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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."
YAH!
the last place I need more spyware is on my television. No one needs to know how many episodes of Star Trek I've been watching.
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
"If the networks and studios focused on the inevitable evolution of their business instead of attempts to stifle technology, we believe everyone involved would benefit, consumers most of all," the CEO added. "
I'm starting to hear this more and more. I hope that this was an influence in the judge's decision. The simple fact of the matter is that markets change. You can't legally force them to stay put. Doing so will ruin this economy. There is a lot more at stake here than just ad revenue.
"Derp de derp."
then they should design and market their own Tivo/ReplayTV, etc device. I'm sure that they would know how to market it and I bet they could sell to countless Joe Schmedley's who wouldn't care if their viewing practices were monitored. Especially if they were given some kind of incentive like a chance to win some prize by actively participating in info gathering.
OTOH, the enterainment industry might wreck that product by not providing a commercial skip/fast forward feature. They're still deathly afraid that they'll piss of they're advertisers.
All things in moderation.
Consumers have rights? I didn't know that. Usually everything we buy has fine print that tends to negate any rights we had prior to purchasing the product.
-Tolerate my intolerance
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
"Ok that's it. We've had enough with the public. Who do they think they are? Well, we have a plan.
All network TV will now be encrypted in a similar fashion to satellite TV. In order to be issued a decryption smartcard, customers will be forced to sit through 120 hours of non-stop commercials followed by back-to-back reruns of My Two Dads and Hart to Hart."
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
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"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This is a sad day for us lying bastards. I was just beginning to relish the idea of hacking the reporting mechanism. Then I'd be able to influence network programming without even viewing the shows. This way I could dictate the mindless drivel without having to watch any of it - a double win! Create enough spurious reports and the system would have been useless. *evil grin*
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Say YES to good precident!
George W.'s campaign slogan for 2004 has been leaked apparently.
Best Windows Freeware
There is danger in targetted advertising. New customer aquisition tends to suffer when you target _too_ well (because you're advertising to people who are likely already customers), and then advertisers get soured on the value of advertising. Some of the best and most valuable advertising and marketing is decidedly _non-targeted_ where advertisers surprise themselves by finding high converstion rates and RIOs in market segments they never would have thought of had they been offered uber-granular targeted media buys.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
Two points:
.. a la Double Click fiasco. Have you ever heard of a company providing the feds with contest/survey data? They dont, or if they do, they have absolutely no choice. Thats not to say that companies dont fuck with your data - just pay attention, because the Blue Chips (Coke, Nike, etc) have been watching all the online privacy issues from the sidelines and are very cautious about what and how they deal with your data. A large company deals with exponentially more scrutiny with respect to their consumer data collection and management processes than your mom'n'pop or e-new.com businesses.
Suppose you're in a bitter custody battle for your children and the ex says you're a terrible parent and you're violent. Her lawyer would subpoena the cable company and then hire a psychiatrist to analyze your viewing habits and give expert testimony against you based on information that is totally irrelevant. And you know most judges would believe them.
1. Large, bluechip companies (believe it or not) are terrified of mismanaging your data. When they sell you to third parties, you're likely to complain, maybe file a suit or two if they violated their User Agreement as it pertains to your data. But if they start sharing this data with the feds, they know they'll never have a hope in hell of getting your permission to collect this data. The first time something like your scenario happens, everyone will complain
Or if you want to go with Big Brother conspiracy theories, then lets assume that the new and improved FBI/CIA is going to make a new Carnivore program that will analyze your viewing habits and flag you as a murderer, rapist, child molester, terrorist, etc..
Do you really think that collecting the viewing habits of users watching legal, mainstream television are going to help tip FBI/CIA off to trouble-makers. Its not like Bomb Making - A Guide to Anarchists is on every Wednesday at 7pm or something.
I really dont think aggregated viewing habits is data that is too sensitive to be collected. The only thing I'd be scared about is the media buys getting too granular, and having that turn advertisers off when their buys suffer from a low ROI (due to viewer burnout.) Then, they turn around and devalue the media, thus fueling the need for more advertising. Sometimes targetted advertising can suffer from tunnel-vision blindness.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Another example is on the Rosie O'Donnel show she recently shilled for Wendy's new salads, saying how great they were. I wasn't watching, but apparently while she was talking her producer said "Take a bite", "What?" "Just do it."
Another good example is the TV morning "news" shows on the day Coke launched Vanilla Coke. The Daily Show did a wonderful send up of this. "The Today show host then informed the Coco-Cola spokeswoman that it was time to go to a commercial break, at which point she just allowed her to continue speaking."
I can picture this getting a whole lot worse, as it's the enw hot trent in advertising. I've basically stopped watching TV altogether except for the Simpsons anyway.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Not so much on the Judges ruling but this week on the show "On The Media" had two stories about TiVo and a follow up on product placement because of TiVo.
0 2_ tivo.html
:)
_ product.html
http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts_0601
Which talkes about TiVo, and then in intresting fact, it seems that someone was reporting that the BBC had down loaded a show or two to all TiVo machines that could not be deleted, had to wait one week before it was removed. Thus hoping I guess for people to watch it. ( Could be full of add
And http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts_060102
another story:
On what the advertisers are doing to get their products in front of people's eyes.
-Scott
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
This is a great victory for more than just Sonic Blue. This sets a precident that prevents manufacturers from being required to install monitoring software. That said, the issues of file sharing and commercial skipping are still open (for which litigation is no doubt forthcoming!)
By the way, the whole "file sharing" issue has often been misinterpreted. ReplayTV's file sharing is not an unlimited sharing tool like Napster was. You can only share a file with up to 15 other people, and once the recipient receive the file, they cannot share it further. Yes, itis file sharing, but it's been designed to be somewhat limited.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.
-- The Judge in "Life-Line"
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