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Judge Says Sonicblue Doesn't Have to Monitor
MoD writes "From CNet: District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper on Friday overturned a late April ruling that required the maker of ReplayTV set-top box technology to write and install software to monitor what its customers were watching."
Unfortunately, I think the victory will be shortlived. Replay TV users can basically ftp television shows to each other's consoles. Neat feature, but it probably makes the entertainment powers-that-be soil themselves with fear ("Holy Cow! That's file swapping! Quick, get me Legal on the phone").
Rather than work with Replay TV or TiVo, it will only be a matter of time before the TV industry reps files for litigation that will require Replay TV to monitor their users for uncopyrighted or illegally disseminated materials, and prevent their transmission.
After all, it worked to get rid of Napster, didn't it?
Sigh.
-FC
So this is getting interesting. More and more companies are coming up with technologies to zap commercials. If the technology is robust and usage widespread, will we see a fundamental shift in how we "pay" for tv content? After all, much of the cost of over the air tv is subsidized by commercials, so what if (in a web crash way) advertisers say, hey, if people are zapping the commercials, we are not going to run them/pay a heck of a lot less for them. Say that this is widespread (again, like the rollercoaster that web advertising has gone through), will the networks then be forced to shift their business models? What would they shift them to? Would this be the begining of the end of "free" over the air tv? I personally know of only a couple of people who do not have cable/satellite, is OTATV a dinosaur anyway? Is the price we'll pay for being able to zap commericials be that we'll have to pay more for content?
I really wouldn't care if the networks were aware of what I was watching right now. Unfortunately, they wouldn't just leave it at that. My TV viewing history would be stored, possibly sold to third parties, and might eventually come back to bite me in the ass. "Sorry Mr. Lehmann, but our records show that you watched 'The Spring Break Bikini Babes / Alien Autopsy Special' on Fox back in 1994. We wouldn't want types like you in this organization. Have a nice day"
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OK, just to take a (slightly) extreme example...
:)
Girlfriend/wife goes to bed. Boyfriend/husband stays up and watches pr0n (without girl's knowledge). Next day, watching telly together, ads for "the hottest new sex channel" come up.
Man in trouble.
Just a random example. I'm sure there are many other less-morally-dubious ones
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
OTOH, the enterainment industry might wreck that product by not providing a commercial skip/fast forward feature.
They might have the courage to add some features the others wouldn't, though. For instance, whenever you pause the unit, instead of showing the same screen forever, they could automatically replay recent commercials! They could also autosave commercials you might be interested in based on their similarity to other commercials that you enjoyed (i.e. watched). Then there would be the "Content Advance" feature (only works for channels that preserve the commercial marking signals) which would let you skip the tedious filler that is crammed between our beloved commercials. Just be careful! That content is there for a reason... if you only see the commercials you might start taking them for granted and getting tired of them! I think I read a science fiction story that had a scenario like that, but I can't recall the name...
The original ruling was ridiculous on the face of it in the first place.
;)
I already had a device that would allow me to record a live television program, skip all of the commercials and for a small fee send the ENTIRE program to my friends.. It's called a VCR.. It use to come in two flavors, Beta-Max (the Macintosh of VCR's) and VHS (the DOS of VHS, does 70% of Beta-Max, with better marketing).
I really think that the people who should have pressed the suit in the first place were the Nielson folks. They're the ones who really need to know that I've watched the entire Band Of Brothers series about 80 times so far....
The only reason that the first judge didn't make RCA/SONY/et al write software for VCR's that reported who was recording what was the simple fact that NOBODY knows how to program a VCR...
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
The skipping-commercials feature gets Hollywood steamed. And I don't blame them -- it is the crux of their business model. No one likes their business model ruined, just ask the RIAA. The thing is, in the USA we get free, over-the-air TV in return for advertisements being pushed into our houses. That isn't going to change. Instead, where the advertisements are put will change.
On the third-to-last ER of the season, in the ultra-emotional opening segment where we saw people's reactions to Carter dying, the local NBC affiliate had a scrolling text banner across the top of the screen. "Important Details About The Crisis In Boston's Catholic Churches -- stay tuned to Channel 7 The News Station for an important news story tonight at 11!" (Or something close to that.) To the people that really care about ER, this was a major distraction and hurt the content.
It isn't just local affiliates that do this sort of thing. Sticking with NBC for a minute (though they aren't the only ones who do this), is anyone else sick of the text overlays when they come back from commercial? They state the show that you are watching (NBC logo + "The West Wing"), but right before they wipe it away, they REPLACE IT WITH AN AD for something else like "The Friends Baby Is Born This Thursday! (Check local listings.)"
This is only going to get worse. I'm not talking about product-placement stuff that has gone on for decades, I'm talking about how our television will very quickly resemble a poorly-designed web page. Navigation banner on the top, news/stock/other update scroll on the bottom, advertisement on either side and less than 40% of the on-screen space used for content, right in the middle. This will be extra-great with the poor NTSC standard we have in the US.
Sigh. [STRIKETHRU]At least we can point out drastic flaws in our administration when we need to.[/STRIKETHRU] The United States will win the war on terror, and dissenting voices will be quashed. This is wartime, people!
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
This is interesting because of (oddly enough) a statement I read in this month's Kiplinger magazine. In a sidebar, it was noted the that US Treasury dept. was looking at adding some color tones to the background of US notes to foil counterfeiters. The interesting quote was to the effect, "these modifications are part of the Treasury's plan to modify US bank notes every 7 years in an effort to make counterfeiting harder." My immediate thought was "wow! here is a US goverment department that sees how they have to change their business practices to compete with constantly changing technology" such as hi-res color laser printers and such. So why the hell can't the RIAA and MPAA do the same?
The US currently has laws against counterfeiting. Creating new laws to, for example, require all scanners to detect image signatures within US bank notes, would be completely possible yet plain silly since it could probably be easily defeated and would raise the cost of scanners. Yet this is exactly what the RIAA/MPAA wants with respect to copyrighted audio and video.
The parallels between the two situations were interesting to me. The irony that the government is more competitive than a private industry is not lost on me.
-tim