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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?
PVR's throw a wrench into the finely tuned machine that is mainstream television. They make their money from ads, and the more people sitting through those ads, the more money they make. Well, what happens when advertising firms start paying channels less because there are less people actually viewing the show than recording it? You can guess that the channels will be pretty pissed off. They're just trying to protect a source of money there, really.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
A lawsuit by the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Association against the automobile industry, because the change from carriages to automobiles has decimated their markets. The Horse Manure Shoveler's Association is expected to sign on as co-plaintiff.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Nobody's suing people who actually infringe copyrights anymore. Everyone is suing people who make devices...
True. They aren't going after all those who actually infringe copyrights, since that would number in the millions. Instead, they are going after the makers, for contributory copyright infringement, much like the way Napster was sued. Napster itself did not violate copyright, but its users did, and Napster provided a convenient way to do it.
In the case of PVR's, its a little different, since fair-use does allow for time shifting, IIRC. It's the sharing of the "perfect digital copies" that the industry fears.
They are suing device-makers as a preventive measure. Without these devices, many will go back to using VCR's to make imperfect copies.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
What does editing commercials out have to do with copyright protection? I can understand having a problem with sharing movies but sharing TV shows that broadcast for free seems just a tad over the top.
Here, you can have this free product but you may not give it to others.
Cat
Actually, meta-information is all the rage, in science and in consumer data. So, if they establish that precedent...
"It's illegal to let companies record and store people's profiles based on the location, income or other words in their profile."
My goodness, we could eliminate demographics entirely!
A.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
So, here's my prediction (guess I shouldn't be handing them ideas, but someone's bound to come up with it someday anyway, or probably someone has already):
In the future, we will have TV shows where you are forced to watch commercials. Something like: to view the second segment of "Friends", you have to enter the code flashing on the screen during the Pepsi ad that was aired after segment 1.
This should be perfectly feasible (technically), especially once everyone has a PVR.
I guess I should patent this idea...
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
Correct me if I'm wong, but last time I checked, "markets" were not constitutionally protected, and neither were coporate profits or business models. (unless, of course, the business model is patented)
They're trying to protect their business model through litigation, because embracing new technology is more expensive than lawyers.
Maybe they'll all be hit with frivolous lawsuit countersuits. Here's hoping, anyway.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
This is BS as "Fair Use" is well established. It's an obvious extension of technology to use hard drives instead of video tape, and computer searchable guides instead of paper guides. If anything, you would think that studios would WANT people to watch their bad movies / shows. What they are REALLY pissed about is the ability of people to fast-forward through commercials.
Frankly, if there is a show I want to watch, I let tivo record it and watch it later as commercials are just too annoying (one of the worst offenders is TNN which turns a 1:45 movie into 3 hours. Who the hell is willing to put up with that?)
Tivo and friends are are pure time-shifting devices. The don't have the ability to save off to an archive except by playing the movie and recording it with a VCR. If you are going to do that, you might as well just have recorded the damn thing with a VCR to begin with.
If they really don't want people to record by name, actor, director, they also need to sue TV Guide, all the newspapers in the US, movie trivia sites, book authors and publishers, film / entertainment magazines, etc. who also publish this info.
Interesting phrasing here. It seems to imply that recording the entire thing with commercials is OK, but skipping commercials violates copyright.
That in turn would mean that it's not just the show - it's the entire presentation of the show, with each specific commercial at that point, that is the entire "show". I think Domino's would be rather surprised, though, to find their copyright was swallowed up by Ally McBeal's production company.
One also has to wonder if this means that when a local tv station (Hi, Global!) replaces the national ads with their own, are they committing copyright infringement by making a derivative work?
(yes, I know it's taking it to an absurd conclusion)
Look, the article only mentioned commercials once, and in passing. Thats not the issue here. I mean, what the hell does Universal care which commercials you are watching? They want the revenue from the movies and shows - that includes VCR, DVD and royalties from pay networks.
What they're more worried about is the fact that you can record and store digital quality shows and movies. That means, that they think they will lose revenue from all the folks who would normally buy the Simpson's DVD, but instead catalog all the episodes on a hard drive somewhere.
What they don't realize is that people are not likely to do this nearly as much as they think. Movies often come out on DVD before they come out on pay TV, I believe that the benefits of the DVD far outweight the value of taking the movie from HBO and storing it somwhere on a disk. I also believe that most people who would buy a Simpsons DVD set would still buy one, owing to the fact that syndicated episodes are cut for time. In short, people who normally would buy these DVDs would still do so, regardless of TiVo.
Yes, these lawsuits are useless, and generally a waste of time. But ever since the beginning of time, the industry has been unable to keep up with technology - and running to the courts has always been the great equalizer.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
Sure, you can build a custom PVR system, but where are you going to get the data from to run it?
My Tivo's value is in the service, not in the device.
You can't grep a dead tree.
Don't count the current advertiser-supported TV paradigm out yet. Commercials will still persist in live feeds like news and sports. The standard commercial in entertainment may be a dying breed, but there's plenty of other opportunities that are much harder to avoid. Watermarks, pop-ups, and on-screen banners could become more prevalent. Most significantly, product placement will surge. New methods even allow you to digitally insert products where they weren't before. Advertising will never go away completely - it'll just get more insidious and harder to avoid.
I for one don't think that a commercial-free future in which all TV either costs money (via pay-per-view, channel subscription, and show subscription) or is publicly/privately supported is such a bad thing. There's the obvious lack of commercials (yay). The direct relationship between content producer and consumer will allow more flexible dynamics of how much money will go into making a show or channel, and how much it will cost, even more flexible than theatrical films. Consumers will be much more picky about how much they're willing to spend and where they do, forcing quality to rise and less shows to be made. If channel subscription models prevail, a relative few networks will dominate with exclusive, tailored content, and syndication will boom amongst the players to reach as wide an audience as possible with lesser shows. Show formats, freed from the restraints of commercial breaks and standard lengths, will diverge. The big media players will force expensive package deals on the consumer rather than cheap individual channels... oh wait. They already do that.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The argument they give here has absolutely no merit, as it is still possible, without a PVR, to look at the local listings and program your VCR to tape all of them for you. Better still, you can just make sure you're home to watch them live. There's nothing stopping you from doing that...in fact, maybe they shouldn't show anything on TV, because if you see it for free on TV, you won't buy it when it comes out on video. What will they argue next? TV Guide shouldn't be published, because then you'll know the shows are on, then you'll watch them, which will "cause substantial harm to the market" for the DVDs.
I'm interested to see what happens, but I have a hard time believing that the case won't be thrown out almost immediately.
They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.
If digital technology is adopted instead of being fought tooth and nail, I think we will see that the market *INCREASES*. Who wants to buy full-blown cable to only watch a few shows? I would certainly pay-per-tv-show if I could. But I can't. So I don't (or maybe I just figure I'll download the content instead), and they lose money.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think somebody mentioned down below that these corporations need to evolve. It's time to find other sources of revenue. If their only salable "product" is airtime for advertisements, they're in real trouble. Every business that I know that stuck with a single product has gone down the tubes.
These are the same folks who anticipate using the free digital channels they were given to provide revenue by forgoing HDTV in many cases, and using the additional space for revenue data type services.
But the 'illegal' to copy using keywords like titles, authors... it sound more like a slap suit than copyright suit, and someone should slap back. I'd love to see them site case law on that one. It'd be like the publishers going back to the Supremes and asking to revisit the Xerox case because instead of copying a page at a copier, one can now use search engines by keyword to get that page you want for your book report or thesis and then print it on the printer. That's an exact analogy to the theory they're using.
I'd say if we ever go back to the stone age, it won't be through nuclear war as was once thought, but it'll be due to the RIAA, MPAA, Valenti (who's from that age anyway). This is all about control, and trying to get back what they lost in the Betamax case. They should get censured for filing a frivilous suit on that keyword thing, and then go from there. (standard IANAL disclaimer. I actually was prelaw, but decided early after meeting some real jerks, it wasn't for me. I see many are still practicing.)
"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 ... it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states."
Ok, so I'm supposed to care about harm to their markets? What's better.. the government is supposed to care?! This seems like a whine to me, rather than a legitimate grievance.
As Ian Clarke once said [paraphrasing].. "If you make money by selling water in the dessert, and it starts to rain... it's time to find some other way to make money."
Well folks.. it's started to rain, and the studios are turning to the government to supply the umbrellas.
Let them get wet, I say!
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
That's not what I was saying. Here it is in short:
1. The airwaves are (should be) free. That means (theoretically) anyone can fire signals through the air. However, since that would make things really messy really fast, there's a licensing scheme to make the airwaves useable. Basically, if someone puts out a signal on the public spectrum, I can watch it (but not resell it or violate any copyrights on the material that the broadcaster might have).
2. Because of (1), I can BUILD my own TV (or in your example, my own car for a highway) to view the signals whipping through the air. And I can view it however I like, any color scheme, any time of the day, etc.
3. Also, because the airwaves are public property, the networks can't just start encrypting those publicly owned airwaves. It's like a private company fencing off a public park and charging admission to get in.
4. Because TV is a linear stream and there was no way to circumvent that linearity, commercials made sense. Interpose ads in the stream.
5. Because of the advent of TiVo, &c., the broadcast stream becomes non-linear, rendering the commercial model obsolete.
The correct response to this is NOT to sue the manufacturers of TiVO, &c., it's to change the business model of television. This is expensive, so they decide to sue these replayer manufacturers instead -- a stopgap solution at best. Broadcasters chose to get into this business and to use the commercial model for generating revenue. That's their problem. The onus is on them to revise their business models, not to sue those who found a way to legally circumvent their revenue stream.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Since the birth of copyright law. Remember, the whole thing started as a way to gaurantee business for publishers, so that they could safely invest the money to support the original work.
Actually, the first copyright laws came as a response to the invention of the first digital copying technology -- Movable type. Before movable type, there was no such thing as a professional writer. Writing was something that you did with pen and ink, and if you were very lucky, some scribe somewhere might painstakingly hand-copy your work, and a second copy would exist. The original purpose of copyright was censorship. In exchange for submitting to censorship by the crown, publishers were given a monopoly over printing. They had the right to seek out and destroy unlicensed printing presses and books. Only when copyright was on the verge of being abolished, due to publisher excesses, was it reinvented as an "author's benefit."
This isn't about our rights, it's about theirs. Fair use is a specific and limited exception to their right to control their copyrighted material; in a sense, it's a 'privilege' granted to us by the courts.
Absolutely wrong, and a dangerous meme. Fair use, far from being an arbitrarily created "privilege", is actually a consequence of the First Amendment. Remember that Exclusive Rights clause is part of the original Constitution. It authorizes Congress to grant speech monopolies. A copyright is really the right to exclude others from repeating or building upon your speech. One of the basic principles of law is that if a newly passed law conflicts with a previous law, then the new law supercedes the old. The First Amendment bans Congress from passing any laws abridging speech. After the passage of the Bill of Rights, the courts had to wrestle with the question of whether the First Amendment prohibition against speech control superceeded Congress' authority to grant copyrights. The doctrine of Fair Use was invented to save copyright in the face of the First Amendment. Fair use is an attempt to separate the commercial aspects of speech from the non-commercial aspects. Fair use was only codified into copyright law in 1976. It is not a "privilege" -- it is part of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
Now a weird thing is that some of this stuff is already available.
I'm an American living in Spain and I recently bought box sets of the first four "Friends" seasons on DVD to watch with my wife. They were just sitting there in the DVD section of a big department store here. (Subtitles and various soundtracks make DVDs perfect viewing for bilingual couples like us... and hell, let's watch tonight's episode in Polish!)
It seems that you can't get these box sets in the U.S., only here in Europe. You can, however, go to Amazon.co.uk and see that all of the seasons up to #8 are available (a little net research and I found out that season #9 is being aired now in the U.S. and that Rachael is pregnant. Oh no! I've been out of the country too long!).
Who knows if they'll ever sell these DVDs in the U.S. It basically seems that Warner Bros. is relying on country codes to keep U.S. viewers from getting all of the shows on DVD, thus forcing you to watch the repeats at 7 p.m. on channel 25 or whatever your local UHF/Cable licensee is... I guess they don't do that sort of thing here (cable not existing here in Spain) so they just sell the DVDs.
Random info: The weird thing about these box-set DVDs is that they are double-sided and only contain 3 episodes per side except for the last which contains 4 episodes on one side (for a total of 25 episodes per season). My best guess is that all the soundtracks and subtitles bloat the shows so they have to do this to fit it all in.
-Russ
Me
"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.
It's a stupid argument, anyways. I've got a ReplayTV 4000 which stores 80 hours at "standard"--which is good enough for time shifting, but the image is pretty grainy and not at all the quality of a DVD recording. If I wanted to store every episode of the X-Files on my ReplayTV, I could only store 20 episodes at high (near DVD) quality.
Which means for just $1,000 I have a piece of hardware which stores what I could buy for $99 at Amazon.com--rendering my ReplayTV unusable (as I'm using all my disk space to store 20 X-File episodes) in the process. How stupid is that?
Furthermore, the argument is incredibly dumb, given the fact that the studios refuse to sell me the damned DVDs of my favorite programs anyways! I love Stargate SG1--but can't they be bothered to release anything but the first season on disk (which I bought, dispite owning a ReplayTV)? Noooo....
Come on! I've got $400 burning a hole in my pocket, and the studios can't be bothered to put down the episodes to DVD for Region 1 (though the episodes for Seasons 2 through 4 are available for Region 2)...
The whole management process at these various entertainment companies stinks to high heaven. Using a lawsuit to protect a market they don't even want to sell into in the first place by making life more inconvenient for me is rediculous.