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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."
but you could still stop people from recording your broadcast, reproducing it or distributing it.
I would assume "old" recording technologies such as VCRs and PVRs would still be able to record the signal? (Current protection, Macrovision, is easily scrubbed from a signal.) These bastards have forgotten what the term "Fair Use" is all about.
Trolling is a art,
You can prevent people from recording. You can try, but you'll probably fail just as everyone else has prior.
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!
The more they make TV a pain to own, pay for or operate, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.
er. wait... I mean, eventually I'll get tired of it and stop watching TV altogether.
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.
I say if you don't have the copyright to what you broadcast, you shouldn't have the right to prevent redistribution.
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
Imagine if all of these groups spent as much time dealing with dictators, genocide, hunger, slavery, child abuse, rape, privacy, female genital mutilation, government spending and other important issues as they do protecting corporate greed.
I'm starting to believe that this stuff doesn't matter.
I hate to sound all Princess Leia, but they keep piling this nonsense on, and we keep ignoring it/circumventing it (and ignoring the laws against circumvention). At some point the whole thing becomes a joke and enforcement becomes impossible.
That's not to say that I don't think we'd be better off without this stuff. I'd rather not be a criminal, if it's all the same. OTOH, I'm not going to run Windows just so I can watch DVDs that I've bought.
I guess time will tell.
-Peter
... this would outlaw such things as time shifting? And they could accomplish that...how?
Yes, I'm waiting for some smart guy who can understand lawspeek to read the PDF and translate it into a paragraph or so of normal english.
Next they'll want to brain scan you and make sure you don't REMEMBER a tune or news story or a video scene, because you would be avoiding some royalty payments...
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.
If I read that correctly, this means that even if I release something for free to the public, they can *still* find a way to prevent people from copying it and distributing it? In that case, I throw my full support behind the lo-techs and their falling cars of doom. Get your VCRs ready. I may even start carrying around 80 gigs of divx files in my head, childhood memories be damned.
I also reply below your current threshold.
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
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
through over-regulation.
Theres a massive market for high quality recording off of tv/dvd/hd/whatever. All that legislation like this does is raise the barrier to entry, and thereby cause LESS competition, giving the consumer (fitting word in this example) less of an option.
Besides, if/when it becomes widely known that you cant record your favorite sports game/movie/whatever with these new tools, people simply wont purchase them, and will stick with their old equipment.
And when that happens, theyll blame "piracy."
no
... until the UN runs the internet!
If they UN ran the internet, the committee would probably be headed by a nation like Tongo seeing how the UN's great wisdom lead to Libya heading up the Human Rights committee.
The second dark age will not be caused by organized religion, but by the "content" industries and those politicians that deliberately or unwittingly serve their interests. Their power will come, not from the flawed dogma of authoritarian religion, but from the flawed dogma of intellectual property.
The people pushing this are not creators, in fact, if they really understood creativity they would understand why the whole concept of knowledge as property is so flawed. Walter Elias Disney understood, but those that control today's Disney Corp certainly does not (or just don't care).
The free software movement is a powerful demonstration of why these concepts are flawed, but could be rendered powerless by some of the more potent forms of intellectual property, such as patent law.
We must fight this on the political battlefield, if you haven't contacted your political representatives about this - now is the time.
I have only given the treaty a quick scan, and see no fair use provisions
Article 9
Right of Reproduction
Alternative N
Broadcasting organizations shall enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing the direct or indirect reproduction, in any manner or form, of fixations of their broadcasts.
Alternative O (1) Broadcasting organizations shall have the right to prohibit the reproduction of fixations of their broadcasts. (2) Broadcasting organizations shall enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of their broadcasts from fixations made pursuant to Article 14 when such reproduction would not be permitted by that Article or otherwise made without their authorization.
[End of Article 9]
Article 16
Obligations concerning Technological Measures
(1) Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by broadcasting organizations in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty and that restrict acts, in respect of their broadcasts, that are not authorized or are prohibited by the broadcasting organizations concerned or permitted by law.
Alternative V
(2) In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who: (i) decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal; (ii) receive and distribute or communicate to the public an encrypted program-carrying signal that has been decrypted without the express authorization of the broadcasting organization that emitted it; (iii) participate in the manufacture, importation, sale or any other act that makes available a device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal.
Alternative W (2) [No such provision]
Article 15
Term of Protection
The term of protection to be granted to broadcasting organizations under this Treaty shall last, at least, until the end of a period of 50 years computed from the end of the year in which the broadcasting took place.
[End of Article 15]
Alternative V
(2) In particular, legal remedies shall be provided against those who:
(i) decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal;
(ii) receive and distribute or communicate to the public an encrypted program-carrying signal that has been decrypted without the express authorization of the broadcasting organizatoin that emitted it;
(iii) participate in the manufacture, importation, sale or any other act that makes available a device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal.
so... this means that digital TVs would become illegal. Or, in fact, any device that would allow you to actually watch the encrypted TV, since the proposal is that a device which can decrypt the content under any circumstances (even to watch it) is illegal. Period. No exceptions. Only part (ii) here has an exemption for express authorization by the broadcaster. Part (i) makes it illegal to watch TV if it was encrypted (since you have to decrypt it to watch it) and part (iii) makes it illegal to sell a TV.
Y'know, I'm thinking maybe that isn't what they meant. Isn't overbroad legislation wonderful? :-)
Do we really need this? What will it solve? Television programming is ALREADY copyrighted. By adding this explicity copying restriction then are calling all television viewers CRIMINALS.
Also. This thing needs a new name. Just like DRM's correct name is "Digital Restrictions Management". Calling this a "broadcast flag" isn't descriptive enough to the average person. It needs to be referred to as something else. "Copy prevention flag", etc...
Also, keep in mind, it's really not preventing only copies to be made. It actually prevents you from even making a FIRST GENERATION recording of a live program as well. Guess what, no more timeshifting. TIVO just got a whole lot less useful. No more instant replays of Janet Jackson's boob.
What's going to happen when people start walking around with "personal memory augmenters" that record everything they see and hear for their own personal data mining later on?
Are they going to make such a device illegal because you might wear it to a concert / movie / theme park and then get to play back your experience again later?
What happens when the technology advances so far that it becomes a sort of implant?
When we begin to become practically symbiotic with such a device such that our competitiveness and our daliy lives begin to depend on it more and more, will we still be told by large media organizations what we can and can't re-experience?
When our human memories become fully meshed with technology (which I expect will happen within the next 100 years), where will we draw the line between our rights to re-experience something from memory and the content producer's right to get compensated for repeated experiences?
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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?
Anyone else thinking "you know what? keep your damn content - I'll take on a new hobby, go out enjoy nature, read more books, learn to cook, take up hiking, etc." ? If they're going to these great lengths to protect their content, why not just keep it to themselves? It's like going into the water at the beach. You're afraid you'll miss this crap until you fully do it - disconnect. Then you realize what a fool you've been wasting your non-refundable, one-shot & short life in front of a non-interactive tube.
Must-not-watch TV!
Um, you mean the same Swiss that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II?
i go ld/intro.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/naz
Or how about that whole bit denying insurance payouts to survivors of the holocaust?
Yeah, I think the Swiss would work really well there.
InThane
"If the USA can ignore the UN and attack Iraq, then they can sure as shit ignore the UN for *any* reason."
To be fair, the UN wasn't doing their job with Iraq. The US didn't ignore them, they just couldn't wait any longer. Somehow I doubt that'll take place here, especially if the US's interests are being served.
"Derp de derp."
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
1. They have lost all control of their schedules. With easy, good-quality time-shifting, they can no longer target a particular show for a particular day and time. Counter-programming one show against another is futile.
2. They have to stop people from easily skipping commercials. With any PVR, that's a simple matter of recording a show, and starting to watch it about 20 minutes after it starts.
Instead of adapting to the new reality of the consumer being in charge of their own entertainment, the broadcast networks are forced into these draconian measures.
The first network to use this flag will get a lot of complaints, and lose viewers to the competition. That competition will be most happy to use its lack of the broadcast flag as a major selling point.
Corporate greed created this flag, and that same corporate greed will prevent its widespread use. This whole issue will become a tempest in a TV plot.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
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.
"Note I didn't say that Kerry, Clinton or some other random "Democrat" would have done anything better."
Yes, you are right. I wasn't thinking of you specifically when I wrote that. Sorry for not being clearer about that.
"It just makes me fucking sick when I see guys who still believe that the people who have clawed their way up to the highest leadership positions in the country really care about morals and not just about money and power."
We share agreement here.
" I arrived at the conslusion that the system does not reward people who care about morals all on my own, imagine that."
I agree with you here as well. I don't think the system is encouraging the right people to come by and be president. Wish I knew how to fix it but I'm still chewing on what the actual problem is. I feel that if you have to win by pointing out the faults of your competitors on TV (be they truthful or not), then anybody who campaigns is negatively tainted.
"Derp de derp."
> 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.
To be fair, the UN wasn't doing their job with Iraq. The US didn't ignore them, they just couldn't wait any longer. Somehow I doubt that'll take place here, especially if the US's interests are being served.
The US has done everything it can to make the UN completely ineffective. To use their ineffectiveness as a rationalization for a war that was already decided before the 2000 election is a bit like beating your wife and then rationalizing your visit to a hooker because your wife has ugly bruises on her face. Knowing the whole time you were going to see the hooker anyway.
Bush has abused his position. He should be impeached, tried and removed. Preferably in chains.
It's ironic that one of the most un-American people in the country is the leader of it.
That's right I said it.