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SonicBlue Ordered to Spy on ReplayTV Viewers
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Got outrage? According to a story on SiliconValley.com, a federal magistrate has ordered SonicBlue to track ReplayTV users' every click to see what they're watching, recording, skipping (commercials) and e-mailing to friends. The info is to be given to the entertainment industry control freaks who are suing SonicBlue for allegedly abetting copyright violations."
So they have proof that every subscriber is useing it for illigal activity?
Also i think that this means we might see a million geek march up to this courthouse, as we are all entitled appear in court and contest the records collected and all allegations against us.
-Windchill2001 The One, The Only, The Cold...
Read the article.
"The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery, ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that would record every ``click'' from every customer's remote control."
Let the
"Honorable" Charles F. Eick know what you think of his decision:
give him a call at (213)894-5234, fax to(213)894-3335, or write him:
The Honorable Charles F. Eick
United States Magistrate Judge
United States District Court
United States Courthouse
312 North Spring Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Fuck you!
you think that advertisers are going to let you get around watching commercials by just skipping through them? you think that they haven't thought of all of your ways to skip them already?
there are new methods in place already to take care of this, and have been going on for years.
images are placed, products are placed, entire scripts are rewritten to take products into account. it's integrated advertising, and it's where television is going.
you won't be able to watch your tv show w/o getting force fed advertising. now the smart companies will do this so that you don't hate them. but how many you think are going to be smart about it?
lol, i majored in marketing, they are well aware of the limitations of commercials in today's tech society, and are already well on the way to fixing the problem.
one little example. remember sienfeld? those boxes of cereal in his apt. were digitally changed based on the market and who paid the shelf space, and that was years ago. they're better at it now, and you never notice 90% of the time unless you've been trained to watch for it.
and for those saying that they've never bought a single thing due to advertising, you're flat out wrong. you may not realize it, but advertising has measurable, consistant effects on sales in markets. if nothing else it will make you aware of a product that you wouldn't have known about otherwise.
-alcimedes
So do you watch ESPN? ABC? If you do you're not boycotting them. Many radio stations and magazines are owned by Disney as well. They are not easy to avoid. I won't pretend I'm all holy. I still watch ESPN, but if ever called upon by Nielson Ratings I have never watched ESPN.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
TheyRule.net does a good job of showing who's in charge of what. It's scary...
Here's part of the actual order. On April 26, Judge Charles Eick of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, gave SonicBLUE 60 days to:
(1) take the steps necessary to use their broadband connections with ReplayTV 4000 customers to gather all available information about how users of the ReplayTV employ the devices, including all available information about what works are copied, stored, viewed with commercials omitted, or distributed to third parties with the ReplayTV 4000, when each of those events took place, and the like;
(2) implement Defendants' offer to collect available data from a second source -- the MyReplayTV.com web site -- about how users of the ReplayTV employ the devices, but for all time periods for which that data can be collected, rather than just for a short period;
(3) provide the foregoing data to Plaintiffs in a readily-understandable electronic format and provide any technical assistance that may be necessary for Plaintiffs to review the data;
(4) provide Plaintiffs with all documents about Defendants' consideration of what data to gather or not to gather about their customers' uses of the ReplayTV 4000; and
(5) provide Plaintiffs with any other documents (such as emails or logs) reflecting what works have been copied with the ReplayTV 4000 and how those works have been stored, viewed, or distributed.
Now who gets all of this data? The plaintiffs in the case against SonicBLUE (the makers of the ReplayTV 4000). Roughly, Time Warner, HBO, Warner Brothers, TBS, New Line Cinema, Castle Rock Entertainment, WB TV, MGM Studios, Orion Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal City Studios, Fox Broadcasting, Paramount Pictures, Disney, NBC, Showtime, United Paramount Network, ABC, Viacom, CBS, Columbia Pictures, Columbia TV, and Tristar. The plaintiffs are also ordered to pay 3/4 of the cost of gathering the data.
Come on. Our courts have no business ordering a company to spy on its own customers just because big media wants to put the company out of business. We at the Privacy Foundation saw a lot of consumer outrage after we released our report about TiVo's privacy disclosure and practices. TiVo did a pretty good job of responding to the situation; they spent a lot of time with the press, and they wrote a white paper explaining what had happened. (We still have some gripes about their system, but that's another story.) The point is that companies are very sensitive about tweaking their customers' privacy, because they know customers don't have much patience for it. So when the court orders a company to spy on their customers, it's basically a punitive act. The customers will revolt and get mad at everyone. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the discovery of evidence phase of a lawsuit isn't supposed to be punitive.
In this case it's worse than just a privacy squabble. Either the court doesn't understand or the court doesn't believe ReplayTV's repeated explanation that they simply don't have the information demanded by this order. See, in April 2001 some months after our TiVo report came out, I showed a ReplayTV exec my traces that proved that their current model also collected some type of viewing information. This scared them, and in May 2001 - before the ReplayTV 4000 existed - they disabled the collection function, since they had never used the data for anything. This is what they told me, and this is what they've sworn to the court in testimony.
Now the ReplayTV 4000 is a different product than the one I investigated, and ReplayTV has said that they never reenabled the old tracking code, nor did they update it to make it monitor the newer features - like automatically skipping commercials and sending recordings to other ReplayTV 4000 units. But that's precisely the type of data that the plaintiffs are demanding to see in this case!
So what we have is a court ordering SonicBLUE to prepare a new software release that implements new spying features, and then ordering them to force it upon all of their customers, out of fairness to Big Media in their case against them. Considering that SonicBLUE has probably updated their customers' software only a few times ever, this is like ordering Microsoft to create, distribute, and maintain a new version of Outlook that checks to see if any of its users are sending MP3s as attachments!
I guess this is a sneak preview of the type of consumer broadband "protection" we can look forward to in the very near future.
What happens next: SonicBLUE is planning to file papers with the overseeing judge in U.S. District court objecting to this order. If that doesn't go their way, then I guess they'll be working on a new software release.
David Martin
http://www.cs.bu.edu/~dm
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!