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What Critics of the Critics of the FCC Rule Miss
Asprin writes "Businessweek has an editorial up which argues that the FCC's HDTV broadcast flag rule is a good thing, and that everyone is just overreacting. What the author is overlooking is that this rule gives exclusive control over production to the studios that are in "the club", essentially denying private citizens the right to make their own HDTV format video. To wit: "The problem comes when a program taped on an old VCR can't be replayed on a next-generation VCR. So consumers may experience some compatibility problems between machines as they upgrade." Awww, she almost gets it. (...and she was sooo close, too!) The problem is the word "consumers", which doesn't describe us anymore. There's nothing like being locked out of your own old family videos when your current VCR dies, eh?"
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Put a frog (alive) into a pot of cold water. Put the pot on low heat. If you heat the water slowly enough, the frog will not jump out, even when it eventually boils to death.
This is what is happening.
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om Shanti
When companies like Apex, simply ignored the Region coding stuff, they sold like hotcakes... So I plan on doing the same thing, simply ignoring the flags (or whatever they end up being), manufacturing my units in some country the US can't touch (say China), and making a fortune...
What part did I mess up? I must have missed something... This seriously is too good to be true... I'm gonna be rich!!!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The point is that corporate america does *get it,* and they are trying to avoid selling said rope. Failing, but trying.
sulli
RTFJ.
So this is all that is stopping them now. HDTV will only happen when the Internet is locked down. Once upon a time producers wanted people to see their shows. It's not like these are pay-per-views that go out over our airwaves.
If consumers want their HDTV, they have to accept limits on the ability to redistribute TV shows on the Web.
You know, maybe I don't want my HDTV that badly. Present TV is good enough for the fare they serve up on it. Of course, regular TV is now also distributed on the Internet. Are they next going to threaten us with no TV at all?
One can only hope.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The article thinks that the only content is that provided by the big studios. I don't know about you, but most of my home video library is composed of home movies, short films I have created myself, and some classic material that you can't get on tape.
This ruling eliminates any kind of non-authorized content, weither that is indie films, home movies, pirate TV stations, or illegal downloads. It doesn't matter to the machine, it's all unplayable. The FCC has done its job here, with regulating commercial playback, but it has overstepped its bounds in forbidding non-commercial use of non-broadcast signals.
Shoot, there is no guarantee that I can record my local township's cable channel anymore with this. It will force these no-budget public access stations to pay who knows how much or else their programming is no longer viewable by their constituants.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
If you believe that it would be universally ignored, why do you need it?
What do you think will happen once they have the mandetory flag? Step 2: Flag not effective. Must provide mandetory encryption. And then they'll claim it's not something new, it's just enforcement of an already existing and accepted IP protection.
It's about making you swallow a camel (is that even an US expression? anyway), they were just so generous to cut it in two for you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've skimmed through the FCC's PDF report and read a few other sources but this is the first thing I've seen that says that new VCRs won't play old tapes. Is there something in the rule that says all content must have a flag? Is flag-less content presumed to be pirated?
You fools^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers will buy anything we tell you to. If that means you can't skip commercials, watch your old tapes, or time-shift programming, we'll just sell you neutered technology to do part of what you used to get for free at an inflated price.
This seems to be the frame of mind of the people who came up with this incipient CF - an arrogant assumption that people will accept what the networks give them, and will forget anything that they want people to forget. The problem is, people have the money that the networks want, and they aren't likely to forget the fact that they used to watch their shows when they wanted without commercials and now they can't. People have short memories, but changes such as this are precisely what people are likely to remember. Unless they can write laws forcing people to buy HDTV and keep them on, they can't make people buy their neutering of content. If the TV networks stop nondigital broadcast in 2006, then people may find out they can live without TV, thus guaranteeing the networks a fast, painful death. If they don't then the broadcast flag is irrelevant. Either way, they lose.
Apart from the government stipulating what hardware manufacturers MUST have in their hardware, I see no problem with this.
If they use 10% of the FCC's collective brain power (which is approximately at the level of Homer Simpson at this point), they'll figure out that the easiest way to get this done is to allow new VCR's/DVD's/DVR's/PVR's to play non-flagged content as well as flagged.
RULE 1: If there's a flag, do what it says.
RULE 2: If there's no flag, play the damn thing.
That makes everyone happy. The FCC and MPAA can mandate their stupid flags as much as they want to and it will do what it's supposed to, but I can still play my home videos and all the pirated videos I'll be able to get once someone cracks the flag (and you know it's inevitable).
-- This sig for rent.
But isn't that the point -- judging by sales, consumers don't want their HDTV. Why is this allegedly pro-capitalism administration, usually so gung-ho to invoke the market to address societal needs, apparently so willing to overlook the overwhelming verdict of the market: People just aren't itching to get HDTV.
Why is government intervention and the "picking of winners" OK here but not, say, in national health insurance?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Yeah the Macrovision is annoying. But a little competition would probably put this guy out of business.
If this continues indefinately we will end up approaching a system simular to Soviet Russia but from the opposite direction.
In Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, published 50 years ago, he presented a future United States where Soviet-style centralized planning was adopted -- because it turned out to be more profitable for the capitalists.
I don't find it hypocritical at all. The broadcast flag by itself does not make it illegal to record the 'protected' material. It only advises the recieving hardware not to record the stream. The fact that a GPLed piece of software is capable of ignoring the flag doesn't make itself responsible for the user violating copyright by distributing copyrighted material recorded with that tool.