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Consensus At Lawyerpoint
Seth Schoen writes "The
EFF has started
a weblog about the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), called "Consensus At Lawyerpoint". This is the EFF's first-ever blog, the brainchild of new EFF staffer Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing blogging fame. Consensus At Lawyerpoint covers the efforts of Hollywood -- with the complicity of consumer electronics and computer companies -- to impose
a new government mandate for copy controls in digital TV devices.
This mandate would outlaw tuner cards for digital HDTV, unless they included DRM (and prevented the end-user from getting
a cleartext recording). PVRs and VCRs might be allowed, but only
if all their outputs were encrypted. Since all TV broadcasting
in the U.S. is supposed to be digital by 2006, this could have an
enormous effect on technology and on the competition for
video standards in the marketplace. We hope that the blog format will help us get the word out and let interested people see what this group is up to." Interesting for a couple of reasons, both the subject matter (the beloved SSSCA/CBDTPA) and the method.
As I understand it, this would just make it more difficult to record HDTV broadcasts in a digital format that's easy to redistribute on the net. And, of course, this would come at a correspondingly higher price for the hardware for the consumer. This might deter casual users, but some one determined will still be able to capture the broadcast at a reasonable quality. And I will still be able to get Simpsons episodes over some P2P network.
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
> Since all TV broadcasting in the U.S. is supposed
> to be digital by 2006,
I think 'supposed' is the key. In the UK the govt. is aiming for 2008 to turn off the analogue masts, but noone really expects this to happen - there are *far* too many sets out there, both as primary and second sets, that can not receive digital TV.
Even the introduction of a 100 quid box to convert wont help, because it requires SCART (old TV's only have co-ax) and my grandma wont understand (a key test !).
So I dont think we need to worry too much on that front.
Now that the EFF has their own blog, they can start Google Bombing!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Bill Gates/Micheal Dell/Steve Jobs steps up to a podium. He holds out a plain white mouse in one hand. Then swiftly, he closes his hand upon it. The rodent makes a sharp, shrill sqeak that booms in the ampitheatre...
He drops the mouse to the floor, and silently, solemnly walks offstage...
In all seriousness, doesn't Microsoft have orders of magnitude more LIQUID CASH than the Movie/Record industries make per annum? Why don't they just crush these ninnies, remind them that their place is to entertain us, not create laws in which to enslave us.
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
Whatever happend to the air waves belonging to the people and the brodcasters using them as a privilege?
CSS on DVDs is one think (still evil if you ask me) but on brodcast TV when dose the madness end?
I can see my donation to the EFF was worth every cent.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Isn't "Lawyerpoint" the coolest phrase ever? I can hear the news reports now...
"7 people brutally murdered at lawyerpoint. The suspect is still on the loose, assumed armed and litigious."
Want Linux games? HERE.
... look at the counter-WIPO essays page (http://www.wipout.net/essays.html) and links (http://www.wipout.net/links.html) to alternatives, such as Free Music Philosophy. This indicates that ordinary people are waking up to some of the consequences of abandoning all content control to the legal system.
a lawyer to destroy any incentive for invention. I think that if there is If there is anything in your country that will one day make the US a technnological backwater it will be American laws giving lawyers so much power.
At the moment it is in a balance in that people who invent have a large incentive to make an enormous amount of money but will that always be so?
i.e. when a US show is shown live in the UK (in this case the Oscars), the BBC needs to hire some mouthy guy to fill in all the gaps caused by the commercials in the US. Save us! Put less commercials on so we get to see less of Ross next time!
Yeah, right.
Sir,
/. We would like to point out the following.
Carnvour has pointed out to us your post to
We know where you live
We know your ISP
We know which porn site you visited last night
We know where your parents live
We have a large number of Tanks that can role over your house, see the beta testing Isreal is performing for us in Bethlehem
We own Congress
Yours, [Name witheld] MSCIA
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
I've just finished reading a sci-fi anthalogy called Starlight 3, and one of the stories was "Power Punctuation" by Cory Doctorow (and I see now he's got an excerpt on his website).
;).
The story is about a country boy working in a big corporation (File-Agator) in a world where corporations (Microsoft, literally) own cities and wage war on each other. The boy gets bumped up the corporate ladder on the whim of the CEO and stuff happens (don't want to ruin the story
I quite enjoyed the story and had a good laugh at the ending so I would say that this bodes well for the content of the blog.
Slashdot isn't a blog it's a forum, as are most of the sites you've posted.
A blog is a lengthy archive of self-obsessed opinion compiled and posted on the web by self-regarding people who have no other media outlet, and read by a very few others, mostly equally sad bloggers themselves. They operate on the theory that with enough howl-around feedback from each other they can claim an enormous readership and influence.
"We hope that the blog format will help us get the word out and let interested people see what
this group is up to."
Not bloody likely, mate. Why don't you get in a newspaper or on television, if you want real people to see what you are up to, and not just internet types with nothing better to read at the moment.
Basically - all blogs are a total pile of bullshit, almost without exception.
I've always believed that one should never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity. In my mind, this applies to the House and Senate as much as (or more than) it does to the American public at large.
/. agree with me?
But we're hitting a point here where I find it literally incredible that anyone capable of getting him/her self elected into the legislative branch can possibly not realize what's going on. Is it just me? Is this issue tougher to understand than I think? Do I just think the injustice is so obvious because most people on
My one hope has been that if the demands of the entertainment industry got preposterous enough, someone would "catch on," the light bulb would go off, etc. But that hope is rapidly being crushed. I'm beginning to think that we've already lost, and all the valiant, worthy efforts of the EFF won't end up mattering a tinker's damn.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Forgetting for a moment that this is wrong and harmful, it's also stupid: how on earth is copy-protection of TV ever supposed to work? I point a camcorder at my TV during play, and boom, low-quality copy. Use optical zoom and some moderately cunning software to merge video streams and I might even be able to get a copy at near-full resolution.
Instead, it appears that they want to remove value. I don't see how this can work.
Here in Hawaii we have digital cable. But MOST subscribers refuse to get it because of the cost (hawaii has terrible economy). When 2006 rolls around are they going to turn off normal cable? If they do that... will my TV simply stop working period? If that happens... I'll gladly smash my TV into thousands of pieces and ship it to hollywood.
But, as another poster pointed out... this can be pretty easily defeated. Signal Processing algorithms can do AMAZING things in cleaning up recorded data. Thus... to *rip* a digital signal all you would need to do is point a camera or microphone (in the case of audio) and capture the material. Then apply filters to remove the noise and scan lines and have a very very good quality reproduction.
Are these nitwits forgetting that we really don't care about PERFECT playback? We're more than happy to settle on ANY playback - otherwise VCR's wouldn't have been popular.
So that brings up the next point... at what point will they make designing software algorithms illegal without a license? When will they force us to submit our source code to a goverment entity to ensure that the source can't be used to record signals?
Don't throw out your old electronics.... they could become very very useful.
Microsoft owns most of the patents on DRM as applied to computing technology.
... and it certainly wouldn't be to GNU/Linux.
Passing the SSSCA/whatever-they-call-it-now will legislate the Microsoft Monopoly into unassailability. Microsoft favors the legislation, unlike every other company in the industry, large and small alike.
If this bill passes, Microsoft would be able to pick and choose which token 'competitors' survive by deciding to whome the would and would not license the mandated technology
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That is certainly one possibility, but another one is that Microsoft (a company that is certainly *not* run by dummies) really does know that the value of their current OS monopoly cannot possibly grow at the rate that would continue to make them the dominant player they surely wish to be.
Recent MS moves actually seem more focused on becoming the kind of company that gets 1% or 2% of every transaction rather than one that gets 95% of a more limited pie. If that's the real strategy, they have no reason not to license their stuff to anybody else. Indeed, if licensing DRM technology substantially slows any effort in the Linux community to work around it, re-implement it, or come up with a competing standard, they would have to be silly not to do so.
Or even give it away, if the client use was associated with a revenue stream at the server end. (Indeed, that's *classic* MS behavior.) I personally also find a parable in the story of MS and its manipulation of the .DOC format.
Once upon a time, you couldn't do the .DOC format
if you weren't MS, then the licensing became less
and less restrictive as the format became more and
more prevalent. Last I checked, you could do anything with it you liked except (I believe) use it as a default file format for your software. This isn't really giving anything away, though, since Word is what 98% of mankind will use to edit any .DOC files. Plus, they had to do something once it became clear that XML and stylesheets really would be a serious contender to anything
that MS put out...so guess who leads the w3.org
efforts on XSL?
Babar
The only real effect this will have is to force consumers to stop purchasing computer hardware in the US and buy foreign units that lack the draconian restrictive controls. If these become difficult to import, it will encourage the smugglers to bring more goods in through grey and black market routes.
Case in point, PGP. How many people out there used the "legal" crippled version, and how many just downloaded the international version that worked as it was intended?
I'm thinking any forced DRM attempt is quite simply going to fail, and will take a good bite out of what little consumer confidence is left in the high-tech sector.
The problem is that the "analog hole" is impossible to close without direct neural implants.
Our eyes and ears are devices that take analog input-- therefore for us to hear the sound or see the picture indicates that there is an analog hole which cannot be plugged through legislation.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Part of me can't help but think that the real reason this industry is trying to encrypt the digital signal is so that VCR companies will have to pay them royalties. I don't think they care as much about what happens to their signal after it hits household TV's.
I'd be okay with royalty extortion, except they're trying to control what I do with the content. Well, I have a piece of advice for them. The minute that a TV show becomes too hard to watch because I refuse to be anchored to my TV day and night is the minute that I stop watching TV. I have plenty of things I could be off doing, TV is more of a luxury than anything else.
How do they seriously expect people to adopt Digital TV over Analog TV when they don't get the same priveledges they are used to? Hell, the reason I don't have Digital Cable right now is that my home-brew PVR can't work with it!
"Derp de derp."
Microsoft favors the legislation, unlike every other company in the industry, large and small alike.
I don't suppose you can back up that assertion with links to authoritative source(s), can you?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I don't suppose you can back up that assertion with links to authoritative source(s), can you?
Yes.
The Relevant Patent
The Hollings bill S-2048
A less authoritative but nevertheless informative article summarizing the issues
If you need more information and aren't just a troll, you can do any further research on your own. Google is your friend (except when censored by corporate interests such as the Scientologists, but that doesn't appear to have happened WRT this subject, yet).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy