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Anti-Copying TV Technology Creeps Forward
An anonymous reader writes: " After CDs, then comes TV? Although the technologies
being spoken about are supposedly to prevent online sharing of television
content as digital network television is born, the extents of the
control being spoken of is alarming. When I purchase my next television recording device, will I be able to chose to record my
favorite show while I am away from home? Will I be able to record one show while watching another? Or will I be at the mercy
of the network ... only allowed to record should they *want* me to record. It could be possible to prevent the recording of first-run
shows, forcing either-or choices (and affecting ratings and advertising rates,) rather than allowing us to watch one, record another."
There's precious little worth watching anyway...
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
seems kinda funny... anti-copy TV broadcasts at the same time as ST:TNG being released on DVD. good thing i already have the good eps taped. could this possibly mean that other series will be released on dvd as well, so recording won't be necessary?
The networks are still bound by FCC regulations that through the airwaves transmissions be in the clear - that means that the big players, if they want to keep broadcasting through the airwaves, would be unable to prevent copying of those signals. Is there any way they could prevent people from taping in-the-clear signals?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
do we?
If I can't tape TV shows, I'll set up a video camera on a tripod, get a tightly cropped picture and use a timing device to record my damn shows. Or maybe I'll finally get so pissed off I withdraw from all corporate entertainment consumption.
Dammit, could the entertainment industry be bigger assholes?
For the networks to keep the viewing totals up for the major advertising bucks they want (the article implies that the networks would ban recordings of shows on certain times so people would watch during the week ad prices are calculated), all that would need be done is to count all the VCR's recording the shows as a viewer. I don't suppose the technology to do that would be very hard at all
... the entire TV, music, and movie industries are on the verge of bankruptcy, because of those evil digital pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of TiVo, mateys! Let's take the Digital Main!
Sheesh. The VCR was the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Recording and sharing _increases_ interest in the entertainment industry's products. Why can't they see that?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Sure, one of the key problems with recent attempts to eliminate free-use rights from digital music is that the "average man" doesn't make use of such rights enough for it to matter. I again speculate that, if Larry Lunchpail can suddenly not record the Sunday afternoon NFL games, he will start spinning and not quit until the walls are painted in blood.
I, personally, can't wait.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
And this would break the 1992 law regarding the consumer's ability to videotape. They'll go to court over it and then *hopefully* get their asses kicked.
I say hopefully because the climate has changed so much in the past 10 years that I'm not positive that such case law will be enough to stop these ridiculous attempts at stifling the use of technology to make our lives easier.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
but why not save all the hassle with your good ole 4 header VHS?
:-)
of course the quality, and maybe the sound might not be so great... but at least you have a copy... hassle free too
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I watch more cable now anyways, since the major channels have forgotten how to make a really good show, besides West Wing, I can't think of a show that kicks butt.
This half @$$ bs is just annoying and a slap in the face. If they don't like the current advertising model, then change to a pay channel.
I'll get modded down :), so what. atleast I'm not a blood sucking tv exec
In recent years:
The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that consumers could "time shift" TV programs on VCRs to view later.
Making cassette tapes or copies of CDs for personal use has been affirmed by court rulings, while a 1992 law allowed consumers to make limited digital copies of music, with royalties to be included in the price of blank tapes and discs.
In 1999, a court ruled that portable digital music players could be sold and gave owners the right to move their music from PCs to the devices.
The precedences are astounding, so what (other than money) are the "big boys" going to do to overturn these rulings?
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Personally (and there are plenty of people who disagree with me, that's why they buy products like thys), I don't think there's much left on TV that's worth recording anymore. Instead of watching "When Animals Attck VIII", maybe this will get people to read more or do other stuff that's more educational or socially significant, like taking interest in children's education (and having kids focus more on their education because they're not watching as much tv). There are some quality shows, but commercialization and voyerism and other junk have really made network television really aweful.
Then again, I guess the next step would be to copy protect books. Maybe they'll burst into flames if they detect a sufficiently bright light, such as used in copy machines.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
I think these are $2 at the local Goodwill
Just call me analog boy.
But I'm really starting to think that the future lies in analog.
I mean, the big boys can't do squat to prevent us from making analog recordings... and they seem to be all but killing progress in the digitital world.
Maybe it's time for an antitrust case against the big boys...
For thouse of you that don't know it, there is already TV show trading on the internet, mostly on IRC and on a few web sites. The problem for the TV networks is that people take out the commerials when they encode the show, so the networks don't get any advertiing dollars.
This may not relate directly to the article at hand, but it is important to many /. readers. Check out this thread on a previous discussion that received a record 122 (!) moderations. This by itself would not be cause for concern. But the editors didn't seem to like this thread, so the entire thread was "bitchslapped" down to (-1, Offtopic) several times.
I would like to ask the editors, why did you feel this was necessary? The parent post was at +5 at one point before getting slapped down to (-1). It received some more positive moderation up to +4 or so and got slapped down again. Currently it is at +2. Why was it necessary to drop a +5 user moderated post down to (-1) on multiple occasions? And why did you drop the entire thread (70+ responses) down with it? Many of those responses made valid points yet they got the same (-1, Offtopic).
This is just a bunch of out of work techies scaring tv executives into spending money on their new "copy" protection schemes. If they listen to them, then they deserve what they get... reduced viewership.
Imagine sharing of tv shows.... how many people would actually edit out the commercials? Isn't that the frigging point of tv from the executives perspective? what does it matter when someone views your show as long as they do? Keep the scramblers only on pay cable...
I signed up for a trial of digital cable TV where I live, and after purchasing a video on demand, I went to record the last part as I was getting tired and wanted to sleep and watch the rest the next day. Lo and behold the picture faded in and out, same as if you try and record a DVD.
I know there are signal boosters/correctors that can overcome this...the question is, why should normal, law abiding citizens have to resort to this?
Personally, I watch nothing live on TV. I record everything I watch no matter what. I hate being stuck in front of the TV afraid to do something else and miss something. Plus, I'm rarely around when stuff I want to watch is. I won't structure my life around some lame TV-exec's schedule of when I should watch stuff. So, if they don't allow recording of everything (with the possible exception of PPV), then I won't watch anything. Nothing is really worth watching live, anway. So, that leaves more time to develop code!
Think of all of the social benefits that would come if people just stopped watching TV!
I don't know, but it works for me.
If you consume a TV show, you are doing something wrong.
...are they supposed to be able to achieve this? The article's point about a 'flag' having to be universally accepted and followed is right on. But unless they try to actually encrypt the full signal, anyone could manufacture a non-compliant device, and it'd be an instant mega-seller. I don't even see the point of this initiative. Without the force of law or unbreakable encryption, it's useless.
Soon all we'll be able/allowed to record are infomercials featuring Danny Bonnaducci and/or Chuck Norris
GOD HELP US ALL!!!
:)
Those that want to record Seinfeld repeats on the digital TV system will find or make devices to do just that. They'll be available on ebay for a while, and everyone will know someone who has one.
Besides, what's to stop you from pointing a good camcorder at the screen and recording it that way? There's ALWAYS a way, even if it's a generation apart from the original, that's fine. How popular were dubbed mix tapes in the 80s?
--- http://foo.ca
Wasn't this one decided once already? Time shifting is legal, right? Hello? McFly?
manage to make their signals such that they can only be viewed by using a special reciever/DVR device. If you wanted to watch TV, you would HAVE
to buy one of these, in addition to a TV.
It might take the networks to buy some laws
to get this done, but it could happen.
This DVR will allow you to time shift, but will not allow you to fast forward through commercials. The networks could also have a pay-per-view scheme so that it charges you whenever you view anything, no matter how much you've already seen it. Or perhaps ever minute you're watching something, you are being charged some amount.
I'm sure somebody over there has thought of this
sort of device.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I see this as the real "Digital Divide," a recurring pattern using this new medium as a force to separate and distinguish the two classes, but in a new configuration. In the past, the producers were the paeons and the consumers were the elite.
This development shows how this is reversing: the producers are the elite who have licenses to clone costless data and the consumers are the powerless drones who pay their wages and freedoms away per every view.
Same class model we've had for centuries, and the digital realm is nothing new.
[
I think that the tighter they squeeze people, the wider the door will get for independent people to make their own shows and publish them on the web.
It is possible with today's consumer technology for people to make movies and broadcast them on the internet. Video cameras are cheap, people are willing to act (although there's need for improvement heh), and TV quality visual effects are within the reach of people with a modest income.
Until the day Hollywood consistantly creates stories that are worth paying for, they can't make these kinds of demands. Take a look at Final Fantasy. The people who are fans of that series are mostly interested in the story. They have their Playstation 2's, they have the $50 to buy the game, and they have the 40 hours to beat it. There isn't a TV show out there that can make that many people reschedule their lives around when the show is aired. Even though a show is half an hour to an hour long, nearly all of them aren't worth making sure you are home for that time.
So go ahead Hollywood, spend your energy trying to protect your 'precious content', you're not going to squeeze more money out of people.
"Derp de derp."
First, I stopped going to theater coz I'm pissed by MPAA. And I stopped renting movies for the same reason. Then I stop buying music CDs coz I'm pissed by RIAA. And I refuse to buy DVD player because of this stupid zoning scheme and DMCA.
And now TV. Well, not that I watch any TV at all, as I don't even have cable. But still.
Great, everyone just spends more quality time on Slashdot, then. Let it be the geek's new year's resolution.
I will hack, slash or code me a way to watch my content. Currently I record off an mpeg converted to divx or vcd depending on the quality of the input. This is my right, Im using it for personal use. I will also pick up a tivo and hack it also. There will always be "Hacker Way" to do it.
//rant
The day the police raid my door to stop me from breaking copy protection in my own home, is the day I become a freedom fighter, and start the war of revolution. Many people are starting to think the same way, when will people say NO, and take up arms against a corporate controlled police force.
It might be a un-popular view to believe in personal freedoms. But where are the people standing up for my rights? Do I need to protect them with a gun? Voting doesn't work when the majority is brainwashed with political correctness and sound bites.
rant//
"Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes." - Robert Francis Kennedy
What will happen when someone decides to build non-compliant recorder that simply ignores the 'do-not-copy' flag ? The asian markets are a natural birthing pool for these kinds of aftermarket gadgets.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If we can't tape TV shows anymore then we just have to be a little more inventive.
I can see a legion of enthusiasts sitting in front of their sets with pencils and sketchbooks, copying scene after scene with speech bubbles for dialogue. Then we reassamble these sketches into flipbooks to simulate the television experience...
"Wow, the animation in South Park is so much smoother than it used to be..."
Well, I can see by your -1 score that you have poor taste *AND* absolutely no point whatsoever to make, not to mention the fact that you're completely WRONG.
:))
The United States constitution grants copyrights to those who innovate and/or bring some positive benefit to society. This copyright does not belong to the individual or company in question, but to society itself. In return, the government grants said company/individual a temporary exclusive right to sell these materials, but must grant the purchasers of these copyrighted materials certain fair usage rights. The copyrights were supposed to expire within 20 years of the author's death. Thanks to Disney's shameless lobbying, that copyright is being continuously extended.
So you're wrong about fair use. Copyrighted materials in fact belong to society as a whole, and they are being LENT to the companies/individuals in question for a limited time and with limited priviledges. So our right to fair use is a RIGHT, guaranteed under the constitution.
If you wish to reply with more B.S. please do. I'd love to see your karma drop by another two points
This space left intentionally blank.
The Technology Working Group has a better record of achievement, however. Formed in 1996 to come up with standards for protecting DVDs from piracy, the group has consistently agreed on standards such as the Content Scrambling System, which is built into DVDs and DVD players.
r ies...whilst...drinking...coffee...)
I suppose they just succeded in making me buy a new monitor (...must...learn...not...to...read...online...sto
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Kill your TV.
It seems that with digital and / or satellite services, everything is always on, at anytime, anyway.
Therefore, it's a luxury. A luxury you pay for. A luxury you *don't have to pay for*. If you don't like the restraints this particular facet of the entertainment industry wishes to put on you *DON'T BUY A FUCKING TV*.
These arguments get me *so* pissed off. People are dying in other parts of the world because they can't get enough rice, and *we're* worried about a luxury we somehow view as an inalienable right.
When will these guys (the networks) realise that this sort of thing will only infuriate joe bloggs, and the people that _really_ want to copy stuff still will. At the end of the day, whatever method they use, they've gotta send the signal to your TV, so there's always going to be somehow to record. And that's assuming that some clever hacker doesn't work out how to decrypt/circumvent it. It's the same thing with P2P file sharing stuff. Most files are uploaded by 1, maybe 2 people, and get spread to hundreds and thousands of others. It's no accident that all the copies of Madonna's ray of beautiful light stranger music on napster/edonkey/gnutilla are all the same size...
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
...is shit anyways! I just recently began again patronizing one of the first great bastions of freely shared "content"...my local library. Guess what? I'm liking it a whole lot more than killing braincells watching mindless shit like Friends or that stupid Pamela Anderson T&A show...I can't even remember what it's called(shows how culturally important THAT is, doesn't it?). I say we should all just tell the so-called "content producers" to fuck off and take their steaming shit they have the temerity to call "entertainment" with them...it isn't worth the price of blank media anyway...and devote our attention to real art and real literature. And let's get out and live our own lives, and not waste time watching somebody else living a stupid fake life on TV.
You're using her as bait, Master!
You're right. Fair use does not guarantee that it should be easy to record a copy for personal use.
However, broadcasting is a pivilege, not a right. Getting an easement on everybody's property for cable is a privilege, not a right. Parking a satellite in a geosynchronous slot is a privilege, not a right.
I think that it's only fair that in return for using their government granted monopolies on these publicly owned channels for their content distribution, broadcasters, satellite and cable companies should not be allowed to thwart reasonable fair use by their customers.
If they don't want to allow fair use, that's fine. They would just have to distribute their content in an entirely private distribution channel, like delivering DVDs via UPS.
With the current corporate-controlled political climate, however, I doubt that my argument will get very far.
Even *if there is a difficult to break digital copy protection scheme, you will always still be able to make a digital version of an analog copy, with audio it's easy - soundblasters are cheap and produce ok results, I use a relatively inexpensive pro audio card, it's flawless, sure, quality video equipment is still rather expensive, but it will get there relax, they'll never win
I normally only watch the reruns of the news at night. All of the other programs I do want to watch are available in the various usenet groups much earlier (1-2 years) than they will be on tv here. Most interesting things went away with the commercialization of the tv programming so channels that support the record blocking will probably suck anyway. I prefer spending my time reading books, making music and participate in various things instead of consuming McDonalds-like food for thought on television.
I remember when RealAudio came out with RealAudio Player Plus, it had a "Feature" to record audio feeds to the hard drive. It cost you an extra $30 for this. And the sad part was that Real put in a "feature" to allow "content providers" to disable the functionality. Guess what? EVERY STREAM WAS RECORD DISABLED. No matter what. You couldn't record anything. It kept going until they came out with RealOne (which to my knowledge doesn't even pretend to have the feature). Look at DVDs. VERY FEW are non-CSS non-macrocrapped.
Every time you provide an "optional" copy protection with "varying degrees of protection", all the content will be protected with the MAXIMUM form of it. It seems there isn't enough of a disincentive to using these, and it's perverse, wrong, sick, and a horrid shame. If VCR people decide to bow to these people, their market will EVAPORATE completely. No one will buy a VCR that can't record anything. It would be pointless, and bad word spreads quick.
I bet it won't even notice whatever content protection scheme they put in!
You're using her as bait, Master!
How the hell are you going to be able to start a revolution when you are doing life plus 200 years for copyright violations ?
It's too bad there isn't a slashbox to filter out these whiny fucking threads. Think about it for a second, way back when there were three television broadcasters! You didn't get to pick shit that was on television. You were damn lucky if the TV had anything for your lazy ass to watch or you just watched what was cool. Then came cable and satellite. You had even more choices of what to plop your lazy ass in front of as long as you were willing to pay for it. VCRs also came about which allowed you to record stuff to watch later (held up by court statute known as time shifting). The you could program your VCR to record shit even if you weren't around to press buttons. Broadcasters even worked with the VCRPlus folks to give channel guides codes that would let people even more easily program their VCRs to record shit they weren't around to watch. Now in the transition to digital broadcasters want to break all of this because people can make exact copies of what was broadcast.
The problem lies in the fact that they make money from the potential eyes of viewers. Ratings allow broadcasters to charge more money for the time they sell to advertisers. They make their money in this fashion. However if they are broadcasting digital information rather than analog exact digital copies would be made. Big deal you say but it IS a big deal. It requires a bit of effort to filter commercials out of analog signals on a VCR (they look for a fade to black and stop recording until the video fades back in). The percentage of VCRs and people who take the time to do this is small so broadcasters don't bitch much about it. With a digital signal it is fairly trivial to scan a datastream for a pattern or flag denoting the transition to a commercial and since this is trivial a PVR or equivilent can easily nix the commercial from the recorded video. Since the only difference between a PVR and digital signal decoder is a storage device to record the video stream this had broadcasters a bit worried. If a majority of people with digital receivers can both time shift and remove commercials from video feeds the broadcasters can't make didly squat. Their traditional metrics become useless and advertisers can't be assured their advertisements will even be seen.
Broadcasters don't care about the small fraction of people who would go to all the trouble to trade copies of video over the internet. Most people won't bother even if they have the bandwidth. It's scores easier to flip on your TV at a certain time of tell a PVR or VCR to record something than it is to first find it and then second download it to your computer. Broadcasters will however be taken to court if they break compliance with statutes saying people have the right to record video for personal use. To keep from getting legally fucked in the ass this way you're going to see non-linear break commercials. Characters will drink a Pepsi and wear Reeboks and chase a bad guy through the Gap end will hang out at a Starbucks. Advertising will be like it was depicted in The Truman show where they broadcast constantly. Everyday items would be product placement and actors would be spokespeople during the shows they performed on. The crap acting you see in commercials now is going to take place inside your favourite drama or sci-fi adventure. Also expect more of those fucking tickers at the bottom, top, and sides of your screen.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Not that I agree with what I am saying, but just to make you think ....
What makes you think that you have the right to do whatever you want with someone else's artistic material? If it brings them higer advertising dollars to restrict the presentation to force you to watch it during broadcast only then so what? Would you as an advertiser pay as much knowing that most of the audience can and will fast forward through the commercials?
If you don't like it, tough - watch other shows. The consumer votes approval or diapproval with his wallet - if no one watches then no one will advertise - the bar will be set at whether the show is good enough to watch only as it's first aired with commercials, nothing more, nothing less. Seems fair to me. Of course there will allways be those who are above the law and find ways to violate copy restrictions (and speed limits and steal software and music etc..) but I sure don't care what their opinion is (hang them all as far as I'm concerned, they contribute nothing to society).
You'd think that someone at the studios would realize that their ideal situation is one where thousands more people watch their content on demand. What they ought to do is distribute the content freely in a digital format (encoded), along with free players that force you to watch the corresponding ads. Why isn't this the best for everyone? But instead, of course, they're trying to prevent people from watching the broadcasts... very clever people.
but i'll say it again..
/. karma. They won't care.
If you're going to bitch,
bitch productively!
If you put the same effort you do here, into legit politics (wow. now *THATS* an oxymoron), the least that's going to happen is you're voice will be heard. The most? The sky's the limit.
Just do yourself a favor. When writing your congressperson or representative:
1) Don't troll
2) Don't flame
3) Don't mention your
4) Don't start with "I didn't vote..", or, especially, "I didn't vote for you, but..."
5) Above all, write intelligently.
P.S. Inconspicuously hinting that your wealthy father could make a sizable donation to the rep's campaign wouldn't hurt.
I don't think we're too far from being 23 minutes into the future when its illegal to turn off your TV, never mind tape shows to watch them later...
Very well said. And copyright itself is a privelege not a right! The government (ie what should be us in a republic) grants via law a limited time ownership of original works. Its sole purpose in doing this is to foster the sharing of more original works which it is hoped will help the society advance. After this time, everyone in the society is allowed to freely use those ideas. That's what the public domain is.
This has gotten completely out of hand with our current government giving away copyright for periods far longer than they should, mostly to protect the income of large corporations.
check out Limiting Copyright for some interesting articles on this.
Mike
This has got to be the most amazing /. phenomenon ever! Rapidly approaching 500 comments ... Not on a frontpage article, no, on a post! Insightful comments at -1, interesting comments at -1, funny comments at -1 ... Something is breaking Slashdot, tearing it down before our very eyes ... and it looks like it's the editors themselves who are doing it! What will happen to confidence in /. being open and free? Don't miss this one, you've never seen anything like it! Check it out!
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I have no doubt that TV execs are going to shove this down our throats.
I also have no doubt that in the end, they'll simply push people to other forms of entertainment.
Frankly, TV isn't that good as a whole. You might like certain programs, but you could easily live without it.
If you couldn't copy it, maybe you'll decide that it just isn't worth watching.
I suppose new technology and laws will force us to watch TV for a minimum number of hours per week...
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
If they just want to prevent online distribution then I can understand their motive. People are going to want to be able to record a TV show and then watch it later. There are people who work during prime time and can't watch TV. Surely the networks would prefer these people be able to tape and watch their programming and advertising rather than not view it at all. Unless the networks deliver programming that is viewable on demand they will benefit from the VCR and TiVo. Stopping unauthorized distribution is a different issue though. I think they are entitled to try to come up with something that will protect their rights. And I don't think you'll see much support of file swapping when it comes to actors as you did with some musicians. Actors in television do it for the money and syndication is where many of them make the big money. All those markets and all those royalty checks add up. You start throwing enough Seinfeld episodes out on the net and all of a sudden Babu might really have to return to Pakistan.
'Same speed C but faster'
the first post ive ever seen by klerk that wasnt crazy ass lame(and ontopic)(AND correct)
and you fucking argue with him????????????
Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community
Well, heres the deal, magnetic analog recording may not be the best, BUT its not succeptable to any anticopy capablities either, NOW, take that and digitally encode it an VOILA .
I thought the FCC didnt allow ENCRYPTED TV signals ? Now I didnt think this held true for cable but....
Hell, AS IVE SAID BEFORE AND BEFORE, If it comes froma source to the TV you can trap it.....
TV's are stupid, and will be for a long time. There is NO Fu**ing way the Entertainment people are going to get 5 BILLION TV's replaced as a requirment to watch.
This is stupid stuff dreamed up by some bozo at disney trying to brown nose and he think hes got the holy grail for the entertainment industry,
This is NO different than what happened 100 years ago with the phonograph, edisons patents, and thse that found way around, there were bootlegs 100 years ago and there will be 100 years from now....
Fair USE rights WILL prevail, if they dont the solution is simple, a revolution, throw those in power out and start again.
From time to time the tree of freedom must be renewd with the blood of patriots
or something like that, from thomas jefferson....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
To get guns off the streets, some police departments hold an annual(?) amnesty day on which you can bring your gun (or "someone else's") to a designated place and they will buy it from you.
I'd like to see ABC, CBS and NBC bidding for my VCR. They probably wouldn't offer cash for the VCRs, though. They would each have their own version of TiVo that tracks your viewing habits, and they would invite you to trade in your clunky old box for a shiny new Big Brothe-- I mean, Personal Video Recorder. NBC would of course offer a discount on the MS HomeStation (since NBC and MS are so close) and a free Passport account.
Of course, I'll always have my computer's video card hooked up to the cable box...
If you find the controls in digital TV (HDTV?)unaccepatable then by all means, don't buy one. Keep using your analogue connection. So long as there is a fair portion of the market that demands analogue TV, it will be provided. I mean think, you can still get TV over the air. I'd venture to say that over 90% of the opoulation has cable, satalite or something else.
What's next? Maybe they'll start locking up sewers so that people can't get at all the wonderful feces down there.
"...When I purchase my next television recording device, will I be able to chose to record my favorite show while I am away from home? Will I be able to record one show while watching another? Or will I be at the mercy of the network ... only allowed to record should they *want* me to record..."
Here's Captain Obvious with Clues for the Clueful!
You're ALREADY at the mercy of the network. Who cares about what you can record? You only *watch*, in the first place, the programs they *want* you to watch. (insert Twilight Zone theme here). You seem to be operating under the misconception that TV viewers were ever offered any choice of any variety, which they were not. So please, lose the outraged squawking, it's just plain silly. Either watch TV and accept the crud they shovel at you, or DON'T WATCH TV. This is known, among adults, as a Decision.
End clue session, exit's to your left...
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
People are used to a certain status quo. They expect to be able to record TV shows. They expect to be able to watch what they want, when they want to. And despite efforts to restrict this in the past, people are legally allowed to do so.
Certainly, almost anything worth watching can be obtained in an illegal way. I can download any popular TV show off the internet from SOMEWHERE, although these methods most certainly violate copyright. And while quite a few people partcipate in these activities, the greater majority doesn't and won't because its more trouble than its worth.
However, if people are suddenly unable to do what they've been used to doing for many many years, then some of these other methods might start appealing to them. TV shows will still get copied, just as DVD's are converted to DivX's. The underground scene will not be affected by this, at leat not in the long run. But the average consumer will find it annoying, and they will be driven to seek out other ways to obtain their media content.
And when they download an episode of "Friends" off the internet, they realize that they can watch it whenever they want. Not only that, but there are no commercials. And they can obtain ANY episode of "Friends" from the first season on, and all they have to do is be patient. If they're going to go to the trouble to do this once, they might realize its not that much trouble after all and might use this method to obtain other TV shows.
And eventually, they might start realizing they simply don't NEED their cable/satellite/whatever anymore because its become less convienent than obtaining it from the internet, not to mention there's no additional cost as long as they already have broadband.
Except for the few that still only recieve the broadcast stations, people pay money monthly to watch their programs. They do actually expect something in return, and one of those things is the ability to do so as they wish. In the blind rage of the media corporations to prevent the evil "pirates" from stealing their precious programming and distributing it for free to the less than 1% of the audience who bothers to make use of it, they will alienate the remaining 99%.
Way to go guys!
Way to go.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
A broadcast TV service that doesn't let me time-shift is of no use to me.
If I can't whack something on a tape and watch it later then I'm going to go somewhere else for my entertainment. My schedule runs around my schedule, not around TV.
Anyway, I have a nice big expensive analogue TV and an expensive analogue VCR and a large collection of video games stuff that all outputs analogue video signals and a subscription to a cable service that isn't anymore interested in upgrading to digital than I am. Analogue free-to-air could disappear this very moment and I probably wouldn't notice for a month, and I'd never care enough to do anything about it. Heck, Foxtel's gotten so crappy lately that I could probably cope if it went away too.
I don't have a cell phone, but that's partly because I can't get good analog service. I've used digital cell phones. While the sound quality may be good when it's there, it's either there or it's not there. When it drops it drops completely. I much preferred good 'ol analog where you might have some "static" noise, but at least you wouldn't completely drop the call very often.
--MonMotha
This is what we call FUD. When someone takes an idea, runs with it and implies that it applies universaly. In this case I am reffering to internet file sharing.
Since day one, the trading of files and data that was not supposed to be traded on the internet was a concern. But no one believed it was going to dent anything. Then a few years back, along came MP3s. Even then, it wasn't a big deal, they lasted for quite a while without notice, but then napster came out and made it twice as easy to see.
All of a sudden, the music industry was out there waving reports about the XX BILLION (where XX is any thousand digit multiple of pi) of songs traded on napster, and how they've lost YY BILLION (where YY is any hundred thousand digit multiple of pi squared) dollars those songs were worth in record sales. What they neglected to tell you was that music sales were up from the previous two years.
This had the effect of making the internet suddenly seem like an evil moster where pirates cause whole corporations to go bankrupt over night. So what happens? Software manufacturers start beefing up copy protection, the RIAA begins to produce CDs that won't play in PCs, the MPAA begins regioning the DVDs and now the TV producers start flagging shows.
This occurs for two reasons. (A) The companies actualy think people are planning on selling these shows (songs, movies) in mass production. This is bad because in the spirit of overcharging for dirt cheap materials, companies are unable to compete with user prices. (B) The companies have yet to figure out that if you produce a product worth buying, people will buy it. For example, the game Half Life had rudementry copy protection that was easily circumvented. Despite this, it still went on to becoem a best selling game. Macs are overpriced (comparativly speaking and only in some opinions) computers. Yet consumers still find them worth the price and pay for it. If the product is worth it, people will buy it. If it isn't they won't. Simple economics.
Ofcourse, we went through all this before when recordable audio cassettes came out. And again when recordable VHS debued. Well, the music industry and the MPAA is still alive and kicking (unfortunately for some) and I have a feeling that this wont change a thing. People found ways arround copy protection before (I have a little box that cancels copy protection on VHS tapes) and people always will. But since most people are law abiding citezens (I can build a cable descrambler, but it isn't worth it) I doubt there will be any problems in the end.
However, I agree with the one poster above, if the FBI comes knocking down my door for having MP3s and 3ivx on my computer, I will go join a radical extreamist group fighting the evil corporations and go back to old computer equipment (BBS on a C64 anyone?)
-T Money
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You nailed the point--the editors are trying to step in and decide things when it's the job of the moderators. Right now, the thread is rising above 0 again...let's see how long that stays.
This kinda crap is never going to stop 'piracy.' It's only going to piss off the average consumer who paid for his cable line or satellite or movie disc and wants to do whatever he/she pleases with it. Think of it this way: at the same time all this copy control nonsense is being rolled out, so is HDTV. To take advantage of HDTV, you have new TVs that are using some sort of LCD or Plasma display. So while you may not have access to a plaintext digital stream, the analog signal being fed to these devices is matrix-addressed and quite pure (unlike that of CRTs). All someone has to do is connect the highest quality ADC's they can find directly to the DAC output from the integrated HDTV decoder and voila.. nearly perfect digital copy. (avoiding the crudeness of pointing a camera at a screen..) They might lose accuracy in the least significant bit, but that's not going to stop true pirates from selling fraudulent copies.
So when you get down to it, once again, this is not about copyright, this is about controlling consumers / reducing privacy to make more money.
It's called Macrovision, and CGMSA. Any NTSC decoder worth its salt can detect these signals. ReplayTV, for example, has chosen NOT to allow users to share Macrovision-encoded signals with other Replay owners. This seems pretty fair, I suppose (sharing a pay-per-view movie is pushing the limits of fair use, methinks). CGMSA goes further than Macrovision, allowing for more complex rights management (copy once, etc).
I hate all that crap, but I'm puzzled as to why a NEW rights management scheme needs to be put in place. I mean, yes, you can strip out Macrovision with a special device (or some firmware knowledge), but the average user isn't going to be able to defeat these technologies (especially with the obnoxious DMCA to help companies go after Macrovision-strippers, etc).
[vent]
Alright, I have had enough of these cretins and
their holier than thou additude. Why don't
they ride their high horses back to the
huge castles where they came from.
[/vent]
If they keep this crap up, I feel that there
will be a huge rebelion from a huge precentage
of their money co^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers
Is that the big box over in the corner? Yeah, I remember that thing. "Cosby Show" and all that. Call me flamebait, but I really don't care. I mean, I'm interested in the intellectual property/fair use debate. That's bloody important. But TV as such just doesn't do it for me any more. *sigh*
When somebody *broadcasts* something, he means:
"Hey everybody! Watch me! I'm broadcasting!! Watch me!! Everybody!!!"
So why the hell are they complaining about *more* people watching the stuff that they are *broadcasting*? I thought that every transmitting station would *kill* to be able to bypass the inverse-square law and increase the size of their audience. That's in effect what they get for free and they don't like it??
points somewhere where I can download a life? :)
--Gareth
finally contacts us by sending one of our own signals back to us leave it to some asshole to find a way to sue them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
There was an episode of ST:TNG where the Enterprise picked up a vessel floating in space with people in suspended animation. When asked about television, one of the crew members explained that people eventually lost interest in television and it died out...now we know how it began to do so.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Maybe I should be careful what I ask for - If a read a /. discussion where more than 3 people knew what they were talking about, I might fall over dead.
Press the mute button everytime the audience laughs in "The(actually its That) 70's Show." You will realize just how horrible that show is.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
As he put it:
-Frank Zappa, "I'm the Slime"
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Choice number 1 will defiantly be preferable as it will get more public attention, however, choice number 2 is something we as geeks can defiantly do.
Fuck you, Taco! Why'dja slap all the responses to First Slashdot Troll Post Investigation!?
They have to decrypt the signal before they send it to the CRT and/or LCD, and it will be possible to remove the CRT (or just piggy back off of the signal wire. All you need to do is hook the signal line up to a good amp, and take the signal from there), change the signal in to RCA, RF, or whatever your favorite transmission scheme. It's not possible to have the signal encrypted all the way to the CRT and have it still viewable. Even if it were (by some magical process) able to decrypt the signial within the CRT, the signal can't be encrypted after it leaves the tube (as the original poster implied).
Every time these freaking geniuses come up with another "protection" scheme, I'm reminded of that security expert who got tangled up with the RIAA who said (something like), "No protection scheme can possibly work if the recipient of the content isn't a trusted source."
BlackGriffen
Yes, by all means read the whole thread. I also stuck a link to it in my signature, which hasn't changed in something like a year previous. If any moderators (or god forbid the chimpanzees that have tied up the editors and taken over their consoles) see this post, consider that if you look at my record, I'm consistently giving back to the slashdot community by trying to post worthwhile comments and do my metamod every day. In other words, while most likely I'll get a -1 Troll or offtopic for this, I think this thread reflects legitimate concerns in the slashdot community.
A side note to anyone at Andover.net/OSDN/VA who happens to read this. Remind yourself that when Slashdot became corporate, the userbase became your customers, and indirectly your source of revenue through advertising. Piss us off too much, and watch your revenue stream trickle off...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
There will come a time that digital recoding will be available to the common poor folk like me. I find it a little too expensive since I already own a VCR and besides, my TV can't tell the difference between digital and analog right now.
But the really funny part is that we won't have to record stuff anymore when it does become available because it will be streamed on demand. From where and whom and for how much I don't know. I'll leave that up to people with business degrees.
Cheers
If I can see it, I can record it.
If I can hear it, I can record it.
Copy protection dosen't work.
If you hold onto something tightly, you cannot share it. There are too many devices and too much content competing for my entertainment time and dollar to hassle with silly things such as this. Restrict your content and restrict your audience.
HT
You can get around any protection.
'Color Corection' boxes for macrovision
Region free dvd players
Philips for cds
So don't sweat about it
"And analysts say consumers are likely to accept the new copy restrictions as just one more element of a new generation of technology that provides features well beyond what they've been used to with analogue TV."
Hmm... and just what "features" are these "analysts" referring to? Every feature of digital TV beyond what was available with analog seems to be precisely what the "content" producers insist on prohibiting. By the time they have finished "protecting" their "rights" there will be even less reason to bother with TV than there is now. Somebody seriously needs to consult a proctologist on just how to go about removing their heads from that dark stinking hell they have been lead into by their IP lawyers.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
translation: "I want it all, I want it now, and I don't want to pay for it."
Grow up.
Welp I got a powermac 8100/80AV recently, a 9.1GB SCSI HD for it, waiting on the S-Video RCA cable and I'll go from there... So I guess I better record everything I actually care to record now (and archive all the tons of VHS tapes we have from years past). :)
Yes, the content providers can't have you arrested, or sue you, for recording content for home use, BUT... (as has been said many times before here) it also is legal for them to migrate to media formats which make it extremely difficult to exercise your fair use rights at all. There is no legal compulsion on the part of WB to release those Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes I crave so much in a format which doesn't require decryption on proprietary, DMCA-protected hardware.
Freedom: "I won't!"
When the "entertainment" becomes more of a hassle, it's time to look elsewhere. Permanently.
I don't think you are alone.
dos?
/. isn't real keen on single-user non-multitasking real mode OSes. For what it was, when it was, on the hardware it ran on, DOS was truly The Shit(TM)... Well, at least it sure seemed like it during my early teens.
Okay, it's a decrepit obsolete hack of a pathetic excuse for an operating system, sure - but flamebait? Geez, I guess
WordPerfect started losing market share when some suit-encumbered moron decided to restrict tech support to registered users (this was really the key point, not WPCorp's slowness in adapting to Windows). Previously, totally free toll-free tech support was available to ALL WordPerfect users, including for pirated copies, as WPCorp recognised that the best way to lock in a customer base is to get them using your product in the first place. And it worked -- people pirated one version, but bought the next (well, I bought 16 "nexts" and counting). That deliberate winking at borroware, along with near-total printer support, made WP the market leader.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't know if they still use it but some years ago disney started introducing a copy protection system on their VHS tapes that introduced extra lines that the tv just ignored but a copying VCR gets confused about and throws it out of sync with the video strips on the tape. And more resently dvd players output a signal a tv can play but confuses standard vcrs. Nothing to stop broadcasters from broadcasting this type of signal. Sure there are ways around this but they are a pain. So your worst case scenario... already here.
I find it exceedingly interesting that this discussion is being posted EXACTLY 18 years after the landmark supreme court case (Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios, Inc.) was settled.
Just a little food for thought.
Who will force you to watch the commercials. Also, Time shifting will be for a maximum of 30 days. After that, the recordings will delete. The content providers will hold all the cards, thanks to Congress and the DMCA. They might even have the audacity to make you pay to record a program. They'll certainly have the ability to control most everything. There will be over the air encryption. Don't pay..you can't watch. Skip the commercials, you can't watch. Don't interact with the commercials? You can'5t watch either! If you don't think this is happening, think again. I'm in the media and it WILL happen... Give them 10 years.....you'll see.
If it were up to me, I'd delete your account, the troll accounts you created and all of your posts. What reason is there to waste space archiving all that bullshit? You have wasted a great deal of time, contributed nothing, and prevented others from having an intelligent conversation. Go away.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV.
The Federal Communications Commission (US analog to Canada's CRTC) has mandated that TV stations go digital by January 1, 2006, when the FCC will terminate television stations' analog spectrum licenses.
Updated!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that consumers could "time shift" TV programs on VCRs to view later.
IANAL, BIHALD (But I Have A Law Degree)
This ruling establishes a defence if a copyright holder ever sues you for "time-shifting". However if a copyright holder implements a technology that prevents you from time-shifting, this ruling does not help you.
This is also true for "fair use", which can be used as a defence if a copyright holder tries to sue you, but cannot be invoked as a right.
My television viewing will be OK.
Unless... do you think they'd do this to old
Perry Mason episodes?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Napster was a search engine though; how did people become exposed to music they wouldn't otherwise have been if they didn't know to search for it.
Three ways:Will I retire or break 10K?
Still that was serious enough for the developer to be persued through his home country's courts.
Timeshifting is now a part of everyday life. Slowly, it is no longer an elite group that can set the timer on a vcr (devices like TiVo, help a lot) and a lot of people time-shift.
It doesn't matter wherether it is a broadcast premiere of a movie or a sports event, both may be time-shifted, and quite legally too! This is going to upset a lot more people than the CSS business and will not do anything for industry credibility or compliance.
See my journal, I write things there
they exaggerate the extent to which it hurts them but IT STILL DEPRIVES THEM OF PROFITS
In some cases, piracy can potentially increase profits by increasing the size of the market for the legitimate software. Piracy on the part of poor individuals doesn't cost any profits because poor individuals aren't able to pay $600 for Photoshop anyway, and it increases the mindshare of a product. Mindshare translates to market share, especially when businesses site-license software. This is part of how Photoshop, Flash, 3DS Max, and Windows became so popular: by granting implicit licenses to individual pirates, the publishers made their programs more popular among those who would want to join companies that would legitimately license expensive software. It's the same reason companies give out "free trial" copies of software, except that the missing feature in this case is the ability to use the software in a commercial setting.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Where would Adobe be today without the rampant piracy of Photoshop by tens of thousands of graphic art students (don't tell me this is not happening).
Probably selling a lot of copies of Photoshop Elements (that is, Photoshop minus the prepress engine) at $100 a piece (not $600) and making a wad of dough.
Photoshop has a HUGE learning-curve to do anything but the most basic operations.
How does it compare to GIMP's? Is GIMP 1.2 easier or harder than Photoshop Elements?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Look, if a law that restrictive was ever passed, Police officers would be breaking it.
According to page 5 of this PDF from the Library of Congress, law enforcement officers acting in official duty are exempt from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Remember Prohibition?
The current crop of Republicrat legislators don't seem to; otherwise, they would have repealed the anti-recreational-drug laws a long time ago.
Any politician who would vote for such a thing better hope the donation from the media companies can buy him a ticket to Rio and keep him fed for the rest of his life
Find how much your politician got from Di$ney at Open Secrets.
because his public "service" career would end at the next election
Not with our ovine electorate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Are we so wrapped up in TV and pop culture that we have to live and die by the TV? Will it be the end of my life if I miss the latest episode?
Really I think the bigger picture here is, Are we wasting are lives with the tube? Honestly, don't we have better things todo?
Join a gym, hockey legaue, basketball leagues, futbol(soccer?) league....
Go to a bar and have a drink...
Spend some quality time with your gal (guy??)...
The point is, TV may be fun and all, but it's
such a waste when you could be spending that time with friends and loved ones.
Why is this even a concern??
Haven't you heard about this yet?
r g/ hdcp-weakness.htm
http://www.dvhs.co.uk/100046.htm
Also the spec at http://www.digital-cp.com/
Luckily, it seems to be flawed.
http://www.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/cryptome.o
Pay techsupport hurt WordPerfect, but honestly the alternatives weren't any better.
What killed WordPerfect was that the userbase had decided that Windows was the future, and after WP's terrible early Windows versions, everyone wrote them off as dead.
There was also some price and support advantages to buying a "suite", which WP was slow to offer.
you all wish you'd listened to that fat cow sally struthers and gotten your degree in tv/vcr repair.
i'm signing up now, fuck this engineering degree.
Please use your moderator points to keep the parent post (on the problematic nature of the moderation/editorial system currently in use at Slashdot) modded up to visibility!
Slashdot editors and a number of first-amendment-hating moderators are trying to suppress free speech on Slashdot and have been doing so now for months.
Those of you not reading at -1 have no idea how many informative (and in some cases very funny!) posts you're missing which are being suppresseded (via "offtopic" "redundant" or "overrated" mods) for political/financial reasons, very much in the same tradition of totalitarianism, the RIAA and the MPAA.
I am posting as an anonymous coward because I have already burned 70+ moderator points over the last 8-9 months trying to bring some attention to this problem; finally someone has managed to make some exposure headway!
I don't know whether this suppression of ideas is political, financial, or otherwise or whether it is carried out by the editors of Slashdot at the behest of advertisers or simply by holier-than-thou moderators who are 14 years old and have points to burn.
The point is that now, to get at the cream of the crop, I often have to read at -1 and suffer through the "real" trolls as well, while only the non-controversial posts seem to stay visible to to 0+ readers.
This post will no-doubt be moderated to -1, offtopic within five or six minutes, but I notice that there is no acceptable meta-forum anywhere at Slashdot for discussing the mechanisms of Slashdot itself. That such a forum does not exist in spite of the "free" ongoing ad dollars it would no doubt generate seems to indicate that at least some of this suppression is indeed carried out by the editorial staff or by corporate.
It's nice to see this issue get some attention.
By all means, please read the thread discussed in the parent comment to this one, it's really quite enlightening.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The supreme court did not rule that it was your unalienable human right to record things off the TV.
They said that Congress hadn't made it illegal, and therefore there was no legal reason to stop people from doing it. Congress can always change their mind (as they did with the AHRA).
In the rental/sale biz, the picture is relatively the same. The flow is You->rental store->content generators. Now if you were able to download the content from the net, for free, where would the rental store and content generators get their money? Again, the only way they could protect their revenue would be to encrypt the content, and encrypt it to the point of per view encryption.
The unexplored territory is the ad based download site, and /or embedding the ad directly into the show. ("Hey Chandler, pass me a cold, refreshing Miller Lite, would ya?", "Sure! Say, do you drink it because it's great tasting, or because it's less filling?", "No, I drink it because Tops was having a sale on Nabisco Shredded Wheat, and this was in the next aisle. Oh, and you wouldn't believe who I ran into there...")
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Don't forget, unlike certain "freeware" operating systems available today, it worked well and didn't crash because you tried to run a program on it. I know this is something that a lot of advocate likes to overlook, but I figured I'd point it out.
Is Linux for you and your business? Probably not.
If you're truly worried about such trivial things in life as whether or not you're going to miss a television show then you're probably watching too much television. Unplug the cable, pick up a book (I suggest "Lord of the Rings" if you haven't been doing much reading since school), go to your nearest park and read.
Check out http://www.linuxtv.org or http://www.linuxdvb.tv for information about the DVB project, which is attempting to develop Linux digital-TV apps/drivers as well as to keep digital TV open.
Note that the company formed to develop the DVB driver (Convergence) is in financial difficulty and could fold soon.
Given that Linux is an obvious choice for set-top-boxes, and that many manufacturers want to make their own implementations closed (although the DVB standard seems to be prevailing at the moment), this could be the venue for a future battleground between open and closed source.
mtb
i remember my dad telling me stories about when vcr's first came out television companys fucking with the signal so when it was recorded it came out all scrambled,kinda like what they are testing out on cd's, and someone took them to court because it was their right to make a copy of the television show for personal use or something....and won. but i could be wrong.
What's the point of cable and TV if you can't record programs? I'm sorry, but I tend to work upwards of 12 hours a day, and I tend to miss pretty much everything on TV. The only way to see anything is to tape it, either on a VCR, or to my harddrive.
If I can't do that, then I just won't pay for cable anymore.
forcing either-or choices (and affecting ratings and advertising rates,) rather than allowing us to watch one, record another
heh...
Old system: Watch one show (leave room to get soda during ads). Record second show at the same time. Watch recorded show later (fast-forward through ads).
New system: Watch only one show (leave room to get sode during ads). Do not watch second show.
End result of new system: Overall viewing of TV programs is decreased (due to inability to watch second show), advertising rates drop. Networks forced to fill time slots with first-rate shows. Consumers, although unable to watch two simultaneous shows, have better shows to choose from and win.
ok people, this is how it works, a signal, no matter analog/digital can ONLY be sent 2 ways.
<br>
1) feed sent without encryption/decode at source
<br>
or
<br>
2) feed send with encryption then decoded at destination.
<br>
Now, boys and girls, IF it happens to be #2, then the decode method has to be hardware(ez to take apart and figure out, heard of cable descramblers?), or a device that accepts software to decode the feed. (a method of decoding the feed that ends once the decode has finished, and no longer is on the destination device, also know as backdoor feed), this can be hacked do to the specs of the device and how it functions, (like a mod chip for your psx). ez and ur done. So what did we learn? IF you can VIEW it you CAN copy IT. Class Dismissed~, PS, the copyproof cd thats getting the hype?, it was hacked 2 weeks after there supposed test run, spec's can be found on the web, and its ez...
One major difference between something like this and preventing ripping/copying from a CD on your computer is the way the devices interact in the system. In a computer, it would be hard, if not impossible to filter out the corruption put into a copy protected CD short of getting entirely new hardware.
However, because TV devices are often "daisy-chained" together, additional components can be added to filter out this signal corruption. Usually the cable from the wall goes into the PVR, and from there goes to the TV. If some sort of video copy-protection were to be implemented, it probably wouldn't be long until some "magic black box" gets invented to remove this corrupion. Then, your problem (if you are a cable subsciber, that is) is solved.
A major problem comes from digital broadcasts such as satillite and HDTV. The copy-protection scheme is now part of the bitstream, and it becomes much harder to make a black box to filter out the copy protection. This kind of thing exists to defeat SCMS on MiniDiscs, but dealing with hundreds of videostreams simultaneously whould require quite some power (and money).
Is there some simpler way to do this (besides preventing this from happening in the first place)?
Afterthough: If we did any of this, would we be violating the DMCA?
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Exactly, and as we have found out, the DMCA prevents you from exercising your 'fair use' rights. So basically, you have a right to record it as long as you don't break copy protection schemes. If everyone puts a token protection scheme into everything (and the DMCA stands), the betamax precedent has absolutely no legal bearing. At least that's how I understand it, thought IANAL and was never into studying law.
Read the original story again - this is a story that could have been posted any time in the last few, or even next few weeks. Nothing happened yesterday to trigger this story - other than the anniversary of that landmark case - probably deliberate.
IMPORTANT: Please read the whole post
I'm sure many of you are aware of this thread already.
If you are interested in helping against the moderators who have been "editing" the thread, please read this.
Please do not moderate this post down. It is good for the long term, but if you still feel like being someone who denies the horrible truth, give me your best shot. You will help hold all of Slashdot users back in the long term.
For more info, read this piece from an apparently superior news site.
For the most part, I just find myself ignoring television altogether. I found I chose DSL over having a cable/Cable modem. Let's just say I couldn't afford both, and it was one or the other.
I won't get into specifics, except the Cable/Internet service was extremely poor.
I chose DSL and have not regretted it since.
Is this possible? Is there any reason why you couldnt encode tv signals with macrovision, to prevent copying? I`ve not heard of this, which makes me think its not possible, but why not?
TV Copy Protection?
Ha!
People will ALWAYS find a way to circumvent copy protection, and record whats on TV for later viewing. Just like DVD encryption was to prevent copying DVD's, viewing DVDs in different regions and so on.
The weak encryption was easily cracked.
And if worse comes to worse, you can always set up your video camera infront of your TV and record it while your gone, to watch it later. Sure, the quality will be lesser, but you can ALWAYS record whats on TV.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I guess all comments so far are with regards to VCR recording... What I see is people thinking about a "hard" programmed vieweing. It is possible nowadays that you can move onto TV on Demand (Video on demand), which will allow creating a program of your own, and then watching it as you please... as a result paying for each individual viewing (hopefully uninterrupted by commercials).
I think this is the next step the big boys are going to be movin on to.
Batevladi
Put this together with the article a while back that AOL/Time/Warner is trying to get "consumers" to accept the idea of paying, what was it, $225 a month or some such for their cable servcies. Which, granted, would be more than just "cable TV" is now, but that's still nearly a factor of 2 over what I pay for cable plus internet plus phone service put together, and those three aren't allcoming from a single point of failure monopoloy at the moment. (At least, not all from the same one :/ .)
So you'll start paying much more for your TV service. And you won't be able to tape first run shows or sports broadcasts or what have you. Geeks will crow about the beautiful picture and how it's all worth it, but meanwhile those of us with lives but who still want to (say) keep up with Babylon 5 or the equivalent will no longer be able to; we'll be back to the 70's when we have to schedule our lives around TV broadcasts... unless we want to pay even *more* for pay-per-view or similar.
Personally, if my Chicken Little scenario here is even half true, this will reach a threshold where I'll just say it's not worth the money and hassle to have a TV. American consumerist culture already makes me a bit ill, even though my borderline technophilia makes me a hypocrite for saying that. I'd like to think that sooner or later the megacorps couldn't get away with this, because they will completely alienate an audience who will not like the idea of paying more and more for thins that become less and less usable.
-Rob
I suspect it might be advisable to simply boycott channels that employ anti-copying technology. If it's less profitable for them to use the technology than to abandon it, they'll abandon it. As a British TV viewer I object to having to pay per view for certain sports events, on top of paying my TV license and cable subscriptions, so I simply don't watch pay-per-view. I think if they introduce anti-copying technology to the UK I will simply give up watching TV & save myself a stack of money.
More and more the control over the media we consume is wrested from the consumer. With the internet, with attempts at censoring and obnoxious advertising techniques, and here with TV, denying to choose when, how and how often one watches a show.
This remembers me of some science-fiction scenarios, where it was essentially forbidden to switch off the TV, and where everyone was subjected to the same Program, which was more or less unavoidable (installing TV in subways was already planned somewhere).
Advertising is one driving force behind this, and only because it's forbidden, they don't strap us to chairs, fixing our heads and clamping our eyes open while pumping drugs into us to make us even more responsive to their garbage (sorry, i watched "A Clockwork Orange" recently). Will they ever learn, that it would be easier just to make their crap entertaining?
Another driving force is content control by rights holders, who would prefer to bill us every time we watch/listen to anything. Now they want to control where, how and when we watch/listen, next time probably the size of the TV-screen, and the number of people in the audience will factor into the formula determining the price.
Then we have politicians and large corporations who want to control, what is said about them and their actions. Already the DMCA is used not only to suppress information about DRM-mechanisms, but also critcal remarks about a product (also see microsofts recently launched campaign to suppress information about security holes, especially if it isn't moderated by microsoft). Wars look like Videogames in the TV, and since 9/11 journalists seem to have forgotten about investigating for themselves and collectively follow the party line (yeah, mod me down, and demonstrate how it already works).
The point is, that there's far more money working for the control-freaks, than for those subject to their schemes. And they don't mind buying legislation with it, if they think, that will win them even more money. So maybe we'll soon live in a world, where you have the right of free speech, but noone can hear you in all the noise.
.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I think that any mode of copy protection is rather flawed. Take audio: Let's say you can no longer rip music straight off of a CD. Well, you can always play the CD and just record the sound that comes out with your sound card. Certainly this is somewhat slower and degrades the quality a little, but it's hard to notice unless you're an audiophile, in which case you won't be using mp3 anyway.
When it comes to capturing TV for example, if you get a TV card, the process of viewing and the process of capturing (it seems to me) are identical no matter what you do. Even if the software that comes with the tv card won't let you record, something will. Even if you have to read from the frame buffer of your video card to get the picture and plug your sound card into itself to get the sound, both of these are still options.
Since I live in a dorm room, my only TV is in fact my computer, and I've been recording shows into divx'd avi's for quite a while now, and I can't complain about the quality at all.
So basically even though it may be more inconvenient to record some signals, it will always be possible, so I don't think there's a reason to make a big fuss about it...
-S
All I need to make an amplifier is a few capacitors, resistors, and transistors (It's called analog signal processing). From there it would probably be simplest to decode the signal in software. Making the software might take a day or two, if I'm determined, and the amplifier would take maybe $.50 in parts, a little solder, and patience.
Well, in the US we force companies to adhere to certain sets of standards (sometimes).
Well, yes, but what is that standard going to be, and will it be set with the public interest in mind?
There's one force that trumps even the "Golden Rule" (those who have the gold, make the rules). Those whose gold is invested in media empires can leverage their rule making power, public and lesser commercial interests be damned.
It's happened before.
Up until 1945, the FM band was 42 - 49 MHz, not the familiar 88 - 108. FM was was championed by it's inventor Edwin Armstrong, who also invented the superhet receiver. FM was, and is technically superior to AM; a new generation of technologically advanced, highly sensitive and interference resistant FM receivers was set to make serious inroads against the installed base of more primitive AM devices.
In those pre TV days, radio was big -- very big. The powers that controlled radio (David Sarnoff or RCA & NBC) didn't want their investment and power undercut by a technological upstart, so they pulled some strings and had the FM band changed, immediately rendering the installed base of FM radios useless.
To say it set radio back decades is no exaggeration. When I was a kid in the 1960s, FM was an economic backwater. You could actually get an AM only radio -- they weren't uncommon. The popular stations were all AM; FM was largely a bunch of shoestring operations playing classical music and scraping by on what was left over from AM. It wasn't until the 1970s that FM started to match the clout of AM, although arguably this was a change for the worse for the once elite listeners of FM.
Admittedly, we are talking about a somewhat different situation: the possibility of a new technology being forced on the public rather than being kept down. On the other hand, the real question is what side of the equation the most influential corporate interests are on and what side is the public interest on. What we are talknig about is the possibility of striking a new bargain with these interests: essentially free timeshifting goes away in return for either a higher quality signal or more channels (most likely the latter).
So -- take heed. The public may want to cry out, but when they are up against media interests nobody can hear them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just say "Screw ya, wouldn't wanna be ya" to TVLand. Go read a book, write some code, ride a bike, learn to sail, make love, make art, compose a song, take a picture, design a website, teach an old dog a new trick, post to /., rant, run, rock & roll, etc.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Pints weigh more than remotes, you know.
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Broadcasters license the programs they show. For a period of time (beginning in the 60s through the Bush pere administration, IIRC) they were heavily restricted as to how much they could own of the production.
Ownership restrictions for network broacasters have been eliminated, and during the 90s network broadcasters were bought up by film studios (I think NBC is the only network not owned by a studio.) It is as producers, in which they join other producers in working to use the transition to digital broadcast as a way to introduce code which allows the producer to determine the rules for viewer copying: unrestricted, one-time-only (no derivative copies), and no copying.
Incidentally, it seems to me that there is a disconnect between what's happening on the producer side and what's happening on the consumer side. Consumers are being sold the concept of digital hubs as though it's just placing a pc at the center of a world that is like today, only ever more so: one gets something, say a cd, and one enjoys it at their convenience. Meanwhile producers are proceeding towards their ultimate vision: view, then pay; view again, then pay again. It isn't going to be pretty unless a resolution is found.
He was complaining about being able to RECORD what he wanted, not the content available. Sort of like the difference between what cars I can choose from and being told where I can drive them to.
Try to lose the self-righteousness, it doesn't become you.
As to suites, the first really usable versions of the M$Office suite and the Novell WPSuite came along within a few months of one another, and the Novell suite had the M$ suite beat all to hell in the price-to-value ratio dept. (Novell's cost half as much and included half again more real apps.) But by then WP's market share had already been too severely eroded, and about then M$ discovered bundling M$Office with corporate-PC OEM contracts (either include Office, or we'll yank your cheap license to preload Windows), enforcing M$Office as the de facto standard like it or not. And THAT was the first shovel of dirt on top of the coffin, for WP and everyone else.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
We should be allowed to copy, distribute, and especially modify TV and movies as we choose. If such a new paradigm means that the only way the producers can be compensated for their productions is pay-per-view and per-use billing, that's fine with me - so long as that billing is a fair price, it's low enough for everyone to afford (and it's WAY higher than it should be at the moment), and it passes into the public domain in a reasonable time.
Why am I saying this? Because the biggest problem with the media today is that the producers, and the government, and especially the distributors exert entirely too much control over how and where their products are used, which is precisely the reason the US constitution was so specific regarding copyright and patenting. There is nothing inherently wrong with copying someone's idea or work, despite people's territorial urge to the contrary. Art and invention rest on foundations of previous ideas and works laid down over the years, to the benefit of everyone. The free dissemination of ideas enriches all involved and in turn allows further improvement and better understanding. Governments (or at least the US government) and companies have no business telling you whether and how you use that information - that's censorship. This is why allowing people to modify works is so important. Excerpting clips, commenting (via additional media tracks in the case of video), parodying, and most importantly translating (as in the case of fansubs) works allows people to fully utilize them.
The only argument (besides matters of national security like nuclear technology, or products of criminal acts like child porn) against allowing people to copy freely is that it would remove the profit motive (and how strongly the profit motive is relative to other factors is a matter of some controversy), thus encouraging secrecy or discouraging people from innovating altogether. Thus patents and copyrights are granted for only a set period of time to allow their makers to recoup their expenses. They are a bargain created to serve the public good by encouraging innovation and dissemination of those innovations. People used to understand that, but greedy companies and their lawyers have obscured that through intimidation (as in the case of Disney) and legal loopholes (as in the double whammy of restrictive software licensing and anti-circumvention legislation) to devastating effect.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
And I can see by your 6-digit UID you have been on this forum long enough to understand Slashdot "Karma".
Here's a clue, cowboy: Default scores bear no relation to the worth of an individual post. They are only a reflection of the poster's recent activity. It is entirely possible a poster may have spent a few weeks playing around with offtopic comments but was recently moved to post something serious. This happens all the time.
Furthermore, Malda himself has said people get too wrapped up in Karma. It is not a game. It is not a reflection of an individual's intelligence or "worth". Given the herd (or HURD, heh) mentality of many slashdot moderators, it is mostly a reflection of whether or not most long-timers agree with someone's postings.
This was not the intent of Karma and, in fact, the moderation guidelines explicitly warn against it. Unfortunately, that's how it seems to work in real life. Not enough people with moderation privileges read and take to heart these guidelines. Some just don't care and want to use the "power" to further their "cause".
Impartiality and the benevolent use of power are rare. Just look at the network news for proof.
So, in summary, your snide comment about seeing someone else's karma drop says more about you than about them. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to log in with one of my other accounts and mod you down because you're mean *giggle*.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
It is also legal for 300 million Americans to tell WB to go to hell! Currently, TV is a simple no-brainer matter. Just have your 7 year-old set the VCR to record "Buffy", go out to dinner, and watch it when you get home. Somehow, I don't think Joe Sixpack will react well if TPTB try to take that away.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
"dos?
/. isn't real keen on single-user non-multitasking real mode OSes. For what it was, when it was, on the hardware it ran on, DOS was truly The Shit(TM)... Well, at least it sure seemed like it during my early teens."
/.'rs will agree that Dos was The Shit(tm). :)
Okay, it's a decrepit obsolete hack of a pathetic excuse for an operating system, sure - but flamebait?
Geez, I guess
I'm sure a lot of
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Since SonicBlue announced the ReplayTV 4000, I am sure that content providers are crapping themselves trying to find a way to short-circuit the features of this device. Briefly, the ReplayTV 4000 uses your existing home network and broadband connection to both obtain programming information fromt he ReplayTV servers, as well as enable users to share TV shows both over their local networks and over the Internet. Granted, it could take hours to transmit a single show from your ReplayTV to someone else's across the country, but certainly less time than it would take to ship a video tape.
When ReplayTV was a brand new venture, they started selling units on their own which had built-in FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports on them. The idea was to be able to archive existing program content stored in the DVR onto external media, or to supplement the hard disk already in the DVR. These ports were never activated, apparently under pressure from the entertainment industry which feared rampant piracy. Plans to create DVR devices that took removable media (such as ORB disks, a plan which CastleWood had been discussing openly on their web site) were similarly scrapped by other manufacturers.
Now, it would seem that SonicBlue, which acquired ReplayTV, is making it trivial for people to effectively copy TV shows to their friends. Granted, this system probably doesn't allow anonymous copying, so casual piracy will be reduced (no "Napster-esque" video sharing), but there's nothing preventing someone in one geographic region from sharing a show that is either blocked or unavailable in another geographic region. Pay-per-view for sporting events will suffer if such devices proliferate -- you can easily get around blackout restrictions by having your friend in another area record the game for you.
its sad...
The actions and motivations of corporations, especially american ones, will continue to push the envelope without bound, until eventually enough people become totally pissed off at the profit driven, anti-person tidal wave we have that they, through conscious and intentional collective behavior bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. No one will see it coming, but maybe if humans are really really lucky, those that are still left will figure out how totally screwed up we've been placing our lives and future in the hands of profit-driven corporations. How many examples do we need of big corporations fucking things up again and again before we realize that there is no possible way that big corporations intermixed with the fundamental fact that our finacial system requires growth to function -- represents anything close to a sustainable system?
Without man, is there any hope for gorillas?
Back in the mid-80s I acquired a Video Processor.
This was supposed to 'boost' the signal for Dubbing,
but I think it also fixes Timing problems.
Before I owned a NTSC-capable TV I used this device
to process the Signal enough from a NTSC Tape on a
multi-system VCR enough to get an idea on a PAL Monitor
what was on the tape!
As long as I can feed a Composite Signal into THIS
device I can obtain a Processed Composite Signal out,:
EVEN as far as on 3 different devices as it is also
a 1-to-3 Distribution Amp!!!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
As usual, the big companies are rattling their swords about fighting piracy and introducing countless stupid inconveniecies in the consumer devices that will only limit the honest buyer's (and spectator's) posibilities.
They say they want to stop piracy by limiting the freedom of customers and in some cases, even by denying the customer some of his own legal rights.
They think they can stop piracy by preventing someone to share a video material with a friend, while the real pirates, those that actually make the real money at the expense of the media companies, those pirates that already have the power to make copies on a production line, those pirates who SELL those copies, those pirates will never be stopped by this stupid regulations.
What they want is control and the ordinary people to be pawns at their mercy (remember OCP?).
When the DVD copy protection was broken and released on the internet and a huge scandal followed, the media giants turned their wrath on a scandinavian youngster who wrote the code and posted it at a time when real pirates were already manufacturing and selling DVDs on a large scale and did not use or need the decss program.
However, the DVD copy protection scheme prevents the ordinary citizen from making a backup copy of his purchased movie, not even on lower quality VHS. However, it is the citizen's right to do so if he/she wants.
At the time the media giants attacked Napster, it was the only company doing what it did. after Napster was closed, other similar services emerged like mushrooms in a forest after rainfall, many of which they have not control whatsoever.
Personally, I have a TV and 2 VCR's. I like to watch a movie and record 2 others on other stations, if they are interesting and view them later. I will see the commercials on all of them and theoretically, all those stations can consider themselves as receiveing audience rating from me for those movies they broadcast.
Or maybe I want to watch a sporting event that is broadcasted when I am away from home, ie at work!!!
I can't imagine how preventing me from recording that even to be watched later when I come home will ever help that TV station !!!
I don't see how wil this really affect pirates! Surely they already have the means of getting the footage they need and a copy protection scheme on broadcasted TV will be broken eventually by them, and then will become widely known.
Probably the fate of such copy protection schemes will be similar to those used by sat operators. And how in the world can they imagine that the average citizen can afford a personalized, professional, high-tech descrambler like Power-Vu is for sat broadcasts, since there it is used only for high-end customers, like cable operators that then charge you cable fee for giving you that channel...
In the end, this can only be seen as a measure to control the freedom of the citizen.
If the TV has the capability of receiving TV signals then you have to pay the TV licence. It doesn't matter how many TV's you have tho'.. it's the same price for one TV or two hundred. Indeed you don't even have to have a TV... a VCR which is capable of receiving TV signals counts too. For example, there is a lower cost licence for black and white TV's.... but if you have a B&W TV and a VCR which is capable of receiving colour signals then you should pay the colour fee (even though you can only _see_ B&W).
return 0; }