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DMCA Loophole For Peer-to-Peer TV Show Sharing?

Posted by timothy on from the honest-it-was-just-broadcast-to-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Fortune.com asks, "Is TV Show Swapping Legal? For those using TiVos or new Windows PCs, it just might be." Why? "The law that ensnared ... DVD hackers, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, doesn't specifically address the question of [personal video recorders]. But when it comes to the legality of hacking digital media, the law zeroes in on 'circumvention' -- did hackers have to circumvent protection to copy the video? Several hackers who have published their techniques online say they didn't have to crack anything to extract video from their TiVos""

7 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Time limits by march · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wouldn't be surprised if a time-to-live feature is added to "swapping" devices. I.e., you can swap all you want, but the swapped copy has a limited lifetime and then erases itself. Like those disposable DVD's.

    This could be easily done by the folks at TiVo or ReplayTV.

  2. No story here re swapping copyrighted stuff by declana · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Taking the poster's "legal analysis" as true "sharing" copies of television shows is still a violation of other copyright laws. As the MP3.com case proved, no one has a right to make a copy for you. Only you have the right to "space shift" (transfer to VHS, CDR, etc) an mp3 file (or television show). This is where Napster and MP3.com were found to violate copyright law. Not the DMCA's anticircumvision.

  3. my four ha'pennies... by blaimue · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Compare this to open source software:

    The code is freely available. You can download it from the internet and do whatever you want with it. Anyone can watch a TV show and record it if they want.

    So why do people pay for things like Linux distributions? It's the convenience. They're not paying for the code, they're paying for the packaging, the tech support, etc.

    Same thing with the TV shows. If people want to record them and share them for free (essentially providing a service), that's their perogative.

  4. Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? by glesga_kiss · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I would tend to think that most people who watch recorded shows skip the commercials.

    Even if the people watching the shows from a p2p download did watch the commercials, the network still wouldn't get paid for these viewings. They simply have no idea on how many viewers will see it, and have no way to prove it.

    To me, all p2p has done is to change the business model. If the networks had any sense, they'd have every show available for download on a popular p2p app, with some major hosting at their end. Then they get to choose the commercials that exist in the de-facto standard download for that episode. And the advertisers will know that, and pay more for the privledge.

    Or, you could just bribe politions to change the law in-keeping with current practices, and have no control over a system that is growing larger every day. You can get almost any popular show on p2p now, with no commercials in it, having been stripped out by the person who did the capture.

  5. Always has been illegal... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's always been illegal to swap TV shows under conventional copyright law, nothing under fair use covers that. It covers time-shifting, and using small portions in various ways.

    What DMCA added was that it outlawed any tool or information that could be used to circumvent protection mechanisms (and screw any fair use or other applications it might have).

    I really don't see the point here...

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Always has been illegal... by jgerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's always been illegal to swap TV shows under conventional copyright law, nothing under fair use covers that. It covers time-shifting, and using small portions in various ways.


      Illegal or not, they can bite me ;) I'm usually out on friday nights, so I fully expect the right to ask a friend to tape Firefly and borrow the tape later to watch. This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't so easy to release shows to the masses digitally but it's still pretty much bullshit in my book. Especially in the cases where the show is no longer avilable. For instance if I wanted to watch The Wonder Years I can't without finding someone online who has a capture. Or waiting on the remote possibility that it will be shown... at a reasonable time, on a channel I have, and in a reasonable order. As far as I'm concered, I will never feel guilty downloading and watching something I have no other way of obtaining.

      --
      I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
  6. Re:One huge hole by glesga_kiss · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Nah, because it'd be even easier to just cut out between the first keyframe of the brrak and the last keyfram of the break and reshare.

    Sure, but given a choice of the file with thousands of sources and ample bandwidth versuses the one with 3-4 from a couple of cable modems capped at 128k upstream, the "official" version will prevail. You can't control everything, and this seems to be the basic lack of understanding with these corporations.