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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."
SonicBlue ordered to track ReplayTV users' viewing choices
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News
A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.
Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather ``all available information'' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.
``We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive. ``This is something that we find personally very troubling.''
Privacy advocates condemned the ruling which came during the pre-trial discovery process of a series of lawsuits against SonicBlue.
Last October, the studios and networks accused SonicBlue of permitting copyright-infringement with its latest digital video recorder. The machines work like a VCR but record to a hard drive instead of video tape.
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.
Four separate lawsuits focus on a pair of features on the ReplayTV 4000: an ``AutoSkip'' function that allows the device to bypass commercials while recording a program and a high-speed Internet port that allows users to download programs from the Internet or send them to other ReplayTV 4000 users.
The suits allege these features effectively deprive networks of the means of paying for their programs -- advertising revenue. And they allow people who paid for premium programming -- say HBO's ``Six Feet Under'' -- to send it to consumers who haven't.
A Disney spokeswoman accused SonicBlue of a ``deliberate and completely misleading'' characterization of the court's order. The studios and networks are merely seeking access to the same kind of anonymous data that SonicBlue's privacy policy says it is entitled to collect about its users, she said.
Attorneys for the studios say they need this information to determine the extent to which the ReplayTV 4000 allows consumers to steal copyrighted movies and television shows.
``None of the data the plaintiffs are seeking identifies any individuals,'' said Michelle Bergman, the Disney spokeswoman. ``We respect viewer privacy and the order we obtained respects that important right. We are simply protecting our copyrighted content and all whose livelihoods are dependent on it.''
SonicBlue said it stopped collecting anonymous user data in May 2001, after a furor erupted over competitor TiVo's practice of secretly gathering information about its users' viewing habits. TiVo's machine would collect viewing data and send it over a phone line back to the company.
The ruling requires SonicBlue to conduct the kind of surveillance it never anticipated in the privacy policy it outlined to its subscribers, said Laurence Pulgram, the San Francisco attorney representing SonicBlue.
Court documents, which Pulgram provided, show that SonicBlue would be required to document which shows users copy, store and view; what commercials they skip and which programs they send to other users, through the ``Send Show'' feature.
The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through ``unique identification numbers.''
``The concern is once you collect information about an individual, the individual may be concerned that he or she could be linked to that information at some time,'' said Pulgram.
Privacy advocates said the ruling is a more egregious invasion of privacy than TiVo committed. In that case, TiVo collected aggregated data that was purposefully separated from personal details about the viewer. And consumers could opt-out, keeping their viewing habits from being collected.
ReplayTV users won't have that choice.
`It's an incredible invasion of privacy,'' said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property expert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ``But second -- and equally important -- is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have been saying was going to happen now for some time. Basically, under the guise of copyright laws, courts are going to be put in a position of telling technology companies how to build their products.''
Pulgram said SonicBlue plans to ask the federal district court trial judge to review the magistrate's ruling.
``We respect Judge Eick's decision on this and on numerous issues he had before him at the time,'' said Pulgram. `But in our view, it is an unprecedented intrusion into the privacy of TV viewers.''
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!