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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.
great idea!
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No-reg Link to article:
http://archive.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Ne tworks-ReplayTV.html
Music is something people generally listen to over and over again. A favourite song might be played 100 times by a person. On the other hand, a single episode of favourite TV show will generally only be watched once or twice. Even die hard Star Wars fans have probably only seen the movie a couple of hundred times!
TV has always been free. The networks have an explicit agreement with producers to show advertising. They have no such agreement with TV consumers to actually watch them. If the Networks say this sort of technology will cost them money, well their business model is wrong.
As the happy owner of a Replay TV, I can tell you that it has changed TV forever. Prime Time is whenever I sit down in front of the couch. I regularly watch two or more episodes of a program in a row. Episodic programs are much more interesting when they can be viewed back-to-back rather than week-to-week. I'm addicted to the pause and rewind features. Phone rings in the middle of West Wing? No problem - I don't miss a sentence.
One of the big complaints is that I get to skip commercials. Do I? You damn betcha! I don't waste a moment on cheesy ads pushing depilatories, cleansers not available in stores (or in states with active consumer fraud statutes, I suspect), and Slim Whitman retrospectives. However, I DO stop and watch ads that are either funny (Amstel Lite, for example), or are for something in which I'm interested.
As for sharing recorded programs across the Internet, it should be noted that this feature is for sharing programs with other Replay 4000 owners. I'm sure it will be able to be hacked, but how does it differ from sharing my Babylon 5 tapes with unfortunate friends who don't have cable?
I hope Sonic Blue is able to vigorously defend these suits. I'm sick to the teeth of network executives who want to control what, when, and how I watch.
For more on this phenomenon, check out the last section of Michael Lewis' book, Next.
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I don't see them suing Tivo, a company that NBC owns a big stake in. Why? Because they don't have this one silly button? I can understand why this product might be seen as a threat by the networks... What I don't understand is their legal case for copyright infringement. Why the heck does the ability to skip forward 30 seconds make the difference between an "un-infringing" product and an infringing one?
The networks are picking on a weak, underfunded company that doesn't have the resources to fight them. What makes it even dirtier is that one of the plaintiffs has a financial stake in that company's direct competitor.
How ironic that it only took two weeks after SonicBlue won a Technological/Engineering Emmy Award for the Advancement of Television for the big boys to crackdown on them. Too bad we still have media people wanting to control information rather than letting it free.
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 not really intended to shut SONICblue down. As the article states, the defendants and the plaintiffs are also negotiating a business deal. This lawsuit is nothing more than a pressure tactic designed to get a more favorable deal.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
They have joined it. They just joined a different team. NBC has a stake in Tivo, which is essentially the same product as ReplayTV.
Why are they suing Replay instead of Tivo? Ostensibly because Replay has a "commercial advance" button that lets you skip forward thirty seconds. Apparently this button spells the difference between a copyright-infringing product (Replay) and a perfectly ok product that NBC does business with (Tivo). Who could have known that the ability to fast forward your video footage would make a product "infringing"?
If the networks win (which they probably will, as I doubt the defendant will spend the dough to fight this one), they not only damage a competitor to one of their interests (Tivo), but they also gain a legal precedent for limiting what has been found to be a perfectly legal practice (time shifting TV.)
For those without nytimes account: news.com
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People have been skipping ads, not only via VCRs, Tivos, and other timeshifting devices, but by flipping channels and leaving, for years.
I thought it was an accepted fact that advertisers are gambling that you will see an ad, and that the ad will have an effect on your buying patterns.
What next, will media corporations sue us if we don't buy advertiser's products?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
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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Which bring me to my next point: if a television network is going to beam this shit into my home via a publically regulated electromagnetic spectrum, where do they get off telling me what I can do with the signal?
Hmm...given the great steaming pile of crap produced by the US TV networks in recent years, I'd say it would be no great loss.
Really, decent programming is pretty thin on the ground, and most good TV originated from other sources (independent productions, cable TV, internationally...). If big bad ol' "commercial skip" and the ability to share programming with fellow Replay owners results in the death of a TV network or three I say let technology prevail!
If such a shakeup doesn't improve the quality of TV then at least maybe more people will extricate their fat asses from their chesterfields to go for a walk in the park, once "Survivor" is cancelled due to lack of advertising revenue...
You're right, of course, but here's the mind blowing thing: even without one of these nifty little commercial-skip features, hardly anyone watches commercials anyway. Seriously, commercials are mostly just for going to get a drink or using the bathroom. And even the ones you watch are not of much effect. If advertisers realized how useless TV ads were, they'd put all their money into product placement instead--which does seem to be pretty effective.
The only difference between TV commercials and banner ads on the web is that by click-through analysis, advertisers can actually SEE how ineffective it is.
Also, you can share that file 15 times according to the article. So you and 15 "TV buddies" get to watch the show. And skip all the commercials too.
Another interesting quirk. I subscribe to say HBO and send a buddie who doesn't get HBO every episode of Six Feet Under and in trade he sends me some series off of Showtime. The cable company loses money on two premium packages. Now let me do that for 15 buddies. Price gouging bastards they are and personally I would get some small satisfaction (my wife would get a great deal of satisfaction as she actually pays the bill:) but I'm surprised they haven't sued already.
Here's another interesing possible hack. What if I could get the PVR to record while I'm playing a DVD and then I could send that movie to 15 buddies? IIRC, the 4000 records 320 hours of video. Heh, I'd almost break down and buy a DVD player if I could do that.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
...the one where Grandpa Simpson is complaining about how young kids keep trying to get something free for doing nothing. He then walks into the Social Security office and scremes to the clerk, "Gimme Gimme Gimme!"
... going to fund their businesses? One of two options...either they aren't, or they are going to move the commercials directly into the TV programming, just like they have already with football and the World Series.
Here's the deal. You want to get TV for free, you have to pay the price. I'm not talking about the cost of your cable bill here folks...very little of that actually goes to ABC or CBS. That money is for the cost of operations with your TV company. That's why Showtime, HBC, etc. charge money for their channels, since they don't show nearly as many advertisements during their programming. That price is commercials.
Sure, you're have every right to skip over the advertising if you want (now that it's almost instantly possible to do so). Yet what happens when advertising executives realize that no one is watching their adds anymore? They're going to pull funding from you favorite TV channels. Then how are CBS, ABC, FOX,
If you think the business model is wrong, then you are right. They will have to change it. But don't go crying to me when they stick ad promos even further into your face, because that is the only way that they can get money without charging you a dime.
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
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Can you back this up please (though I can't back up any of my claims I do know that I watch plenty of ads, and I am of the opinion that I watch less TV than most)? I am seriously curious. I for one believe that TV ads are extremely effective. Why do companies spend so much on advertising? Why are all the stops pulled for the Super Bowl ads? Do you think companies haven't done research on the effectivines of TV advertising?
Yeah, you might go to the bathroom or flip around during commercials, but you'll probably catch at least the first or last commercial in the set. While flipping around you're bound to come across some commercials.
I know as a child I saw certain toys on TV and then wanted them dearly. I know as an adult I am subtly influenced to believe that products advertised on TV are somehow higher quality than generic products.
I don't think anyone's arguing about the effectiveness of ads that are watched though, only if they are watched at all. I believe plenty of ads are watched. One doesn't have to devote full attention to an ad to get its message anyway, the purpose of many ads being repetition for product recognition.
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My Prediction: Since Replay doesn't actually MODIFY the content of the program (which is completely intact on the hard drive), this copyright infringement suit will be lost by the networks. The courts will ask why the networks haven't pursued similar lawsuits against VCR manufacturers that provide the ability to fast forward past commercials, and then throw it out. This is just another example of how corporate bozos think inside their tiny little boxes, and don't think about how they could HARNESS the power of the technology to further their evil little (and I do mean LITTLE) deeds. See.. if I was a TVLand exec, I'd got to SonicBlue (Replay's owner) and say.. "Hey.. what if we ADDED functionality to allow people to rate and even comment on commercials by providing identifying information in the vertical blanking interval of the video feed, and you send that back to us over the internet?" (the units have ethernet connections...) Just a thought.
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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Oh I can just see that now as over the computer I hear "Flower move your butt, you're blocking the TV!" or "Hey! Who has the remote? I was watching that!" or "Ummm, folks you left the cam on..... Maybe next time you could keep that stuff in the bedroom. I think my son needs therapy now."
The diff is I'd swap shows with my friends but this put up a web cam and "have my friends over virtually" to watch a movie? For myself it would never fly.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie