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Draft of 'Broadcast Flag' Treaty Now Available
The Importance of writes "If you liked the broadcast flag, you're going to love WIPO's proposed 'broadcast flag' treaty (PDF link). The draft treaty will give copyright-like rights to broadcasters, cablecasters and, if the US gets its way, webcasters. As a broadcaster, you wouldn't have to own the copyright in what you broadcast, but you could still stop people from recording your broadcast, reproducing it or distributing it. The treaty also includes DMCA-like protections, in case you try to circumvent the broadcast flag. The treaty is going to be discussed in Geneva, June 7-9. The draft is discussed over on Corante.com and late last year on the DMCA activists list."
With the hardware that most manufacturers build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by most systems if implemented. Besides, if you end up modifying the ATSC standard, in order to prevent breaking all previous encoders/decoders on the market, you would need to make such modifications to portions of the stream which are unused, and existing off the shelf parts would ignore such a modification. Thus, the protection starts off ineffective.
Even after the existing non compliant decoders/recorders/etc on the market are retired to due age or death, newer hardware which ignores such protections would still be available, you'd just have to pay a fair amount.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
I don't see what's so outrageous about this.
The owls are not what they seem
I am a citizen of the US, I vote for my "leaders" and one way or another have a say in the laws I must follow. BUT A treaty saying what I can and cannot record.
BAH!
Those who won't follow it can't be forced to and those who will aren't offending anyway.
Taiwan will still be the primary source of bootleg video movie and software and the US will be a primary consumer.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Depends...I remember toward the end of the VHS days, many manufacturers started limiting the signal strength on the tape. The tape would then play back to a monitor but any recordings would be unwatchable. You had to use a signal booster to record. They could possibly limit the signal strength and these technologies would not work.
Lets see:
Good content sometimes makes money.
Bad content sometimes makes money.
Good content sometimes loses money.
Bad content sometimes loses money.
YET people still make money making content WITHOUT restrictions on "fair use". The question is, does RESTRICTING fair use make MORE money or LESS money?
The various media outlets know that CONTENT is going to be King soon, and that Advertisements are slowly going to lose out.
They are trying to prop up revenue streams with bad ideas that aren't going to work. All technological measures can be twarted, and in the long run, do not work.
People will pay for content worth consuming. Bands will have to play more concerts, poets will have to do more readings etc. Recording is/was just a new form of revenue which has approached the end of its useful life, in regards to generating a profit stream.
Now we are going to have to go back to what worked 200 years ago, before we had TV, Radio and the Internet.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Of course, I'd dearly like to know what exactly this broadcast flag is supposed to be...but I'm willing to bet that this broadcast flag is going to essentially come down to a small sequence of bits (like the "second generation" marker that is used to prevent you from dubbing one MiniDisc digitally to another) or a signal overlay (like Macrovision that causes severe degredation if you copy the content). I don't think there's ever been a time that all the various hardware and content groups have been able to agree on a standard.
...simple to remove. Sure, the majority of the audience will be stymied, seeing the error message on their VCR/PVR/DVR and giving up, but there will also be a large percentage...the same people who go out and purchase "video enhancers" to remove Macrovision...that find ways to defeat it. That works for me. Sure, we are breaking the law, but it's civil disobedience, just like making backups of your DVDs and, just like the original Betamax case, time shifting your viewing material.
So, here's how I think it will shake out. There will be a small bit sequence in a digital broadcast that says "do not copy". It will be trivial to add that support to hardware, and simple to include that in broadcasts.
AND
Maybe, eventually, some company somewhere will sue people who bypass this signal, or a company who makes a signal filter. When that happens, hopefully they will have the balls to take it through the court system to try and positively affirm the public's rights the way previous cases have.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
There's no MAYBE in that sentence. It is absolutely going to happen. With the DMCA tied to this, it will be illegal to even try and make a machine that will ignore the broadcast bit. And they've learned from their mistakes from DeCeSS, and failing to sue DVD-John from Norway.
The companies are slowly lining up everything exactly the way they need it to hit a home run and have an iron fist on this right out of the starting gate.
Ever wonder why HDTV is going so slow in catching on? Because they want to get all this crap out of the way to start with.
And the U.S. government will pass ANY LAW they can to make this happen because they have a deadline on selling all the HDTV airwave range to these companies. They desperately HAVE to sell this spectrum to the content companies because it's been allocated in their budgets for many years now.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
What would a requirement to use the broadcast flag mean for a software radio like the GNU Radio? It seems to me that once software radio matures to the point where we can interpret these transmissions in real-time then all the software has to do is ignore the broadcast flag. Or do will they try to require all software to adhere to this flag as well?
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Sooner or later, the whole system is going to implode. And it'll be nasty. I doubt restricting people's ability to record their favourite TV shows will be the catalyst... but it's not going to help. (Maybe Ashcroft's anti-Pr0n crusade will be a contributing factor!)
You must think in Russian.
> Guess it's easier to hate the US than it is to see the problem that the UN created.
Not exactly, I guess it is easier to blame the UN for the consistant undermining by the former USSR and the USA mostly (China had a bit of a share as well)
Does the UN need reform? definitely. But one of the most needed reforms is getting rid of the veto. That would have meant that France would have been unable to sabotage the discussion about Iraq (maybe with the same, maybe with a different outcome) and it would stop the USA from sabotaging any efford to get a less one sided picture of the situation in the middle east.
> Not really relevant to this dicussion, sorry.
As you can read from the above, it is very relevant because in both cases the inaction of the UN is caused by the exact same thing.
Also, it is relevant because the USA uses the exact same argument to block any actions regarding the middle east (linking it to other unresolved situations)
> Heh. Well the only way we're going to fix our government is to radically change how people get into office in the first place. There is a lot of bad motivators out there to get into office, and a lot of crappy ways (i.e. abuse of the media) to get in there. It's not a matter of electing the right man, that's futile, it's a matter of removing those bad influences
And there I can agree completely.
> As for the 3rd world war, sorry, no, that's just not in our future. I don't doubt that more blood will be spilled, but it's very difficult to imagine that it'd escalate to nuclear proportions. A lot of things would have to change.
You really think so?
It may be hard to imagine from your point of view, but that would be because of being out of touch with what the behavior of the current administration is triggering outside the USA.
In the end the most dangerous part of what the current administration is doing is demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. That is simply bound to make you a lot of enemies. SO while they may not be the first one to hit the button, they very much create the circumstances in which dangerous idiots can gather popular support and do very foolish things.
Just to get something straigt, I do not believe the USA as such is evil, nor that its peopel are. I do however believe that there are a few very misguided ideas about the world that have gotten a hold there, esp. among the current administration and their closest supporters, but with a resonance among a much broader part of the population.
You can get away for a while with not caring about that rest of the world with regards to what they think and want, but seeing how they have like almost 20x the number of people, and happen to have most of the real dangerous tech as well, that is really not going to last, and is bound to backfire very badly. That is why I am saying they have a decent chance of triggering a 3rd world war, I wasn't so much saying they'd start it directly.