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Philips Targets Wireless TV Retransmission At Home
cadfael links to this EE Times story, excerpting: "Philips is attempting to start yet another industry initiative to tackle digital rights management, this time focusing on the wirelessly networked home. 'At stake here,' said Leon Husson, executive vice president of consumer businesses at Philips Semiconductors, 'is the "free-floating" copyrighted content that will soon be "redistributed" or "rebroadcast" to different TV sets throughout a home by consumers using wireless networking technologies like IEEE802.11.'"
Just when we were starting to like them for that whole red-book thing...
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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Here's something I'd like Hollywood and their friends to think about: at some point protecting one's IP becomes more expensive than stopping possible pirating. And while the cost will be passed on to consumers, that just makes entertainment devices that much more expensive, meaning fewer of them will be sold with a lower profit margin.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The problem with this digital rights management solution, just like all of the others, is that they cannot force people to upgrade. Although there is a certain segment of the populace that will desire to own the latest and greatest everything multimedia, and therefore trip himself into owning devices embedded with DRM, the average American won't want to spend the extra money to upgrade.
Therefore, unless you give them a major incentive, the RIAA/MPAA is foiled again. No upgrades means that all of the time they spent plotting up yet another scheme to control what we can and can't watch is ruined by consumer apathy.
If they really wanted people to upgrade, they would (a) develop a new, proprietary format, (b) stop release of all current and future products on CD/VHS/DVD, (c) release ONLY on aforementioned proprietary format. Eventually, enough people would switch to make it worth their while.
Even with this, though, people will find a way around the Digital Rights Management schemes, as they also do.
To use a famous quote, "Where there's a will, there's a way." And when it comes to copying CDs, VHS tapes, or DVDs, there is most certainly a will.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
One existing specification, called Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), defines a cryptographic protocol for safeguarding audio/video entertainment content against illegal copying, intercepting and tampering as it traverses high-performance digital buses, such as the IEEE1394 standard.
Once again, we are shown that digital rights management hardware is by definition defective. They seem to think their only protection from profit stealing pirates (gasp! seeing stuff on another TV?) is to make broken equipment.
I, for one, will be voting with my wallet. F*** phillips, and anyone who follows them. I thought the hardware guys where on the side of logic and fair use...
Maybe I'll write to them and tell them that I won't buy crippled equipment from them that purposely interferes with radio transmissions- and I think the FCC would also take issue with this.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That depends. Am I the company that won't get to sell you the additional DVD player, or am I the company that won't get to sell you the wireless receiver?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Back in the 80s it was perfectly legal to use the wireless Rabbit (remember those?) to transmit TV signals from the living room to the bedroom. This went for broadcast, rented movies, etc. Heck, you can even legally transmit on the FM 88-108 MHz band as long as it follows FCC Part 15 (no external antenna, and under a certain wattage... 100mw I think). Considering that these allowances were made for home-based Fair Use usage, I would consider this a clear-cut violation of Fair Use rights just like copy protected CDs. If you want to make *public* broadcast over 802.11 illegal... Well it already is. Just like it would have been illegal to use the Rabbit back in the 80s to re-transmit cable for the whole neighborhood.
This is all about HIGH DEFINITION content, not existing content like today's DVD's which are:
- standard resolution
- digital content delivered via analog signals (for all consumer level DVD players at least)
Until you have an HD set and HD dish/cable/OTA, this won't affect you.
All future HD devices will have Intel's HDCP (the HD version of DRM) embedded, complete with certificate revocation lists so that devices which are hacked can be retroactively disabled. Believe me, this won't be a trivial hack.
Welcome to the brave new world.
>>It is effectively telling me what I'm allowed to do inside my own house!
This has been a battle cry for pro-recreational drug use for a long time, yet it's still illegal.
On a more on-topic note....I think this may be an attempt to prevent copying of digital content...not viewing.
Who cares if you pick up your dvd and take it into the bedroom? I think what they really care about is if you transmit a dvd movie/whatever strait to your computer.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing how wireless piracy is a big problem
It isn't that it is a problem. It's that Philips wants to develop digital broadcast technologies that will not piss Hollywood off. Hollywood's nightmare is that you could by a $50.00 device that sniffs the packets being sent from your wireless DVD or cable broadcast box to your wireless TV.
Is this a problem yet? No, of course not. But then MP3 ripping wasn't a problem when CDs were invented either. Now Hollywood wants to figure out the DRM issues but it is too late. The installed base of CD players is too large. Unfortunately, the big companies are now in a mode where they will not release new technology until after they feel like they've got the DRM security issues worked out.
If Philips doesn't move on this in advance of the demand then the initial market will be captured a tiny little company that doesn't care about DRM. Remember the first MP3 players?
Am I in favour of DRM technology? Absolutely not. But what they are trying to do makes sense from their point of view. And doing it sooner rather than later makes even more sense.
It seems that the only way consumers in the future will have freedom to use the content they have paid for (think of it as media functionality) is to turn to pirated works. And once they have put forward the effort and expense to track down a suitable pirated work, one has to wonder how often the consumer will feel like bothering to purchase the legitimate product for that added bit of moral highground.
Content owners seem deturmined to shoot themselves in the foot. And its the various technology companies, and their sales/marketing team, that are assuring the industry of an oportunity ("them's feet are good eatin'") and selling the shotguns.