUCK, but people with money bought them anyway. And consider this, digital vcrs like tivo will not work, or work well, with HDTV. Having used tivo I can tell you that it is, without any doubt, a disruptive technology of great magnitude, and it will be less compatable with HDTV, which JUST has a better picture. I'm convinced that HDTV and digital vcrs are incompatable. Right now my tivo can only encode/decode a single channel, so I cant record two things at once, or watch one thing and record another. Soon they will offer "multi encoding/decoding" and people will learn to love it, and when they get HDTV, digital vcrs will probably only sample the signals, killing the resolution, or just barely handle one.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
the color movie thing is a very bad analogy, color was a new feature, or added dimension, HD is just higher resolution. And that ram reference, look at who you're quoting.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
my point is, HDTV is NOT better. Would you say that a car that is faster is better? I'm sitting at an Athlon800 with 256M ram and two 20G hard drives and a GForce2. The only time I can tell the difference between my machine now and my last machine which was a k62400 is when I boot up into windows and play games. Now, typing into netscape, if feels no different, it is NOT better. Having billions more pixels on my tv screen will make it LOOK better, but it will not BE better. And dont tell me I'm being old fashioned, I'm watching everything through tivo, and I couldnt stand to go back to my vcr. Sometimes "superior" technology makes a difference, sometimes it doesnt.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
After reading posts about this, I think that this could be one of the best things to happen to America. Think about it -- the media companies switch to pay-per-view mode and drive away much of their viewer base and eliminate the need for advertising all at the same time. The net result will be that Americans will move to other forms of entertainment such as *gasp* reading a book, going to the theater, or *another gasp* spending quality time with their families.
The media will lose the strangle hold they have on the American mind and people will begin to think for themselves for the first time in decades.
Of course, they (the media companies) will probably lobby (and win) that TVs should be required in every household for the good of mankind.......
Damn right, and in fact the status of the MS Walkman is now -N66 (dropped by CompUSA due to insufficient sales; selling off remaining stock). In contrast, Daikatana was RTVed (Returned To Vendor), and its status on the inventory computer is -N65 (returned to vendor because it sucked).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Let's face it, without entertainment or leisure of some sort, we go insane. Companies buy into this because they feel that they can get ultra-rich. Just look at Sony; the nefarious team of Norio Ohaga and Akio Morita has almost completely Japanized the entirety of American culture. Fortunately, the people have learned; just one week ago, the Memory Stick Walkman was dropped by CompUSA, and dropped in price from $399.99 to $299.88. However, don't you buy that thing! I want to stand and laugh when its price plummets to $39.88.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The days of simple PnP pirated video are prob coming to an end.
As the hardware gets smarter and smarter that only means that the game of cat and mouse between the pirates and broadcasters are is going to get more and more heated. As boradcasters get smarter and start adopting new tech, the people supplying the public with the means to circumvent are gonna have to catch up. Remember all those early copies of Phrack that had all those HOWTO-Cable Piracy tx files?
RANT
The worst part is that the paradigm of "pirate" is shifting more and more towards the mainstream, instead of on the fringe as it always was. It's gonna be John Q. Sixpack with his pirated (made in China) VCR that can record everything he wants, watching TV on his pirate TV (made in Taiwan) connected to his pirate Sattelite dish (modded in the good ole US) that lets him watch East Coast NBC and West Coast NBC.
I guess the assumption that Corps are only worried about the "big time" pirates are over. Even I myself had the assumption that they were only worried about the rings that were dupeing their movies across the Atlantic/Pacific in bulk and that reg ppl were small potatoes and could only be prosecuted (picked on) at a loss. Are those days over? Will the FBI bust into trailer parks across the US under FCC/DMCA/UCITA/CPRM laws? Stayed tuned....
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
Who says this hypothetical APEX box has to identify itself correctly? What if you could configure it to masquerade as a law-abiding device? Download valid device id's off the 'net?
That's not such a big jump from configuring your CSS zone on your DVD player.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
They don't really want to prevent you from timeshifting, they just would like better control of it. Right now, if record a show on TV, and then watch it later, you can choose to skip/ignore commericials by using the fast forward. With the digital video recorders, such as Tivo and Replay, you can still do this. However, if you follow some of PR and things going on around Tivo and Replay, you'll find out that the broadcasters would like to have more control of advertising when you are time-shifting. So how does all of this apply, well if the above article is true, then only certain digital video recorders which give broadcasters control over advertising (or additional advertising revenues) will be allowed to record said DTV content. Just my two cents
...get an old VCR. I'm quite sure neither of mine, both made in the mid-80's, would recognize this silly signal.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Besides that, there are millions and millions of old televisions out there.... it will be ages before they are all replaced with HDTV ones.
The crypto doesn't look that tough (56-bit keys) Like CSS, this will probably be more a legal solution than a technical one-- anyone who reverse-engineers the system, or distributes cracking software (even for legit reasons) will be taken to court.
Absolutely. I love fast-forwarding ads on my Tivo, I do it without exception. But I know none of this will work if Tivo gains widespread popularity. Some people say that the solution is to make more interesting commercials, but why would the industry chance it when they could instead take control of Tivo and every other VCR company-- which is exactly what this technology provides for. It gives the TV and movie industry absolute power over all hardware manufacturers. For their part, the hardware manufacturers aren't complaining, because the lucky companies who get a piece of the action are going to get very rich. Why do you think Tivo keeps such close ties to the TV-industry?
There's a reason you can't think of an instance where the copy protection held: whatever "it" was that couldn't be cracked never got distributed very well and thus languished securely in oblivion.
is the fact that I'm an R.N. and often have to work over-night shifts. I often record a few programs over the week to view when I'm at home. This would totally mess me up as far as following any programs that I might want to watch but work while they're on air (like farscape, X-files, Nypd blue to name some). The other person that mentioned that "this might be all good" has a point. I already spend less time watching the boob-tube, I supplemented the time with my wife and the computer. If this is enacted as the article suggests, then what's the point. So many corporations are trying to pull the M$ stunt of trying to control all aspects of our lives for a profit. I honestly think that they think the majority of Americans (and others around the world) are completely mindless and devoid of the ability to find alternative means of spending their time. If this is true, they're in for a rude awaking.
Crackhead. Sorry, but it's still just TV, TV with a pretty picture. But it's JUST TV. If you're the type of person that can be influenced by it, you're probabally distracted by small shiny objects also...
Piracy may or may not be a "real" problem to them. But if they bring enough cases to court and make enough publicity about the matter, then eventually, the perception becomes, "hey, this is a real serious problem and we need to create laws to protect the 'rights' of the media companies".
I think they are just crying like babies to the point where they can get the courts to mandate laws on their behalf (read: to benefit them at the absolute cost of the consumer) when indeed, the problem probly doesn't exist like they are portraying it.
Another problem, is that just because someone else is breaking the law (and of course, some of the advantages the Internet provide for such people), they have to automatically treat every comsumer like a criminal and treat them as such. It's not "innocent until proven guilty", it's "guilty because you're a potential pirate".
The media has too much power. I somehow doubt enough people will refrain from purchasing such products enough to persuade them. What will happen is if that happens, they'll just say "see, because of these pirates, sales are down xx%" (read: we need more laws and to take away more rights of the consumer). All these laws and cases that happen to protect the companies and harm the consumers, why we never have any say-so in the matter?
I guess if we each send $100 bill (a few thousand of us) with our letters to congress about the matter, we can, too, buy our own laws... he he.. but we'd rather spend that same $100 on porn memberships, that's why this won't change in our behalf. And the matter will only get worse. People always bitch about companies buying their politician, people can too, just send money along with your letter of protest, enough people do it, someone will listen. Until we do, things won't change.
-- Me
High res is great! I want it on my 'puter 19" LCD as soon as I can get it. Then I can see all this great stuff so much better--but I'd rather be on line or reading a book than watching tv, because of content. Seeing stuff better is great if there's something better to see. TV is the opiate of the masses.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
I find the use of the words "high quality content" enormously amusing. After all, we're still talking about TV and there ain't much high quality content on it now. I haven't found anything on it worth taping in years.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
How long did it take for Circuit City to drop Divx ? Same will happen here if people don't buy into it? As bandwidth and computer speeds go up, the lenght of time that a code works to lockout ( the use of your equipment) goes down
Time-shifting is recording broadcast for later replay.
But that's what these HDTV recorders will allow you to do.
What they may not all allow is more like archiving, and much more like piracy. SCMS was an attempt to allow archiving while preventing piracy. I haven't heard much about SCMS in the past few years. Gee. I guess it worked. It sure stopped itself from being copied more than once.
--Blair