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TV Networks Sue ReplayTV
Robert Wilde writes: "Three major television networks have sued Sonicblue over the ReplayTV 4000 and asked the court to grant an injunction to prevent the sale of the device." Here's another blurb about the lawsuit. All you readers that predicted that Replay would get sued over this device, give yourselves a pat on the back.
Unless replay is going to keep some kind of centralized database of who is transmitting what to whom, it would be very hard to enforce a fifteen retansmit limit if a bunch of reasonably competent hackers decided to break it. In any protection scenario, you've got to have some trusted element in the equation. If you're putting the hardware into the hands of the public, it can't be considered trusted. Since users A and B can't be trusted, you would need some kind of an intermediary trusted element, like a decryption key server, to make sure shows couldn't be pirated.
is this type of lawsuit going to happen to the "pop-up" killers and ad blockers that proliferate the internet today? It will happen.
This is a hedge to counter the obvious point that TV broadcast are distributed widely and freely by the networks, and therefore it's hard to argue that copyright infringement will significantly damage the networks' financial interests... But ooh, if people can hit that +30 second button, it's a totally different story from having a fast-forward like a VCR or Tivo.
If you don't like seeing the media companies taking this sort of action, there's only one thing for you to do:
CONTACT YOUR GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE!
That's right, get off your behind, write a letter, make a phone call, take a drive, fire off an email. DO SOMETHING!!!
And after you've contacted your representatives, tell a friend. Tell several friends. Write to a newspaper. Get the word out.
In order for a judge to instate an injunction, the plantiffs have to provide evidence that:
1) The likely ruling will be in favor of the plantiffs. Given the historical precedent of the VCR lawsuit this seems unlikely.
2) The injunctive relief is necessary to prevent some sort of serious damage to the plantiffs. In this case, they can't really proove that they would suffer any consequences so immediate as to require such a remedy.
So if they get a judge with their head screwed on straight I think Sonicblue will be okay. Of course I've seen a lot of insane judgements lately on these sorts of issues. So, I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed.
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Unlike the music industry, which is a flawed system where the record companies make oodles of money while ripping off both consumers and artists, the TV industry works well - viewers get tons of entertainment, with enough variety to satisfy almost everyone, everyone involved is well paid, and advertising pays for everything. (Cable fees and whatnot are nothing compared to advertising revenues.)
Is suing a company for putting a "skip commercial" button morally right? Probably not. But if the current commercial system is rendered invalid by technology, the alternatives will be worse: either a great increase in the costs to the consumer, or far more annoying and invasive advertisements during programs.
Given how much of a rip-off movie and CD prices are, it seems we might not want to fight all that hard to take away the one piece of free mass entertainment.
When I hear about devices like this one it really makes me wonder how hard it would be to recreate one of your own. There are plenty of video capture cards on the market today not to mention the TV cards, many of which are supported by linux. Encoding audio and video streams into MPEG in real time should be no big deal to a 1.4 Ghz athlon provided well written code is used. At worst a dual processor system would be needed. There are plenty of video cards on the market with video out built in. So my question is, why aren't hobbyists homebrewing systems that will do what these devices are designed to?
I'm seriously considering it myself for the simple reasons that it doesn't sound all that hard and the gatekeepers of the thinly veiled propaganda known as television would disapprove.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I sure would like to see more discussion about the overall intellectual property system and less moralizing and preaching from one soapbox or another. Pollux touches on it in his comments about the broadcasting business model. Yes, maybe the business model is wrong. Maybe the whole intellectual property model is wrong, and I mean in the sense of brokenness not in the sense of wrongdoing. I'm not trying to be the little voice of socialism or hacker utopia, I am simply saying that technology has opened holes in some of the basic assumptions that underlie economics. Like the holes in airport security, they've always been there waiting for somebody to step through them.
What made the broadcasting industry possible was not the invention of the technology, it was that the expense of operating the technology limited its use to a few people who could afford to invest in it. Same with the recording industry and the publishing industry. The whole copymaking and distribution business is what made intellectual property a meaningful idea in the first place. Go all the way back to the printing press. If Gutenberg's invention had been so cheap and simple that virtually anybody could reel off as many copies of anything they wanted, the whole copyright concept itself probably wouldn't exist today. We never would have had a publishing industry with investments to protect, motivated to turn copyright into a holy word.
We have the concept of IP because technology was developed in a certain order. Expand your mind a little. Instead of the knee-jerk "what about artist's rights?" reaction, try to forget for a moment that you ever heard of intellectual property. A minstrel wanders into your village and sings a song in a tavern. A storyteller tells a story. They leave town. The local minstrels and storytellers repeat the material, then they wander off to other towns, etc. The performers get paid to perform, in fact some of them might make more money than the creators of the material (no ethical problem there -- the copymaking industry does that in the real world). But the songs and the stories themselves are just sort of floating around in the air. They aren't intellectual property, but they also aren't public property, they aren't even property at all. They are just part of your culture.
So in the hypothetical model time passes and someone invents the Internet, and suddenly you can zip this material off to your cousin in the next village effortlessly. Nobody gets majorly bothered because the fact of who created the material is not economically significant in this model. The minstrels and storytellers can keep doing their thing as long as people still value live performance.
When you separate the fundamental ideas from those that are merely customary (or lucrative), the righteous moralizing everybody has been doing on all sides of IP issues starts to sound like arguing over whether Superman could outrun the Flash. Maybe the real truth is that there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property" at all. Or to borrow from Galaxy Quest, "There is no quantum flux, there is no auxiliary, there's no God Damn Ship!"
Intellectual property is not a god-given right, it's not a "given" at all. It's an investment protection mechanism that was invented by investors, not inventors. At some point we have to move on. The economy would be a lot different without IP, but nobody really knows how. On the other hand, cars and trains might not exist if the concept of "wheeled travel" had been treated as the intellectual property of whoever invented the wagon.
IP appears to be breaking, if not broken already. IP isn't an axiom or a law of nature, it's a tradition. The really disappointing thing is that most of the bright people who could be thinking up a different system seem to be spending their time arguing over how the contracts are written.
Rant completed.
In the UK, we have two commercial-free channels (BBC1 and BBC2) - These are paid for through a "TV licence", payable by anyone who owns a TV and receives broadcasts on it (burden of proof is on you if you do not receive any signals) Even broadcasts of non-BBC channels is included.
This license costs approx. £120 (GBP, ~$180) per year, and a massive infrastructure exists to prevent avoidance - Detector vans, databases etc... Last I heard public opinion was split about 50/50 as to whether to replace the license with advertising on these two channels, and therefore lose the massive cost of operating this infrastructure into the bargain.
Does the US really want to exchange their currently simple television infrastructure for one small "fast-forward advert" button? Surely you are not so lazy that you can't use an ordinary Fast-forward button, and let-go at the end of the adverts (TIVO style) ???
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Granted this may no longer be true, but I remember a Radio Electronics magazine from 10 years ago or better that had a project to modify your TV so that it would detect a signal in the feed and turn down the volume during commercials. (during commercials, not dynamic range compression)
This project wasn't exactly super-expensive high-tech. I'm not sure if it is still possible since Commercial Advance VCRs seem to detect commercial fade-in/fade-out, which is more complex; if it is though, it is a fairly easy way to do reliable detection.
Heh, sure they will. You miss the main point of hte PVR (ReplayTV, TiVo, UTV, DISHPlayer). If I start watching a 8:00 show at 8:15 I can skip all the commercials and finish up right about 9:00. I can choose to read a book, debug some code, or watch a half hour TV show (skipping the half that is commercials) and finish up at the same time you do.
Why would I possibly want to start watching at 8:00?
The only way to get me watch commercials is to make more good ones. I watch those. If I'm not in a hurry. And I notice them at 60x (or they start the block).