Networks and Studios Against PVRs

HiredMan sent in an LA Times story talking about more suits against PVR makers like Replay and Tivo. The most bizarre quote to me is that the suit argues that "it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description." Huh?

Comments

Explaining the bizzare "illegal" quote

[Seth Finkelstein]

The "rationale" for "it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description." is "explained" further down:

"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.

IANAL, but I think the idea is reaching to come up with a negative effect on the copyrighted work itself, so as to undermine the longstanding law that personal use of VCRs is fair use.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Re:Explaining the bizzare "illegal" quote

[Seth Finkelstein]

Take a look at the legal criteria for fair use

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

They're trying to make an argument which goes to at least element #4. Remember, this an EFFECT test. That's not the same as the idea of being possible to do it with much more work before these sorts of PVRs

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

DRM features in Replay 4000 Series

[Krelnik]

It's been reported in several of these stories that the Replay 4000 limits internet sends of recorded shows to a total of 15, and they have to be people you have previously agreed to exchange shows with. This is very different than Napster, where a total stranger could grab a song off my disk without my knowledge.

And there are other Digital Rights Management features in Replay 4000 that have NOT yet been reported upon. I'm a Replay 4000 owner, and I can comment on some of these.

SonicBlue licenses Macrovision's technology, which is the same signal-munging technology that keeps VCR's from recording the output of your DVD player.

The interesting part is that a Replay 4000 will let you record a Macrovision-encoded program. I personally tested this by feeding the output of my DVD player into the secondary input on my Replay 4160 as a test. The Replay reproduces the Macrovision signal when outputting the program. This means you can time-shift copy-protected shows, but you cannot dub them out of the Replay onto a VCR!

Also, according to this press release, when a Replay 4000 sees that a show is Macrovision-encoded, it will not allow the user to share this program over the internet.

I think this is a pretty decent compromise between preserving the customer's ability to time-shift programs, and the program-owner's right to control copying of that program on permanent media.

And vis-a-vis the big conglomerates, this is a big change from the early Replay units. I've owned a Replay 2004 for over two years, and those early units would strip the Macrovision encoding from shows you passed through it. Thus they could be used as an intermediary for dubbing DVD's and other protected content to tape.

For this and other reasons I really think the media giants are going to fall on their face in this lawsuit. No judge is going to side with them when its so obvious that SonicBlue has made these efforts to accomodate their interests.

Jack Valenti Quote

[Hieronymus Howard]

Courtesy of the New York Times:

'The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology,' Jack Valenti said, threatens an entire industry's 'economic vitality and future security.'
Mr. Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, and he was ready for a rhetorical rumble. The new technology, he said, 'is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.'

It was 1982, and he was talking about videocassette recorders.

And they're still as paranoid and as utterly wrong now as they were 20 years ago.

HH