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EFF Begins Digital Television Liberation Project
Dozix007 writes "One year from today, on July 1, 2005, an FCC
regulation known as the
Broadcast Flag will lock up your digital television signals. But EFF's
"DTV Liberation Project"
aims to help the public keep over-the-air
programming free. The Broadcast Flag, which places copy controls on DTV
signals, attempts to stop people from making digitally-perfect copies
of television shows and redistributing them. It also stops people from
making perfectly legitimate personal copies of broadcasts. More
disturbing, the Broadcast Flag will outlaw the import and manufacture
of a whole host of personal video recorders (PVRs), TiVo-like devices
that send DTV signals into a computer for backup, editing and playback.
After the Broadcast Flag regulations go into effect, all PVR
technologies must be Flag-compliant and 'robust' against user
modification -- and that means, once again, that the entertainment
industry is trying to tell you what you can do with your own machines."
Our right to fair use has ended. The conglomorates have convinced the dumbasses in the world that they have no right to fair use and the dumbasses are starting to believe them.
It would seem that the lawmakers are dumbasses too but unfortunately for us they are getting paid to make desicions that benefit the conglomorates.
Do NOT support law makers that support these corporations and do NOT support companies that sell devices with the broadcast flag. While we will likely NOT win please do you best to educate the rest of the dumbasses to their rights that they are slowly losing.
Seems to me that they are spending more money developing all these technologies than they stand to gain by knocking out piracy. I mean, you average Joe probably isn't going to go to the internet to look for his favorite show that just came out on DVD. Most times I won't either, if it's worth watching, it's worth supporting, esp. if they throw in lots of extras like commentaries and whatnot. Are they worried that people will pirate sportscasts? What is the fun of watching a game that has already been played? Chances are the people trading these would not be buying a copy anyway, so I think they are managing to piss off consumers and lose money simulatneously.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Yes but once you buy that content it becomes YOUR content (not in the IP sense) and you should be free to do with it as you wish (for personal use of course). We actually have laws in place to ensure that we have the right to make personal copies and this would eliminate that right.
but we *used to* have the right to take their content and record it for our own use (such as watching it at a later time when it was conveinient for us).
While they own the content and we are unable to redistribute it as our own or for profit we are able to use it the way we want to.
I wouldn't worry too much. There are about 100,000 of us in the world that even know about this. When non-techie folks find out what it means, the industry will suddenly tank and content producers will demand that the broadcast flag go away.
I hope.
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
Distributed yes.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Two things: it is telling you what you can do with your machine leading to all sorts of annoyances (and disasters) with stupid hardware and programs that prevent entirely legitimate use.
Secondly, I don't like a world in which content users have so much power over the potential uses of their content. It stifles innovation and creativity and leaves culture locked up in the hands of those who want us to pay every time.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I don't see what the problem is ... it is the originators of the broadcasts who own that material. The term copy-right means that they have a right to control who can get a copy of whatever has a copy-right attached to it.
What's egregious is that the entertainment companies (TV, music, movie, etc) were warned 20+ years ago that the rise of digital devices would lead to problems around their copyrights. That the digital devices would create a situation where perfect copies of their copyrighted material could be made quickly and cheaply. 20+ years ago. And, did they do anything? No, they sat on their thumbs ignoring the warnings until it (Napster, etc) nearly killed them. Stupid idiots.
But the existance of Napster and friends does not negate the validity of the idea of copy-rights. Neither does the existance of digital media. It just changes the playing field. And rather than learn how to exploit the easy copyability, the entertainment industry is throwing up roadblocks. More stupidity on their part.
e.g. it would be way cool if they distributed their entertainment products in digital files over the Internet that automagically provoked the recipient to pay a few cents to their coffers. That would exploit easy copyability, while hewing to copy-rights.
This kind of restriction seems pointless to me. The casual user who wants to copy a show/film for a friend to see will use VCR type recording anyway. The only people who will want to redistribute the digital signal will be criminals who - not being well known as maintainers of laws - are likely to have outlawed equipment.
All in all the only people this will harm are the legitimate paying customers. How long can a business model last that pisses of the people who pay the wages?
This is pretty much the case with all copy protection... The true criminals are always going to be sophisticated enough to break whatever protections are in place. It is always the normal, law-abiding citizens that get inconvenienced the most by stuff like this. If these companies were truly worried about piracy they would be going after the major piracy rings which, I might add, are not all that difficult to find even for a normal citizen let alone a law enforcement agency. It is a truly sad state of affairs.
I give it two to three years, max. it's inevitable. nothing anyone, including slashdot and the eff, can do about it. get ready for a new class of TV criminals.
"what are you in prison for?"
"I recorded a TV show illegally."
just a matter of time.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
TV rots your mind. If you can't copy it, good!
The last thing you need is a recorded TV show.
But that(selling your own, without broadcast flag compliance) would be illegal. And you would face fines and jail time, for what? For distributing something that you made that's capable of recording content that you paid to watch.
If all news stations used this flag (After all, it is THEIR intellectual property), it would be soo much easier for - oh, for example - state leaders to smooth over earlier statements that might have been slightly wrong.
Not that it is shown that often anyway, but images like those of Mr. Powell in front of the U.N. pointing at satellite photos would be available for replay by a lot less people (The news stations, national archives, etc.). Right now you see some debate about who said what at what point. Using Patriot($nr) to stop stations from sending (and stopping from telling they are not sending) a certain case is not that unthinkable. Those amateur documentary makers on both the right and left side of the fence (Check e.g. suprnova for 9-11 related amateur documentaries) will not have much content to use.
If stopping certain content from surfacing again is just a matter of limiting a few companies and organizations, we might even start doubting things we knew happened.
Funny. Reminds me of a book I once read.
And yes, yes, turban of tinfoil and all that, don't give me that bullshit. If I said three years ago that law agencies some time in the future will be able to get lists of who-reads-what from libraries in secrecy, you would laugh and ask me to stay off those late night X-Files reruns.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I've quit buying any kind of digital entertainment. Only entertainment i buy is comic books.
Of course, what will the "entertainment" industry say when their sales drop thanks to boycotts?
They'll say: "Pirates!"
Then they'll sue. And the circle is closed.
People won't want it, once they find out what has been foisted on them, once they run into ever more problems taping shows and using their Tivos, and they will find alternate entertainment. People may be sheep, but if sheep find the gate to the stream locked, they will eventually find another gate or another stream. Then the MPAA and RIAA and Disney and even the various Senators from Disney will find themselves leading where no one is following. They can lock their lowest common denominator crap up all they want because no one will want it.
Infuriate left and right
Piracy is not an issue any more than it has been in the past. The dirty secret is that most people really don't care. They know it's wrong, or just want to avoid the dirty feel of it.
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Why do all of this then?
Control. This is the primary issue. It is not about dollars, though they stand to make a bunch of them if we cannot easily archive things.
If we cannot easily produce and distribute our own content, they will continue to profit from being the only ones to do so. Today it is possible to make music on your own, distribute it and perform it, with results on par with the big productions. This is quickly becoming true for movies as well.
What happens when we start enjoying our own stories and music again? The megamedia corps lose plain 'n simple. Prior to the electronic age, this is how things were. I believe we are headed back that direction, if they don't suppress the movement first via legal and technological means.
Think about governments too. Don't you just love what Michael Moore has recently done with F911. How about when people call their leaders in their lies and manupulations and bad calls with actual published proof. Controlling what gets recorded and what does not puts the megamedia companies in control of our culture, expression and access to recent history.
All of these things limit the voice of dissent. All of these things make it easier for those in a position to govern to do so without the proper checks and balances.
There is a growing movement toward both openness and closedness in our society today. It it beginning to trancend the technology issues. Make no mistake, dollars are behind it, but control is at the root.
I own a ton of DVD media. As far as I am concerned, DVD is pretty damn open, just like CD is. In a short time, DVD authoring tools based on open software will be perfectly useable. The megamediacorps are looking *hard* to prevent this mistake from happening again.
They will continue their attempts at legal means to close the door for us until they succeed in getting a platform to profit from. They will never stop because they know their longer term days are numbered due to increasingly powerful technology solutions being delivered to the masses.
If this flag is not neutered, they will lock open technologies out of the next round of hardware developments. If that happens, we all begin to lose our freedom of expression and basic rights to control our own computing environments. Look at DVD. CSS was not a big deal. I play media on Linux every day because its easy and it works. Why don't the distros put in DVD support? Because of legal entanglements. Look at cell phones and how content is handled there. I wrote this:
http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&n
[google search for "Closed Computing a Future Look Today" if the link is too mangled.]
Coming to hardware near you simply because they think they can.
This flag will prevent us from easily building our own solutions. Now the geeks will continue to do what they do and will likely be affected little, if at all, but they will never be able to compete with the established interests.
Why not? Every last one of these established interests was started by some geeks in a garage. All of them know their demise is cooking in a garage near you. Rather than compete, they would kill the innovation we all deserve.
Sucks doesn't it?
Get pissed, donate to the EFF, write your leaders, tell your friends and buy open technology. Work hard to understand the differences between open and closed. --You will be glad you did.
Blogging because I can...
They bought out politicians.
Another reason why we need to stop campaign contributions from big business.
You can almost be certain that some little Chinese manufacturer(s) will produce some little PVR device or even a PCI card that has some secret backdoor (up, down, left, right, hold down B and press start) that will make the device ignore the flag. All it takes is a couple of these devices to make it into the US or Canada or where ever and CSI.NewYork.2x06-1080i.avi.torrent will be available to everyone and their grandma.
Or the other situation that is just as likely is Hauppauge releases their PVR-550 or whatever and some dude(tte) with a hex editor "fixes" the firmware that is loaded when the driver loads.
It's pointless.
Ask the folks at Coors or Smith & Wesson. In those boycotts, people just bought other brands of beer and guns. In the case of DRM, an entire industry has to be targeted. While it is hard to boycott a necessity like gasoline or electricity, digital entertainment is a sitting duck for this type of strategy. It's time to speak to the MPAA & RIAA using a language they understand.
We long ago moved from the model of buying media with a recording on it under the assumption we owned both the object and the right to do anything we wanted with the recording that the law allowed. Now we only buy an option to listen to a song, watch a movie, play a game, or even use an application at the copyright owner's discression. Consumers of entertainment own less with every new format.
Read books. TV is constantly going down the drain. The quality gets more and more simplified and generalized so anyone can be mildly entertained by it. TV shows and movies cost so much to make that they have to entertain a wide variety of people in order to pay them off. Books on the other hand are usually written by one person. A tiny fraction of a cost compared to a movie, so books only need to be targeted towards a tiny amount of people to pay them off. I'm sure many people here have a show that didn't stay on the air long because of poor ratings. Extremely entertaining to you, but not generally entertaining to the average person. Farscape anyone?
Movies are mildly entertaining to a large group of people while books are extremely entertaining to the niche market they cater to. Plus no one says when I can read, how many times I'm allowed to read it and if anyone is allowed to borrow it.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
It stifles innovation and creativity
In what way? What about a do-not-copy flag inhibits your ability to create, and send out all the copies you like without the flag? After all, nothing about the flag prohibits you from placing your work in the public domain, and nothing requires you to master media with a do-not-copy bit set.
Oh, that's right. You can't create. You just want to copy some else's creativity and innovation without paying them for it.
When said content producers alter the law in order to make it impossible for open source software to be used in PVRs and make decent homebrew PVRs all but impossible to make, then they are telling me what I can do with my own hardware.
He doesn't mean just the broadcast-flag.
Think for a while of what the only perfect copy protection ever is. It's to prevent anyone from recording music, be it their own, or someone else's.
You can always copy by recording, even without the analog hole or whatever you want to call it.
By preventing anyone from recording music/whatever without a certain entity's permission, you're not only preventing piracy, you're also preventing anyone else from creating and publishing music except for the few who have the legal right to record.
This would mean that, besides playing gigs, getting signed would be the only way for a band to spread their music around, because obviously the record companies would be the only "trustworthy" enough entity (for the government) to hold the rights to recording.
No i don't like that idea for a future either.
I'm tired of hearing the "It's THEIR property, if you don't LIKE it, don't BUY it, it's not your ENTITLEMENT to free entertainment," et.al. argument.
What these Joe Public (and even Joe Slashdot) morons don't grasp is that yes, it IS our property! When someone writes/sings/films/programs something, it IS THE PROPERTY OF THE PUBLIC.
However, they are given, as an incentive to KEEP creating these useful things, a limited monopoly. This was formed by the Congress, by the will of the people. However, thanks to the media cartels becoming bigger and more influential than the actual voting block, the "limited" part is sent right out the door. So even though the people gave these rights to the content creators, they now find themselves unable to take them away...even though the numbers clearly don't lie (Isn't it like 60 million fileheads in the US?)
The public has lived up to their part, by saying "yes, we'll pay you for these things."
However, those in "the business" haven't lived up to their end of the bargain - eg; releasing control of their works to the public domain in a limited, reasonable period (95+ years ain't it, folks. I don't care how big-media friendly you are, 95 years isn't within "the spirit of the law" by any stretch of the word...)
And human beings DO have an ENTITLEMENT to be entertained and have fun! Music, words, and images belong to ALL of us. They do not belong to any one person. It is certainly right to give incentive and rewards to those who can MANIPULATE these forces, but to say they can do no wrong, simply because it is "theirs" is bullshit, plain and simple.
The roll over to digital will be full of problems, but I doubt the public will view this as a major problem. This isn't going to out law PVRs. It may make it very difficult to dump content from the PVR to a DVD burner. Shows will be time stamped, so they could be locked on a PVR after a period of time. For years to come, many households will be using a DAC device to watch TV on a NTSC set, or getting conversion from a cable box. The cable companies are the ones to watch. They would love to put TIVO out of business so they can push their own devices and Video on Demand.
Forgive me, but I have never heard of a single consumer that has been looking for DRM to be integrated into their tv sets.
Its kinda funny that they're fighting for the adoption of the new HDTV technology and at the same time invent new ways to prevent people from using it. People don't give a shit about the quality of the recording, why do you think people go into theaters with camcorders. All this fear of people making digital perfect copies of TV shows... Who cares!
If Beastie Boys release and get flamed for it, and therefore sales drop - all these genius executives that think that they'll still have a market once they effectively lock everything down.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
We look to the glorious future, the removal of uncertainty, the time when everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. For after all, the "rights" you have are made explicit in law. Anything else is merely "privilege".
Unfortunately, Fair Use permits certain activities as a right, not merely a privilege. So Fair Use must go, we must abolish it. It is rediculous to think that a citizen has the "right" to view a TV show at a time other than the time the producer wishes it to be seen at. The citizen's only "right" in this matter is the right to purchase the products advertised in the show.
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
Good point, I agree. In that case, they are welcome to not use public television frequencies.
All terrestrial digital (that's ATSC for you) broadcasts in Japan have been copy protected since the day they started.
All Satellite (think Dish Network, etc) programming has been copy protected since April 4th 2004.
At least be happy you are living in a country where people can actually complain and make a difference.
There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only.
I don't think they're lying. I think you are just parsing it wrong. If they left out the word "output" after "analog", there would be implied parentheses around "analog or digital", and you'd be correct. Rather, they are saying that there are two kinds of "degraded form": (1) analog outputs (which is inherently degraded), and (2) digital outputs with reduced resolution.
Errr... which are you again? Something of a dichotomy there, no?
And I speak as a person with a DVB-T card in his PC, who has a a nice (and growing) collection of Buffy, Angel, Dr. Who, and, more recently, Stanley Kubrick movies on DVD and/or a local fileserver - all collected, in "perfect" digital quality, from free-to-air digital TV...
No, I don't consider myself a criminal - though, under the laws of my country I undoubtably am - because I don't lend/trade/sell/fileshare them to anyone anymore than I would normally with a bought DVD or VHS recording. Basically, just family, friends, etc.
The EFF is not lying, but the sentence is ambiguous.
Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" or in degraded form: through analog outputs or digital outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels or less--less than 1/4 of HDTV's capability.
The two bolded portions are mutually exclusive.
How many people actualy watch over the air programming? Most over the air programming has deterioated to the least common denominator and saturated with advertising to the point little value is left. I don't even bother with TV any more unless there is someting big on the news that gives it 24 hour coverage such as 9/11 in New York. What good is restriction free if it's mostly infomercials? The Internet has made an end run past the broadcasters. It's truly delivered on the promise of video on demand that network operators have hinted at. Those media PHB's that wanted to protect their content have simply not put it on over the air network TV. That is why Satelite TV and Cable has such a large market penetration. Stuff that used to be on the networks is on pay TV. Free TV is mostly dead. That is why nobody is making true Digital Televisions. Nobody is spending the bucks on a TV to replace their 20 - 25 inch TV. DTV (the true television that includes a digital tuner) is simply not being sold because nobody is willing to pay that much for a set to watch over the air TV. When analog goes away, the rest of us will get the news off the Internet and feed DTV ready monitors from the digital outputs from the cable or satelite box. We are definately not buying digital TV's that can pick up the network 6:00 new off the air.
If you think I'm off base, as I have in the past, and am doing again now, please list a chain store that has a small digital television set in stock. Requirements are it must replace a 20 to 25 inch set (motorhome, mobile home, mom's basement, apartment, & dorm room, dwellers) which includes built in (not DTV ready) DTV tuner. I'm looking for a plug in a UHF yagi antenna and a power cord and get DTV broadcasts. As an added bonus, it shouldn't cost more than double the analog set it replaces. Nobody's spending tons of money to watch over the air broadcasting. There is no value.
Please reply to this post with price, make and model of set, and name of chain carying the DTV in stock. NTSC tuners and home theatre don't count.
The truth shall set you free!
Free market economics and artifical controls when mixed produce unexpected results.
A little history.. There was a government that wanted to raise some revenue. They put a tax on luxery items. The rich can afford it. They budgeted spending the income on their favorite projects. The rich stopped buying yachts from that country. The yacht makers failed as a business.
Shift to today.. Allow content users to change the rules regarding the over the air broadcasts. Good programming migrates to subscription instead of advertiser supported. Cheap to produce content fills the void. (TV today)
Shift to tomorrow.. Allow content producers to protect their content over the air. All content becomes encrypted. Users don't buy many of the much more expensive sets. Advertisers are not reaching the audiance and stop funding content. Over the air broadcasters fold due to lack of viewership or move to web based to increase viewership.
Sorry for the doom and gloom, but I don't see much of a future for over the air programming unless they start releasing good content to attract viewers to attract advertisers. Content producers are simply putting on too many restrictions on content trying to squeeze the last buck out of content. It has strangled the industry.
The truth shall set you free!
GNU Radio
So, if I am interpreting this correctly, in just under a year from now, we can revise that old bumper sticker to read "Ignore your broadcaster."
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (hey, I know it's
If that is true, then one year from now, I will be watching a whole lot less TV. Not that I watch all that much now due to low quality programming.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
The FCC was asked to carve out an exception to the broadcast flag system for public domain programming. But the broadcasters complained and the FCC served its true purpose, to keep corporate america happy.
Thus, broadcasters in the US will have MORE rights over content than even the original copyright holder did!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
An interesting point. Why is it that so-called "intellectual" work should be rewarded forever, while other types of work are rewarded only once? Does someone who builds a house get paid every time someone enters that house? If people who create "IP" want to retire on the earnings of their work, they should invest in retirement funds, like everyone else.