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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."
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
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?
... 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.
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."
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.
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.
...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!!!
:)
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
Watch what you say. There's plenty of episodes of Junkyard Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television. These are my favorite two shows and also the only shows that watch. (actually, I'm being serious)
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.
What would one read in a newspaper today, yesterday's news? Opinions of illiterate or unqualified journalists? Ads? Same happened with radio; rare a song now is played from start to end because radio people just love to mix and match the bait^Wsong with ads and useless chat that is not even worth the battery to tune to. TV is not far behind; ads drip from every little pause in content, and the content itself is of very low value, targeting lowest common denominator in the society.
Is there something better than TV? Sure, and it is already here. One can have his movies on tapes, VCDs, DVDs or just in big .avi files, just click of a mouse to order at online shop (or Usenet). The one-way pipe (from fools on that end to fools on this end) is now being replaced with tons of chat/messaging software, from rocket-scientist's IRC to uncle Joe's Yahoo boards, where people can actually *talk* to each other, instead of being fed with corporate propaganda.
The TV is losing its appeal, especially (for now) among people who know how to get better information from Internet. Joe Sixpack still uses TV; however he does so not because he loves it but because it is there. He loves beer much more, and if he can get his football elsewhere, he will. If he can't tape his play he would be mad, and the TV would be useless to him.
In any case, there is no free market in broadcasting, and as such the monopoly (made out of several sister TV companies) is free to abuse the viewer in any way it wants. The only remedy is to stop using their services. They are not worth much anyway, and if a movie is good you can always buy it, free from ads, squishing, logos and other fluff.
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
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!"
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. "
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.
I bet it won't even notice whatever content protection scheme they put in!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Only to a certain extent. for instance. Larry Lunchpail already has local blackout on his satellite dish and he isn't coating anyone with blood. Look at it this way. I pay 50 bucks a season to see all the NFL games I want, plus some NCAA. Except, for that 50 bucks, I can't see my home team, because it's blacked out by the national stations in my area. I have to watch their medium or not at all. Much more than that, if my favorite team makes it to the playoffs, or ANY televised game, then I'm stuck switching back to my less quality games through my antenna. So basically, I've paid 50 a season for the worst games and no playoffs. And Larry Lunchpail laps it up! no complaints. this has been going on since the satelite tv started. The only alternative I see is not worrying about the drivel they put up anyway, and watch PBS until they scramble that signal too.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
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.
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.
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
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.
"...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.
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.
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
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.
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
If I can see it, I can record it.
If I can hear it, I can record it.
Copy protection dosen't work.
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.
Watching a show where the sound keeps cutting out every few seconds sucks no matter what, and that's what you're left with if you do what you suggest.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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 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.
They don't broadcast shows because they want to - they broadcast shows because they have to.
They broadcast ADS because they want to.
If we record the shows, edit the ads, and repost the show - their profit model breaks down - in theory.
It gets worse for TV broadcast of movies and mini-series of course, but there is a pathological fear here when TV broadcasters of series and news worry so much.
Home taping has never been a threat. It wasn't to TV, it wasn't to Hollywood and it never really was to the RIAA either. VCR's always had a fast forward feature and some of them are damned good at filtering out ads. We all have VCR's - we don't systemically use them for this, by and large.
Why? We have better things to do with our time than waste EFFORT on filtering out ads.
Being able to make a perfect digital copy (a non-inferior good) and being able to choose it on demand from a pirated source scares the hell out of these companies.
As well it should at first blush I suppose, but is TV in THAT much of a problem position?
TV has less to fear from this technology than any other media. TV is too easy and too "free" to make ppl go out and chase it down to DL on a concerted basis.
Mp3's are traded for convenience and to avoid paying for them. Movies are traded for convenience and to avoid paying for them.
TV will be traded for convenience - as it is now to a limted degree. But as price is not an issue, the consumer does not perceive a substantial benefit to trade them on a concerted systemic basis.
If the only profit model they are really protecting is the ability to sell as many copies as they can of Season Two of The Sopranos on DVD, these guys need to chill out a little.
Okay - your market to sell Band of Broathers shrank a little. Other than that, so what?
TiVO is worth worrying about, but the net does not really add to the problem of TiVO to any appreciable degree.
The networks would be better off spending less effort on video on demand and more time on customized ad targeting.
We choose the show - our personal tastes determine the type of ads they stream to us. We don't waste the effort to filter them out or avoid them, because we don't mind watching them.
The worst case scenario in all of this is that TV simply has to broadcast ads that people choose to watch.
This happens in Europe and Japan already. The sun still rises and sets.
*slow down and take a breather for a moment will ya guys?
.Robert
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?
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?
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
It is a supply and demand you silly ;-)
If some marketdroid will decide that he wants "exclusive" over someone else and pays for it there is nothing you will able to do about it.
C'est la vie
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
The same thing that happens to anyone who tries to build a non-macrovision compliant device today; they'll get sued by whoever is in charge (JVC, I believe, for VHS).
Of course, a few slip through, but that wont really change anything. Oh, and anyone trying to market and sell such a device in the US would get DMCA'd up their ass.
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.
What makes you think that someone doesnt have the right to do whatever they want with anyones artistic material?
Copyright? Copyright is granted as a means to ensure the maximum availability and production of new material for the common good, by offering a limited exclusive right to copy the material.
Of course, this idea is becoming more and more corrupted, far beyond what is for 'the public good'. IMO, it's time to tear up all copyright (and patent) laws, and start over with the public (rather than the corporate interest) good.
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
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
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.
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.
Funny, last time I checked, neither authors, nor musicians were making much money from their creativity. Yet they do keep producing it despite that they arent the ones making money off it anymore, dont they...
Your fantasy about copyright is long gone; it's what we _should_ have, but it isnt what we _do_ have. That is exactly why we do need to tear the current legislation up, because neither the common good nor the creative people gain anything from the current situation where the distributors are the only ones making any money.