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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."
First Disney sponsors Hollings bill. Then Disney does this to SonicBlue users.
BOYCOTT DISNEY.
Don't buy Disney products. Don't go to DisneyWorld, Don't go to Disney flicks.
is slashing their own throats.
It's an escalation of arms at this point. Total war. Never in our histroy have we been subjected to such comprehensive privacy invasion.
It doesn't matter that the data doesn't say Mr. Smith watched such and such. The thought that the entertainment industry will have access to this data implies that they will use it against the viewers. Incredible.
Maybe they should read what the court has said in the past about privacy and viewing habits.
Here is the link to Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984
Assholes.
Ok I'm stuck, do I avoid Sonic Blue's PVR's because it will invade my privacy, or do I buy PVR from Sonic Blue, because they are as outraged about this as I am. I suppose I could record all kinds of crap on it too, that would at least subvert their data.
Hmmm, maybe if we could get everyone to do nothing but record Tech TV for 24 hours as a protest of our privacy being violated.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
This really goes back to what slashdot covered earlier how AOL-TW CEO said that PVR users were stealing when they skipped over commercials, but it also applies here... the users are not bounded to a contract to watch the ads.
It's also interesting to see the hypocrasy when AOL-Time Warner's CEO denouncing products like TiVO and ReplayTV while AOL is making deals with Tivo...
It adds somewhat of a twist when Sonicblue is ordered to infringe on its user's privacy and not TiVo.
Sigs are for losers
It strikes me that the whole music/movie piracy issue could be solved in one fell swoop if the industries involved simply lobbied government to add another 2% onto income taxes and then give the music away for free.
Sony, BMG and the others could then set up "free download" sites where Net surfers could drop in and grab as much music as they wanted, absolutely without further charge.
The huge revenues thus generated would be paid back to the recording/music industries and apportioned according to the number of downloads of each album/movie.
Likewise, some of the money would be aportioned to video libraries to compensate them for the losses they'd suffer.
Hey, it's a win-win-win situation.
The big companies get massive wads of cash. They can then pay the artists. Copy-protection is no longer an issue. Plus, you could then afford to listen to (and perhaps grow to like) a much wider range of music/movies.
Even though I'm just kidding, I suspect that it's only a matter of time before someone seriously suggests such a plan.
Just look at the lame technology/IP bills proposed already!
... but as much as this pisses me off (the invasion of privacy part), isn't this exactly what the industry needs?
Seriously, once stats like this are collected, either they'll realize that this isn't a threat (and then really start pushing digital tv, stop suing companies like sonicblue etc..), or we'll be right back to where we are right now.
I understand the slippery-slope argument and all, but how the hell are you going to convince tv networks that piracy isn't happening unless you do something like this?
And if piracy *is* happening, wake the fuck up. It's illegal. You knew the free ride wouldn't last forever. Being able to freely copy anything you want isn't a constitutional right, even under the guise of fair use (which, by the way, isn't even established by the constitution).
You do not know anything about bussiness people. You think if they get a 2% tax they'll shut up? Certainly not - they will keep the money and try to find other ways to charge us with improved services. Oh yeah and that 2% will slowly increase as well.
Oh sry i just read that you were kidding. Still a bad idea imo.
The entertainment industry is fighting a losing battle here. Anyone who has purchased a TIVO or similar hard disk recorder will absolutely never go back to watching ads.
I personally have a hard disk recorder, and since having it I cannot stand to watch live tv, because I now percieve how much of my time is wasted by ads.
My guess is that eventually the entertainment industry is going to have to modify their revenue system, because no one will willing submit to ads again after being free of them.
What is interesting is that the TV industry will has a system allready in place that could be switched to an ad less system. All they would need to do is charge more for cable or satellite service, or something along those lines. They would probably be forced to take an income cut, because people will not be interested in paying very much more for ad less TV then they do for regular TV today.
If media corporations think they have a problem now, wait until hard disk recorders drop below $200....
They are facing a losing battle, just like the music industry.
What pisses you off more, Knowing there are powerful interest groups that are attacking your rights and freedoms, or that most of the people in the usa will let it happen.
we seem to be the minority.
I had no idea that not watching commercials equated to stealing televison shows. My cheesy RCA VCR marks commercials after recording and skips them during playback. This has been around for a while. How does ReplayTV make it different?
So what happens to people who have sent a copy of Six Feet Under to their non HBO subscribing friends? Will they get jail time for this?
'Same speed C but faster'
Now I could be wrong, but get this. The industry has no way of knowing exactly how many people actually watch their shows. Sure based on a sample of people who agree to be polled, they're able to estimate. And based on these estimations they're able to charge for advertising.
If you think about it, at this point they have their money. Nealson has already counted these views, whether or not commercials were skipped via conventional (bathroom) means or electronic means. I find is suspicious that these companies are now asking for this type of information. I could see the various companies who advertise complaining, but they don't seem to be. And if they did the TV industry would say that since taped views don't add to the ratings, those views aren't represented. So either quit bitching or we'll have to count those views in our ratings and raise rates accordingly.
Either way I don't really see how the industries argument carries any weight. This is a game of averages folks and advertisers know this. Plus the industries accounting mechanism rounds for the industry anyway. I just don't see what their problem is.
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
So, now a few geeks know that they're being watched more carefully. They can tell other geeks, who will make a fuss, and maybe even the general public will hear about it. Maybe you have to do some protesting or set yourself on fire or something.
Then, everyone who gives a toss will modify their behavior (Skip every commercial or watch only one show over and over. Or set up a robot arm to push the skip button once a second. Get creative.)
Then, when SonicBlue goes back to the court, they can say that the data are obviously flawed, because the rats knew they were being watched and changed their behavior.
SonicBlue must've been keeping data previous to this, anyway, they could compare and prove the behavior changed soon after the ruling.
Also, anybody know how this machine would store all this data? I can't imagine it streams it off to HQ everytime you push a button. Sounds like good hack possibilities to me. "Your honor, viewer #23489A somehow managed to skip 10,000,000 commercials last weekend. I think if you just arrest him the TV industry will be good to go."
I'm sorry folks, your brains are now property of Disney. How many images of Mickey Mouse have you illegally recorded in your memory? How many movies, books and songs? All the knowledge and experiences in your memory are stolen intellectual property. Confess now, and we'll offer you a special discount rate to license your brain back for limited periods of regulated thought.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
SonicBlue (and Tivo) laid the foundation for this sort of action with their EULA and origional policy of collecting user data ("anonymous" or not). They removed this functionality when, suprise, there was a public backlash. But by then, the damage is done. They have demonstrated the ability for those who would abuse it.
Enter the entertainment industry. Sure, I'm dismayed that a court would force this kind of action. But I'm sad to say I'm not shocked - we've all seen this kind of attitude from the entertainment industry and the legal and political system that seems to favor it, and these kinds of tactics.
But let us not forget that it is the current PVR industry (SonicBlue AND Tivo) who have created the industry standard that allows invasion of consumer rights. It is their short-sightedness that gave the entertainment industry this option to push for in court.
They created the slippery slope and despite their attempts to get off of it, they will now be forced to continue their slide.
This signature intentionally has just seven words.
Consider: A US Federal Court -- not some backwater municipal or state court -- has just ordered a wholesale invasion of citizens' privacy and personal information without a search warrant.
Consider further: This action was ordered, not in the name of "National Security" or "Anti-Terrorist Investigation", not on behalf of the government at all, but on behalf of a monsterously wealthy corporation bleating about "theft" and illusory "lost profits".
It has begun. The last bulwark against tyranny has been swept aside by a sitting Federal Magistrate without the slightest qualm.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I offer the following admittedly foolish, idealisic counsel:
Close your wallets.
Buy nothing.
See no movies. Rent no videos. Buy no music CDs. Purchase no computer software that isn't Open Source/Free Software (remember, the BSA members are in on this, too).
"But what do I do for entertainment?" Easy. Fire up your Web browser and/or go to your local government building and start digging for incriminating dirt on every elected official you can find. Once you find it, publish it. Read the dirt other people have dug up. Learn as much as you can. Discovering incriminating secrets about other people is endlessly entertaining, especially with that whole "betrayal of the public trust" angle going for it.
And once you've learned everything you possibly can about the people ostensibly representing you... VOTE!
Too many Attorneys General simply refuse to bring malfeasance charges, so relying on criminal prosecution to delete these people won't be very effective. Get out there this upcoming November and vote the bastards out. They are your employees. They are betraying you and selling you out. They are embezzling your earnings and selling your personal secrets to the highest bidder. Fire them. Hurl them out the door so fast that you can see a redshift on their ass.
Apathy about our government is a luxury we can no longer afford. We will only have one or two more shots at this before the courts decide that EULAs really are binding, that your property isn't really yours, that the monopoly of copyright trumps Freedom of Speech (q.v. Keith Henson) and Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure (this case). At that point, we all become serfs, and, "Your papers, please," will become a phrase heard all too often in our places of work and our homes.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Hey mods,
:^)
thanks for clarifying that my post was redundant...hopefully the title helped
a little humor, don't get too excited!
now, it would be ironic if this post here gets modded as off-topic. that would make my day.
yours,
Em Emalb
Sent from your iPad.
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 it would appear that we again have a case of a company believing that they have a legal right to preserve their business model in perpetuity.
This is, of course, the same thing that the RIAA thinks: they've made lots of money in a certain fashion, therefore they are OBVIOUSLY entitled to the continued existence of that revenue stream.
Pure rubbish.
In Germany and other European countries, you pay extra for every CDR blank and similar 'taxes' on CDRW drives, PCs and HDDs are in the discussion.The money is distributed among the labels according to market share. The same system (different institution) is applied to printers and copiers.
For the money I pay, I'm granted rights of fair use. I can make personal copies and I'm even allowed to share with personal friends. You can also use text excerpts for educational purposes.
Oh - and it looks like we are also getting some DMCA-like laws that make it illegal to circumvent copy protection. Even if we're explicitly charged for the right to copy the content.
This is crap. Nobody in their right mind would ask VCR users to report back how many commercials were skipped, yet Sonic Blue is expected to comply with this from a judge. I'm not a PVR user, but I'm outraged at the sheer lack of respect this judge is demonstrating. I'm sure these numbers will be aggregate numbers, but honestly I think the judge should be given one of these and have his entire viewing habits made public record, including his thieving ways of fast forwarding through commercials.
They now have real damages to countersue for. I was going to buy one of the units (they really look cool) but now refuse to. I will not submit to this sort of monitoring. Period. They lost my sale. Am I alone? I am sending a message to this effect to privacy@replaytv.com, informing them of this and suggesting the countersuit. Maybe if they get more reports of real damages, a counter-suit will be filed.
.sig: file not found
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
I have a Panasonic branded Replay 2000. I'm really intrigued by Tivo Series2 and Replay 4x00, but I can't justify jumping to this generation, I'll upgrade in generation 3.
Now, one of the problems with the Replay and Tivo is that while you can conveniently time shift with them (great to not miss shows and have them waitting for me when I get home at ~9:30 PM), you can't conveniently space shift. When I move out of my dinky apartment and into a large apartment or small hour, I'll have more than one television. I then have the choice of building an advanced audio/video distribution system (which are VERY cool, BTW, but don't exist for DTV/HDTV and DD/DTS signals, just NTSC/Stereo), or placing a Replay/Tivo in every room.
Being able to send from one ReplayTV to another in the house is a useful feature. It's part of an attempt to also sell multiple ReplayTVs to people. My understanding was that the shows could be sent over the LAN or Internet. LAN would be quick, a few minutes to grab the show, Internet would take a while.
Sometimes my friends miss shows that I want. Sometimes my IR blaster fails to change the channel and grab the show. I'd love to be able to have someone send it to me so I can watch it.
Ironically, with ReplayTV, I don't spend commercial breaks in the kitchen getting more food. It's probably helped me lose 2-3 lbs., reduce my television watching, and increase my commercial viewing. Sure I only watch really well done and funny commercials, but I used to watch no commercials.
For any industry people watching, grabbing the last advertisements on action shows/movies may help. I got yelled at by the fiancee for over skipping and seeing the resolution of a cliff hanger then going back that we usually end up watching 1-2 commercials to avoid it.
Alex
It is patently unfair to sue someone because they make a product that is _too useful_ (such as a PVR, mp3 player, file sharing program, etc.).
The law is not there to guarantee the viability of a business model. If advertising fails, then use something else (such as product placement), but do not seek to destroy or block technology that gives the users more power. If I were to invent a car that ran on cold fusion, the oil companies would not have a legal case against me, even if I end up destroying their business model.
Of course, this has not kept companies from trying to save their business model in the past. A good example of this is the "Red Flag" laws that were passed in the 1860s to block the automobile industry:
(taken from http://www.dana.com/corporate/history/history3.ht