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."

Comments

Music to my ears...

[NanoGator]

"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.

Re:Music to my ears...

[tdrury]

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

Don't Hold Your Breath

[FuddChuckles]

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

In response...

[Asikaa]

In response to the ruling, the major TV networks released the following statement:

"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."

Re:In response...

[curunir]

5 minutes later...

The hacker community releases instructions for constructing an antenna capable of decrypting the new broadcasts using only spare AOL CDs, 4 paperclips and a rubber band.

Effects of technology on the tv industry

[binaryDigit]

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?

Re:Effects of technology on the tv industry

[PhxBlue]

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?

Good point--cable television is widespread and fairly affordable; and it offers high signal quality even if the content does suck.

I really hope the TV broadcasters don't take a cue from web advertising. I can imagine it now:

Joe SixPack hits "power" button on remote to turn off his TV, only to get bombarded with six pop-up advertisements. He hits the power button to get rid of the pop-ups, and gets two more for every one he "turns off." The whole TV display goes blue and dumps a whole bunch of technical gibbersh, then goes black as a wisp of smoke escapes from the back of the set.

I wouldn't mind, but only if...

[Hans Lehmann]

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"

This tragic ruling

[First Person]

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*

Re:Hurrah!

[L. VeGas]

Say YES to good precident!

George W.'s campaign slogan for 2004 has been leaked apparently.

Spyware on the TV..

[ldopa1]

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... ;)

Good ruling, but we're screwed anyway

[blueskyred]

Forcing SonicBlue to install "spyware" was a non-starter. (It wouldn't have been spyware, SonicBlue did tell everyone this could be happening, but I digress.) It was a moronic ruling and wasn't even germane to the case. It isn't about "what are people watching", it's about "is this devicing being used solely as a copyright-infringing device"?

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!

Consequences of these devices

[Space Coyote]

The current slump in ad revenues combined with the spectre of TV watchers being able to skip ad has caused some TV show producers to write ads into the actual contents of the show. There was a story on CNN about this yesterday, in which they showed a scene from "Felicity" with dialog as follows "Hey, I just got a new computer" "Oh, is it one of those new iMacs? Those things are so beautiful".

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.

Two stories on PVRs

[stoney27]

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.

http://www.wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts_06010 2_ tivo.html

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_ product.html
another story:

On what the advertisers are doing to get their products in front of people's eyes.

-Scott