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EFF Comments on HDTV Copy Restriction Plans
Seth Schoen writes: "EFF has been following the work of the Broadcast Protection Discussion
Group (which was featured in a
CNet
article linked from slashdot on Thursday) since it was founded in
November. Co-incidentally, we today released an
EFF overview of this work which contains some of our
criticism of these efforts to control the ability of future consumer
devices to record digital HDTV broadcasts."
Microsoft will want to hear about this!
Industry Plans to Restrict Use of HDTV Broadcasts, Harming Innovation
It funny you know, I think if anything I've been at my least innovative while watching TV. 'course maybe if its High Def...
Starsucks
I think that the EFF already has a pretty full plate.
If you can see it on tv you can copy it...simple as that. Someone will always find a way to crack it as long as they use antiquated economic models.
If they actually had anything on TV worth _watching_, this might make a wee bit more sense.
I might as well stand by the curb next to my garbage... carrying a shotgun and hollering.
Who cares - waste your money protecting it if you want. Nobody's gonna steal what's on TV. Most of us like two or three channels which we need the full package cable to get, naturally.
Already it's tough to get people to spend the extra cash on those HDTV sets. Lets throw in some copy protection too, to make HDTV even more unappealing! Then we can all be stuck with NTSC for the rest of our natural lives.
Although I've seen them mentioned numerous times here on slashdot, i've never read anything from them. I suppose the only info I know about them would be considered "hearsay" from slashdot discussions. This article is coherent, easy to understand, well thought out, did i meantion easy to understand, and informative. In short, if i wasn't unemployed, I'd be donating right now.
--why?
I think there are enough movies, television shows in the world. Shouldn't that mean that the price decreases?
As the article points out, PVR's do not use removable media (hey, now there is a good idea for me to patent... if only I believed in our patent and copyright system and it was how it should be). Therefor, it makes it nearly impossible for me to distribute/lend my copy to someone else (network TiVos are something else). This was the video industry's major gripe against VCRs when they were introduced. All though I would be quite enraged if they prevented me from recording broadcasts on a removable digital media, I would be far more enraged if I could not make digital recordings on a PVR.
Ultimately, IMHO, something like SCMS will be introduced to prevent multiple perfect digital copies originating from one source. However, SCMS was a joke for MiniDisc/DAT-- many units simply ignored the copybits or gave the option to turn them off. If worse came to worse, you can whip up a bit stripper and copy until your heart is content. Hopefully, if we end up getting a SCMS-like system on digital broadcasts, it will be taken as seriously as it was on MD/DAT and/or be very simple to beat...
...Then, of course, we would violate the DMCA and go to jail for months before our arraignment...
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I'm just waiting until the next time I get moderator points...
No, check these threads. At least you know that you won't be censored there. Also, it'd be nice to see if the kuro5hin moderation scheme works under slashdot-like loads.
Also, kuro5hin's open submission queue for stories is looking especially attractive right now. It doesn't look like the Slashdot editors are going to let any stories through that are critical of their site.
The Great 1-17 Karma Massacre! Mark it on your calendars! The day 'The Dream' got modded to -1.
It's "17-1" you american dumbass shit. There arent 17 months in the year fuckwit.
Er, 1-16.
suck unto my penis, you limey crooked-toothed, pastey, cock chugging, pint spilling, mispronouncing cockslap.
It should be 2002-01-16. Any other system will quickly become unusable. 02-01-03. 02-03-02. 02-10-01.
To sign up, simply post an ontopic (or offtopic - it doesn't matter) message to the following thread - almost instant bitchslap by editors guaranteed!
Opera Breakable after all
To whet your appetite, consider the current moderation on the parent post of this thread:
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=94, Flamebait=2, Troll=4, Redundant=3, Insightful=18, Interesting=59, Informative=15, Funny=2, Overrated=2, Underrated=11, Total=210.
I Can See, I can Hear I can COPY !!!
Man, when will they learn...
What I object to is the idea of the law being used to control the machines we might design and build, by making some non-approved designs illegal. There need to be controls on machines with military applications (like jet fighters) or which can only be used for criminal applications (like lockpicks). But the idea that a general purpose recording machine should be illegal to build because it might break copy protection laws is oppressive.
It's like banning ovens because they might be used to bake hash cakes.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
This is all such crap. First of all broadcasters under legal statute cannot prevent people from recording broadcasts for personal use. They also under FCC rules can't obfuscate their content. They can however legally add flags to digital streams saying "this is copyrighted material". MP3s have a little known copyright bit but people don't bother to pay any attention to it. The C|Net aricle is flawed to say that broadcasters can somehow alter their content as to be unwatchable by certain people. The FCC would have a broadcaster's ass if they sent out an encoded signal.
As for file trading, the argument is sort of ridiculous. It goes something like "the latest ER is available on [sharing service] therefore EVERYONE MUST HAVE A COPY OF IT OH FUCK". The reality of it is too few people have both the ability and motivation to find and download every episode of some TV show. I think the fears of this are temporally misplaced by about ten years. Maybe in 2012 when 70% of households have 10+mbps connections to the UltraNet there would actually be a measurable drop in broadcast programming viewers. By this time however broadcast video would be a twilight technology since most of your content would be on demand anyways. The percentage of people who hop online to grab the latest episode of some show compared to the percentage of people who just turn their TV to that fucking station is is pretty steep.
The problem with broadcasters is they have been lying with statistics for so long they don't know what reality is anymore. They have convinced themselves that they can use Neilson boxes to guage the number of people with reasonable tolerances who watched some show and thus its commercials. I'm not allowed to handle a remote anymore because as soon as a show gets boring or FTB (fades to black) I flip to cartoons. I don't know anybody who doesn't wander the dial during commercial breaks. Thinking that in the short term their billion dollar industry is going to be threatened by people trading digital broadcasts being pirated is jackassery. Then again, this is slashdot. Most of the TV and movie piracy in the world is conducted by its readers. Go ahead and pirate away dipshits. It'll just mean you need to decrypt HDTV signals with your fucking DNA in five years.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Not worth my time. Suppose I want to record shows while I'm away on holidays for, say, two weeks, then watch them as I like? Under these proposed US laws, I'd be breaking the law unless a legitimate device to do the same came out.
Now, I don't live in the US, so fortunately this kind of silliness won't bug me for awhile, if at all. But people I know both in the US and not will be punching {NO SALE} to products that attempt to take away the freedom to 'record now, watch later' that people already have.
Violence will only breed more violence. "War on Terrorism" will not end the terrorism if the war is waged only by dropping bombs and torturing and killing people.
The only permanent way to end the terrorism is to fix the source of the discontent. Stop the one-sided pro-Israel policy and help the developing countries build up their infrastructure (the basic necessities like food and water and most important of all, education).
Let them know how the people they murdered felt
As I said, revenge is a barbaric, foul instinct and should not be tolerated anywhere in the society. If you think what happened on September 11th was inhuman, do not act the same way.
September 11th was in the man's nature, too. Get over it and grow up.
DVD encryption was broken incredibly fast. So will this.
Behold for I am not Gandalf the Grey whom you betrayed. I am Gandalf the White who has returned from death.
I thought I'd address this separately.
The BBC is making more and more content for its commercially funded digital channels. My belief is that in the future the government will use this as a rationale to finally do away with the license fee.
Remember TV isn't a free market either.
These people are never going to win. Why? Because of the 30 - 70 year old at home mothers and grandmothers who video tape the soaps. When they can't watch their favorite shows on their schedule, then they will complain. The hardware industry will discover that there is a viable market there and release a VTR. When they get sued for copyright abuse, they can simply just get Ma and granny to testify on how they use their products (which of course would be in pure legal sense). Then dare the industry to get provide evidence that their recorder was used for piracy.
Of course, if they don't let me record my favorite TV shows, I won't have time to watch them (or their sponsors). And the industry will loose (a little) money. Don't they see? This will ONLY HURT THEM!
Ok I am off my tangent.
Summers
My NoC can beat up your NoC
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
------------
As far as I know no-one watches TV on anything that they have the ability or the desire to hack themselves. Watching TV on a PC used to allow people to copy it but no-one watches TV on a PC anymore. Even though copying DVD's was possible on PC's, it was already too inconvenient to play them on PC's let alone copy them on PC's.
That leaves hackers of X Boxes and set top boxes as the only meaningful grounds for copy protection. Unless kids start soldering PCI traces in their X Boxes or put up with an enourmous amount of inconvenience before getting the footage to even play, copy protection for appliances is going to be redundant.
HDTV is being shoved down our throats, and now they want to disallow us to record shows for later viewing?
d tv /html/2c.htm
http://www.readingeagle.com/krt/entertainment/h
Q: Is my conventional TV going to turn into a pumpkin in 2007?
A: Even if you're not interested in digital programming, conventional TV sets will continue to work for many more years. For broadcast signals, they will work until at least 2006 and then low-cost HDTV sets will be available.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...They're usually cut up to shreds taking out half of the good bits (Cursing, nudity, violence)and another half of the plot. Why are the studios so afraid of everyone copying TV signals? We've been doing that for years. There are two reasons to have a VCR:
First to watch VHS tapes
Second to record video signals from the TV
What else would you use the thing for? Door stop when it's broken status stumps the repair guys at the video store? Nifty deconstruction project? It seems everyone has been jumping on this 'Copy-Protection' bandwagon. Every other day or so on Slashdot there's some story about how this industry or that industry is trying to stop their customers from making copies. It can be anything from Software, to Movies, to Music, to now...TV!
IMHO all these industries would be better off setting up a watchdog program to see what people most copy or download etc. If something is so sought after that thousands of people are going hoponline and spend hours downloading it (and/or the copy-protection cracking devices and software needed to watch it), then they should take note that that's one of the things people want. Obviously the consumers are scrambling to get the thing, so they must want more of it. It's not like companies aren't already watching your every move online to determine what you want so they can offer to sell it to you. Why not just look at our habits at the source. If you copy protect a TV show and people chose to watch another rival show on the same time, and then hop online to download the show they missed maybe the broadcasters would get the idea that yes one show beat out another, but people still want to watch both. It seems to me it'd be more profitable to offer these digital broadcasts to the consumers to download just after the show airs.
If you give people what they want they will love you for it. Or haven't you noticed how /.ers have all run in droves to buy Philips products and support the one company out their that seems to be against the copy-protected CDs. Why the companies making MP3 players don't realize that the RIAA is trying to put them out of business and aren't screaming their heads off I don't know. I know I would. Oh wait I already am.
I read Slashdot for the
Once again, big business tries to subvert copyright to enforce their control over consumers. There is absolutely no benefit to the consumers in anything they are proposing. It is all just restrictive overhead they would require of the equipment that would do nothing but limit the capabilities, and add cost/complexity to the production.
With the republican administration, sponsored by corporate America, we can't expect the government to control any of this.
Once again, the EFF is our only hope. Open those check books wide.
Television copying restriction will fail, for one very good reason: advertising.
How much television do you watch live any more? Don't most people record many of their favorite programs for later viewing? Count out the people who can't afford a VCR; they're not going to be buying much of what's advertised anyway.
Now, what happens when a television studio tells their biggest sponsors that they've come up with a way to prevent people from recording shows to watch later? Suddenly the target audience drops by half, and advertisers will refuse to pay nearly as much to buy ad time.
People today lead busy lives. Stop allowing them to record programs, and they're generally not going to shift their schedule around to watch 'em live.
Consumers will not stand for it. HDTV gear is largely going begging because people won't stand for the inability to tape their favorite shows.
And when push comes to shove, the guys in DC listen to the guys with beer cans in their hands and cave in when the deadline nears.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Since it's becoming most popular to RECORD your shows via a VCR or a DVR (Tivo, etc), this will be bad. People will not be able to aquire ratings since people just simply wont watch the shows that are copy protected. Most of us don't have the time to sit down at 7pm and watch Survivor XIII so we just tape it and watch it on a sunless saturday typically. Same goes for any other popular show. Does anyone actually watch shows when they're on anymore? I think not. This would be suicide to the television networks.
Probably not, but I can dream.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
1. If the HDTV signal is unencrypted, flagged or not, creating a workaround, or a non-compliant device would be trivial. Since the copyprotection is a one-time thing (that is, once it's out, it's out), it won't work. (Yes this means they'll have to break all current systems, or upgrade them).
2. So let's assume we have an encrypted HDTV signal, which TVs can somehow decrypt, most likely with a CSS-style encryption, I'd guess 128/256 bit this time around.
3. We must assume that the signal being transmitted is in a format that makes it impossible to record directly, either by a varying session key (negiotiated through public-private cryptography) or artifically inflated size. If not we could just hook up any genenric device in the middle and replay the same signal.
4. Due to 3., the video will need to be able to decrypt the signal, it can't just store the encrypted signal and play it back as needed.
5. It's unreasonable to assume that the recording media, harddisk or DVD+RW, can be kept kept secure (they've dumped the contents of the Xbox already). So, we need a cryptographically strong encrypted file format.
6. Since we from 5. don't trust the disk, we can not uniquely identify it. To ensure that this is a recording we should play, we need an authentication system.
7. Presumably the best option would be to have a system like pgp, where there's a symmetric key, and public keys to find the symmetric key. Naturally the recorder would encrypt it using its own public key. This is basicly overkill until we introdouce the next point.
8. Limited sharing. In addition to adding its own key, the player could also add a limited noumber of other keys. These public keys you could get in any format you'd want that the player would understand (delivering your recorder with a stack of cards to give to your friends, an electronic version, whatever, this is public). However, since we can't trust the disk (add max noumber of friends, copy back the one without friends, add new and so on) we need either to include these keys only at recording, or keep a track of how many keys we've added pr. recording in a secure flash RAM or similar. The last is clearly preferable, and as we have a built-in encryption we might as well keep the data there encrypted too. Naturally, only the original recorder would add keys, any other would simply only play it.
9. Now I feel we have a reasonble digital VCR. It'll let you give your movies to some friends (I haven't specified a noumber, that's a matter of opinion), but you can't put it up on the Internet for all to leech. You can use standard media (harddisks, writeable DVDs, writable cds. You can backup the media, and they will still work. This was for your basic Reciever -> VCR -> TV setup. However, there is still some way to go.
10. VCR to VCR hookup. As it's all digital there's no quality loss, obviously it's a potential leak. Basicly we need a flag to tell if this should be recordable and how we should pass it on, only now that it's encrypted it's working. It would be a standard SCMS-system (No copy, copy once, free copying) The problem is that this will probably be abused by the media companies to sell you content (uhh sorry, licence you the right to see content) that you can't record. The solution would be to require by law that all broadcasts should be set to at least copy once, I don't see any possibility of technically identifying the source.
10. HD-DVD -> VCR -> TV. High Definition DVDs present a problem. Surely we'd like to be able to make a backup of a HD-DVD, and to keep one on the harddisk instead of putting in the disc every time. However unlike broadcasts a DVD can be played over and over again, and we wouldn't want an unlimited supply of copies, nor do we want an unlimited noumber of people able to make a copy, so the encoding in 10. would have to be set to no copying.
Once again I see using the recoders public key as useful, this time when buying the DVD. When buying you should get the DVD, and also the encryption key to the DVD encrypted with the recorder's public key. Once at home the recorder can take the encrypted data (I assume here the VCR has a built-in DVD player, if not, a way to request the encrypted data from the external player, which should be possible as they're harmless without a key) and create a backup that can not be played on other players.
However, you can now make as many backups you want of the file on your harddisk. So you have a disc which will play on all players, but can't be recorded, and as many backups as you want, however all backups will only play on your recorder. Naturally, this does not work with second-hand sale but it's unfortunately impossible to make neither the player nor the disc aware of this and allow a new owner to make backups.
11. When going to the store as described in 10., it's vital that the key is the recorder's, and not a public/private pair that is known. So, the key must be signed by the VCR producer. Also, all stores would have to have an (on-demand) electronic connection to a server which will give out the keys. So if the phone lines are out, no keys. The DVD will still work as a DVD, but you'd have to come back later to get key for your VCR.
12. Lost/stolen. All depends on the encryption keys, doesn't it. So, we'd want a backup of the private key to exist, however we wouldn't want someone to actually *have* the private key, nor do we want the Big Brother register of keys. Solution: Smart card or similar with the private key, encrypted with the manufacturer's key. This should be consider a valuable right up there with your silverware. With it you should be able to get a new one just like you would if it was permanently broken or you wanted to upgrade it, see below.
13. Upgrade/broken. Fundamentally, we could replace it with an exact copy, provided we had the private key. However, it would be much more convienient if we could take a different player and make it play the old disks. And we can. Once again we'll need the connection to the manufacturer, who'll return the private key of the old player, encryped with the public key of the new player.
14. For 12. there'll probably be some fundamental abuse checks. If the player is lost/stolen, a copy of the police report or similar. The upgrade feature should transparently upgrade all disks made using the old system (decrypt key with old, encrypt with new) to make it more difficult for people to use both the new and the "lost" player. The old player should be blacklisted in the server in 10., to note if someone is still buying DVDs to backup them on a "lost" or stolen player.
The automatic upgrade also saves some complexity as it won't have to deal with upgrades of upgrades of upgrades, only one generation.
15. Unsolved problems - limitations. The biggest one is the problem of what happens if one machine is replaced by several. Several old machines being upgraded to one new is no problem, but what if the family buys another machine for their son/daughter, or who gets the recorder in a divorce? Naturally, they could (and would) be designated as one of those that can play the recordings, but that doesn't give them the recorder's ability to add others that can watch them, nor can they move the DVD backups.
Potentially one could create a profile system, where each profile could get upgraded individually, however it's unlikely that people would bother using it, as there's no point until the day the problem arises. Maybe if it could be tied in with some value-adding components, like a personal TV guide with your channels, your "tell-me-when-this-is-on"-list, "record-this-for-me"-list etc., maybe some fundamental access control (pin code for those porn flicks you didn't want anyone else to see) and so on.
Another limitation is that of fair use. This grants backups (compared to none of todays DVDs, short of using DeCSS or similar), it grants lossless but limited sharing of broadcasts (compared to lossy but "unlimited" today, but I wouldn't want the 30th generation video tape, I'd say it's fair enough). However, it doesn't allow you to use that clip in any other way. The fundamental problem is that there is an unlimited noumber of copies, all exactly alike. One of the key conditions for fair use is that it usually involves a small part But those unlimited noubmer of small parts can easily be put together to an unencrypted whole, so I don't see a way to reasonably implement fair use digitally, without at the same time opening up Pandora's Box. First generation analog, at some reasonable quality will have to do, there's a balance to be kept here. As you'd have to have set-top boxes for current analog standards, I guess NTSC/PAL would be it.
16. Bottom line. The bottom line is, I haven't seen them trying very hard to come up with a technical, instead of legal, way of doing things. It's possible, it can be made fairly reasonable (except for all those that have bought a system that can't handle an encrypted HDTV), but I admit, I prefer my normal DVDs (after DeCSS) and DivXs as much as the next guy. But I see how they skew things too much to the side of the consumer, and I don't blame MPAA for trying to prevent free copying. There's a balance here between what's fair for the industry and what's fair for the consumer, but like most other things in the digital world it's very fast either 0 or 1 - rarely a good balance.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So if this is the true argument, the EFF or some large consumer org should propose that analog RCA outputs be left in these new devices. All of our VCRs and PVRs would still work, satisfying those who would like to keep archives of Ace and Gary's Ambiguously Gay Duo for personal use. :-) At the same time, copying is still 1X and analog so the MPAA's argument is mooted.
As for quality, if VCRs and PVRs eventually migrated to SVideo and eventually component outputs, quality will still be lower than the original digital stream but better than what we have today.
Overall, it's a good compromise for both consumers and movie studios. As long as they're being up front with their concerns, that is. This sounds like a good thing to send to our Senators and Reps as its a middle ground solution.
The worst part about this is that all of the HD compatible televisions peoople bought, the ones that had stickers on them claiming they were HDTV ready, will be obsolete.
They all have component inputs and the new systems will make sure that all connections are DVI( I think that is the acronim ). So people will have a TV cabable of displaying a 1080I RGB signal but all of the decoder boxes will only be allowed to have this DVI connector.
All the Palestinians want is a little breathing room. Let's give it to them...no matter how many times they ask for it.
In case you didn't know, it's because people like us are changing things faster than our leaders can keep up with them. One of the hardest things about being smart is realizing that not everyone thinks as fast as you do.
In any case, they're not wrong to be exploring these options. Do you have a proven business model that allows freely distributing copies of intellectual work (not just software, but books, music, movies, etc.) without payment to the authors?
When you do, your rant will make more sense. Right now it's just another rant.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Instead of trying to prevent their shows from being distributed, why not release their own digital versions with ads?
dbc
Where did you see the demo? I'm not a videophile by any means, but the demo I saw in a specialty shop (not Best Buy/Circuit City/Frys) floored me. It was almost like looking through a window, it was so clear. Regular TV looked entirely unacceptable afterwards.
And hey, if you saw a proper demo and still aren't thrilled, that's fine, too. But a good set-up can be a revelation.
But, that's the whole point.... Building a digital VCR is NOT hard. We have the technology to do it. The problem is when groups create artificial limitations that stop us from using the technology.
If the big business sponsored copy control legislation gets passed, they will have a legal means for stopping the production of any devices that incorporate the technologies you describe. So, they intimidate, scare, and bully the companies into not producing digital VCR's, so that there is not chance of us watching that TV show when they don't want us to, or fast forwarding through that commercial, or -heaven forbid- copying that baseball game for my neighbor when he's out of town.
I, very much, respect your article and time thinking these 'rulesets', but you forgot a few major points.
:-(
We've grown up dealing with NTSC and the static/low res of this format. However, some Pirates enter theaters with video cameras and copy very low res (even compaired to NTSC) and horrendous voice quality. These people are the ones you cannot stop.
1: Please explain how your system will prevent copying through an analog medium (in relation of having a video recorder set up aimed at "The Unit")?
2: Assuming that your system may bring the ire of EET's (electrical engineers with basis in tech) which can determine usual structures in digital displays, please tell how you would stop from an EET from taking over the main controllers of the tube/screen and saving those in a like-raw avi file format on a computer.
3: Would this data saved on media be playable on the computer (and not those made specifically for this purpose? If so, how would you prevent software dissassembly? (read note 1)
(note 1) Be aware that the first digital DVD recorder that allowed DVD=>AVI was not DeCSS, but was XING Mpeg player. It routed the video API to a compressor, then the hard disk. Quite rudimentary, but it did work.
4: As a last question, what happens when said show goes public domain? Eventually these shows do, but this cryptographic lock keeps us legitamately out.
Thank you for your time. I'm not trying to flame, because I actually like this idea to a certain extent. If somebody can come up with something fair, I'd use it. The only last prerequisite is that I'd accept NO zoning. However, I get a feeling if they do like your system, zoning's in
Josh Crawley
The whole industry needs to realize this. In a few years network bandwidth will be high enough that true video-on-demand will become a reality.
This is the type service that people want and will be willing to pay or watch commercials. I mean why would I want/need to download/copy anything if it was available on-demand, and I do mean anything.
TV as we know it, and buying DVD/CD will be dead went network bandwidth gets high enough...
What I want is access to a _really_ HUGE library of stuff for a price.
[Soundtrack: documentary music. Off voice recites:] Note that the movie industry now heavily relies on revenue from home video sales and rentals, which is often higher than box-office revenue. Which proves that MPAA is clueless and not even able to understand the benefits of analog recording technology. This alone should definitely disqualify anything than Valenti ever says.
[Soundtrack: grinding cogs.] Wait, Valenti is still president of the MPAA. In spite of having fought against a technology that generated tens of billions of dollars of profits for the very movie producers he is supposed to represent. So Hollywood actually supports Valenti.
But then it means that... Ohmygod... [SFX: blinding flash] Oh no! It can only mean that HOLLYWOOD IS CLUELESS! AAARGH! How can that be? [Fade to black, soundtrack plays Wagner's Götterdämmerung finale, the part where the world comes to an end.]
But seriously...
Seriously, Hollywood's worst nightmare seems to be that every home has its own high-speed Internet connection and will copy the latest movies off the equivalent of Napster. That's why they oppose the growth of broadband.
Hollywood should realize that grown-ups with even just a bit of disposable income do not have either the time or inclination to boot their PC, fire up a search engine and slurp a huge file through a hypothetical broadband connection. Even at broadband speed, an IP connection cannot deliver the same "bandwidth" as a trip to the local video rental store, which is a full 2-hour movie (6 Gig on a DVD) in 15 minutes. Or 20 if they pick beer on the way home.
Adult with disposable income see their relaxation time as a precious commodity. If they can get a movie on DVD for $3, they won't have the patience to download anything even if it's free. The only potential users of movie download sites are students with ample bandwidth, no money and plenty of available time. They aren't a potential customer anyway (no money) and they accept to watch a movie on a PC screen, which most consumers sternly refuse to do. Marketing 101 teaches that you shouldn't harass regular, paying customers to attempt to deter a minority of shoplifters. Valenti slept through that class, obviously.
In summary, Hollywood, misled by Valenti et. al., does not have its facts right and is trying to shoot itself in the foot again. The MPAA cries wolf to justify its own existence and reinforces that kneejerk reflex.
Let's hope the producers will realize it and get out of the MPAA.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
In any case, they're not wrong to be exploring these options. Do you have a proven business model that allows freely distributing copies of intellectual work (not just software, but books, music, movies, etc.) without payment to the authors?
When you do, your rant will make more sense. Right now it's just another rant.
No, I don't have that proven business model BUT... there is statistical backup to say that they doth protest too much. When the copier was first distributed by Xerox, the book publishers went to court to block it's sale saying it'd put publishers out of business. It didn't. The same people wanting the copy protection for HDTV are the SAME people (Jack Valenti included) who went to court to fight the sale of VCR's using the same argument, that it'd put the movie industry out of business. In both cases, they lost in court. The end result was neither the publishers nor the studios were put out of business. (In fact, the VCR has been credited with saving studio's when they were really lagging some years back. They count on the VHS sales these days.) And to counter the RIAA who says CD sales are down for the first time in a decade and then blame P2P, they forget to mention there's a recession and almost every industry has seen a decline, the more successful saying it's the first decline in a decade.
You're exactly right when you say that the business of making and selling movies isn't static. That's the wonderful thing about it. And that's exactly why these kinds of evil copyright changes have to be resisted. Do you remember Sony v. Universal ? This was the case that was supposed to destroy Hollywood -- and yet they somehow got all the richer for it. The big beef they had was that home taping off the air was depriving them of revenue -- damn it, there's a revenue stream 'supposedta come off every viewing, don't these idiot Japanese and consumers know that?
Riiiight.
The Supreme Court mercifully kicked Universal City Studios and their evil kin out the Fair Use door, and they somehow -- somehow! -- found a way to make money anyway. I somehow think they can find a way to make money if they have to live with fair use. Besides, it's not as if they haven't been screwing people out of their just rewards for ages, now is it?
Dog is my co-pilot.
With Gene-splicing, maybe we'll eventually see...
the Blackmarket Brain-and-Eyeball Organic VCR!
You would just sit one of THESE down in front of your screen (or Screens),
where it would Watch-and-Remember!
To watch an Organic Recording, you'd just link up this with your Bio-Plug (See movie: "eXistenZ") and have it play-back direct to the optic processing section of your brain!
WHAT is DISPLAYED can be ARCHIVED in some form or other!
... Girlfriend says, "Gee, what cute little BrainEyes you have sitting in front of your VideoWall!"
...
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"