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."

Comments

Content?

[whereiswaldo]

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.

Re:For Personal Use Only

[RatFink100]

If it wasnt for the movie and record idustry, we would have hdtv recorders, dvd recorders, and mp3 players in our toasters.

But if it wasn't for the movie and record industry you'd have very little to play on them

That's not to say I'm in favour of skewing the copyright laws even more in favour of those industries, but there needs to be a balance. We need some kind of copyright reform that strengthens the personal use/fair use rights of individuals but allows content producers to protect their revenue. Because I've yet to see a sucessful media producing revenue model that doesn't at some stage rely on copyright protection.

Re:For Personal Use Only

[Shillo]

> Because I've yet to see a sucessful media producing revenue model that doesn't at some stage rely on copyright protection.

Remember that 'less protection' is not the same as 'no protection'.

Also, the media companies are protected, period. They can't choose not to rely on the protection, since they have to compete for the investors with the overprotected monopolists.

--

Copy protection vs. deployment restriction

[heroine]

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.

The good, the bad and the Valenti

[SysKoll]

(Quoted from the EFF Overview article) If new digital VCRs... never became available, some entertainment industry lawyers would lose little sleep. After all, they fought the introduction of the original analog VCR when it was first introduced; Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti insisted the technology would be the death of the movie industry.

[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.

-- SysKoll