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Losing Control of Your TV

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the no-surpise-there dept.

sp00 writes "The MPAA is now trying to prevent high quality copies made from TV broadcasts. The latest anti-piracy move will prevent you from making high-quality copies of broadcast TV programs. And the new "broadcast flag" technology enables all manner of other restrictions. In the future, the Motion Picture Association of America will control your television set."

4 of 633 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about low-quality copies? by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your VHS recorder (at least the current one, with marginal - if any - copy protection built into it) doesn't know that any of the these flags exist, so it presumably wouldn't honor them.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  2. Software Tuners Are The Way "Out" by Doug+Dante · · Score: 5, Informative

    The broadcast flag is old news. The FCC can control hardware, but not software.

    Thus the GNU project brings us an open source software tuner, which is not subject to regulation, and can tune/record HDTV.

    Check out these HDTV screen shots:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/hdtv-sample s. html

    Sadly, the software controlled tuner cards, powerful processor, DRAM, wide screen monitor, good computer stereo, etc put this toy out of the reach of most geeks - for now.

    --
    The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
  3. Disable it in your OWN TV and you'll get sued! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Look for the MPAA to use the DMCA to sue anyone who disables the "anti-copy" circuit.

    Or even worse than that, look for them to illegally sue anyone who purchases anything, like a soldering iron, that could be used to disable it.

    Don't believe me? Look at how (1) (2) DirecTV is warping the DMCA in its own image. Sueing people for merely purchasing a smartcard reader!

    Only 22,000+ people sued so far!

    Watch for the MPAA to start this next, just like the RIAA and DirecTV have.
  4. Japan doing this next month by juebay · · Score: 5, Informative

    People in Japan are really taken advantage of. If they want to buy episodes, they are forced to buy 1 or 2 episode DVDs. But since digital recording is prevelant, most wait for people who supply raw rips of the shows (anime in this case), download them, and since they speak the language, can store a very clean episode on their PC. This April, the changes mentioned in the article will be taking effect so it will be impossible to download recorded shows since they will be in encrypted format. What some fansub groups are doing now are putting together all their unused cycles to try to figure out if the encryption can be broken through distributed processing. More information can be garnered here and here.