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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."
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
paintball
"Any devices made this year can be re-sold in the future."
So I can buy a thousand of these and make a killing in a few years when they're illegal?
It's about time for everybody to stand up to those fuckheads at the FCC. They will push and push and push until they get pushed back. They know that people are generally lazy, apathetic, and stupid, and they are going to take advantage of it as much as they can. It is our responsibility to do something about it. Whether it be in spreading information about the FCC's ridiculous plans or volunteering with EFF. The time for action is now.
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?
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
Unless you bought it with the implicit agreement that you wouldn't do X, Y, or Z with it. And you did agree to that, by buying content that has the flag bit.
It's gone further...
last thursday I went to watch the Detroit Tigers play a glood game. the gatekeeper checking my ticket started harassing me about my fancy digital camera... "That doesnt record video does it?" "recording video is stealing"
These SOB's have everyone including the average joe that works the ticket booth at a ballpark that recording is stealing and is as bad or worse than trying to smuggle in a machine gun or bomb.
it will not change until you have a major and almost violent public backlash. having a riot at a ballpark over a stupid policy and having the place burned to the ground or severly damaged MIGHT get the message through to the morons in the executive suite...
but it will not happen, the people that live in this country like to walk in line and say BAAAAAH.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Unless you bought it with the implicit agreement that you wouldn't do X, Y, or Z with it. And you did agree to that, by buying content that has the flag bit.
You're right. Unfortunately this is the direction that we're headed in. Pretty soon all content will be licensed to you. You won't own anything and what you can and can't do with that content will be strictly controlled. Ugh... What a great future we have to look forward to.
but there are devices that you can buy to defeat Macrovision.
My answer to this is, and has always been, "Screw 'em."
I will not pay money to companies that behave in this manner. Many Slashdot readers are vociferous opponents of Microsoft, but they continue to pay money to the media establishment for such things as Spiderman II and cable television.
Perhaps it's time to find ways of entertaining ourselves other than media worship which enriches these gigantic conglomerates.
Is television all that good anyway? I personally have not watched broadcast or cable television with any regularity for 15 years. From 93-01 I did not even own a TV set-- I grudgingly got one to pacify friends who called me deprived because I did not have one, and for a while I actually tried to force myself to sit down and watch the thing, but I couldn't stomach it-- nothing on cable that appealed to me even remotely.
So, if they're going to behave this way, let them behave this way, and leverage all the technology we have at our disposal to support independent media groups. If you have to have Star Trek Voyager, there's always BT.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
seems like a good time to stock up on old hardware. make a killing selling them back to folks who wanna tape the latest version of {reality show x}
"the entertainment industry is trying to tell you what you can do with your own machines."
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Hey There,
I'm the first to admit I'm "legally" challenged.
But I don't think that this is an attempt to tell us what we can do with our machines.
But rather, it is an attempt
to tell people who want to sell goods and services in the public venue
what we as a community will and will not tolerate
if you want to operate in the community.
I think the community has not only the right
but the responsibility
to make these sort of decisions.
Do I "personally" agree with this decision?
No.
But it doesn't limit me as an individual.
Or what I can do with a personal device.
I can create my own personal device that does what ever I wish.
I may not be able to share it with anyone else
but I can create a machine to do what ever I wish.
And given the day and age that we live in,
Give me a computer
A piece of hardware
And I'll write a device driver that does whatever I want it to.
I assume my personal rights would end just before
The distribution of that software.
But I still have rights!
Don't I?
Cheers,
-- The Dude
...this "everyone is a pirate" mentality. I think most people's thinking is "Well, if you're already treating me like one, why not fucking be one?" P2P networks are developing at an enormous pace. Easier, faster, better all around. Anonymity in numbers. Anonymity by design. Trust-based networks. Decentralized networks. Scalable networks.
If there's something similar to "TCO" that is "Total Value of Acquisition", including rights, limitations, legality etc. I'd say bought content is getting lower, while pirated content is getting higher. That can't be good for the RIAA/MPAA...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Your assertion makes about as much sense as saying you have the RIGHT to get on an airplane without a photo ID. You don't. You USED to be able to do it, but your ability to do so in the past wasn't a right, just a privilege.
paintball
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/hdtv-samples. html
Seems to me that they are spending more money developing all these technologies than they stand to gain by knocking out piracy.
I would like to think that you're right, but I think they are just extrapolating from the losses in markets like gaming, where the easy ability to bootleg games basically killed the Dreamcast, and caused publishers to drop support for the Playstation earlier than they would have otherwise.
I'm as big a fan of fair use rights as anyone - I make mix CD-Rs from my legally purchased albums, I've ripped the music from a DVD to make a soundtrack CD when one wasn't available, and one of my hobbies is hacking the Legacy of Kain series of games. None of those things would be possible in a 100% copyright-enforcement society.
On the other hand, I see thousands of people pirating movies, music, and games of all types on a regular basis and wonder how small of a minority I represent. Most of them don't even have the shakey "I can't afford it" alibi - they do it because they *can*, and don't care that they are ripping off the producers and making it less likely for legitimate fair use rights to survive.
Look at something like the HDLoader for the PS2 - it's a pretty cool idea, a product that lets you install your PS2 games to the add-on hard drive to make them load faster and play more smoothly. Only a tiny percentage of gamers are going to use it for that capability though, with the vast majority seeing it as a way to get free games from their friends and the rental store.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
IANAL, but from reading both the EFF webpage and the PDF of the FCC report and order - it would seem that one loophole is for devices sold only intrastate. I would presume that CA would probably ban the manufacture of such devices, but some states may not give a rat's behind about the MPAA.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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's worse than that, as typified by your comment.
We don't have a "right" to fair use. Copyright itself is a limited privilege. Copyright holders have no place telling us what we are and are not allowed to do with their work, beyond copying it. They have no intrinsic right to tell us what to do. Too many people forget this.
corporations aren't too powerful. everyday citizens (the other people...) are too weak.
corporations will fight tooth and nail to not lose any power, but citizens will welcome additional power.
make normal people more capable; don't waste time trying to cut corporations down.
You're missing the point of these new laws. The idea is that it used to cost more to produce an episode of a TV show than the studios paid for it, and so the producer of the show had to sell his copyrights to a studio in order to get them to finance production. The studio would collect advertising revenue to make up for the difference and turn a profit, and then reap much larger profits if the show runs long enough to be worth syndicating after it goes off the air.
The current state of computer technology has reduced the costs of the technical aspects of television production to the point where an episode can be produced for less than the cost the networks pay. This makes it possible for a producer to sell his show directly to a network and keep ownership of his copyrights. In the past, the studios enjoyed a natural monopoly because of the high costs of production, but today's computer technology threatens that monopoly.
The consumer market for camcorders has traditionally been targeted toward things like parents recording their childrens' birthday parties, and the low-cost equipment in this market segment has gotten to the point where it creates broadcast-quality footage. Combine that with cheap PCs that can do decent non-linear editing and decent 3D modelling, and you can put together a low-budget personal studio for a few thousand dollars that can do what ten years ago would have required several million dollars' worth of equipment. You still need talent, of course, but there are plenty of people with talent in the world, and not all of them are contractually bound to a major studio.
All these "piracy" laws being proposed really have nothing to do with file sharing and such; their true intent is to outlaw any possibility of competition for the formerly-natural monopolies.
You can say whatever you want about piracy. Many people say, "Oh, but it is theft to copy blah blah blah," like when they're talking about videotaping something in movie theaters. Yes, it's theft... but what's the bigger theft over here? I say it's the copyright holders being allowed to become my Big Brother, watching my every move like I'm a criminal, deemed guilty until proven innocent, even without a chance to prove myself innocent.
The people who think videotaping a movie in the theater is theft just don't understand that the legislation doesn't stop there. It starts there.
Yesterday, we were at point A. At point A, you could videotape a movie off television to watch it later. I have a few movies that were recorded in this way. And you could also make copies of videotapes if you wanted to, though the copies didn't come out perfectly, but it was ok anyway. Then, the movie industry came up with DVD, and all its stupid region coding and CSS and other bullshit, so while it is possible to make a perfect copy of a movie, they have made it difficult to do. They have put together a system that is deliberately crippled. So now, we're at point B. Next, they're gonna make it so you can't record television, when YOU pay taxes and/or the cable/satellite companies for the priveledge of viewing that shit. So, we'll be at point C. Then, they'll make it impossible to view anything on TV, when you pay your taxes and cable fees, without paying an ADDITIONAL pay-per-view fee, and you won't be able to record it for later use. Then, we'll be at point D. Then, they'll increase the price. And increase it more. And increase it more. Then, we'll be at point E. Then, they'll do like Microsoft and update the television signals every two years, so you have to replace your perfectly good television with a new one, or else you won't be able to watch most broadcasts. Then, we'll be at point F.
Look at the damage that copyright law is doing to our society. Back in the day, when copyright actually EXPIRED after a few years, a lot of good books were published, everything from literature to technical books. For example, you can get a copy of Moby Dick printed by any number of publishers, or you can find it on on project Gutenberg. The author is long gone, who gives a damn if you copy his book. Who would give a damn if you did 20 years after he wrote it... you can't write one book and expect to live off it until the end of your days. What the hell kind of contribution to society is that in exchange for a monopoly on a work? There were also a lot of really good technical books published. They're long out of print, but you can buy brand new copies, actually facsimile copies of the original books, professionally printed and newly bound. These books are PRICELESS. They contain information that you simply cannot find anymore, since automation and computers have taken over a lot of the tasks that were once done by people, very, very smart people who were experts and craftsmen at what they did. Books that explain things like gears. Look in any modern book on gears and you won't find Jack Schitt on how they work or why things are done a certain way. But luckily, their copyright expired ages ago, and the books can be reproduced. What if their copyright had not expired? What if the great great grand children still had rights on that information? I can almost promise you that 99% of those works would have disappeared into oblivion, the copies being damaged, destroyed, or just plain thrown away one by one, until none, or nearly none, were left. And if God forbid anything should happen to the world that will leave us without the technology that does so much for us today, that information, which would
(or, "Toward A DRM Consumer Manifesto")
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1. The Stick . .
No matter what DRM technology they develop and insert into the media play-back chain,
every such chain must eventually terminate in a human-sensible output device (speakers, monitor, etc.). And every such device is vulnerable to having its inputs tapped for recording by an unprotected device.
For the forseeable future, it's impossible for the Watch-Dogs to move the DRM technology so close to the terminating device, as to make it impossible to tap the signal. At worst, they can make it annoying.
In the case of video, they might eventually make it useless for the Little Guy to tap the video cables, and she/he might have to open the monitor's case. But if you're willing to do that, what can the Watch-Dogs do? Move the DRM into the CRT's electron gun? (or the LCD's individual TFTs, or the plasma screen's individual sub-pixel electrodes?)
And audio signals are even harder to protect: will they outlaw the conventional magnet-coil speaker, or maybe outlaw the possession of Crown or Marantz hi-fi equipment which is packaged as separate media-reader + pre-amp + amp?
IMO, the key strategic move for militant consumers (people similar to us) is to get the jump on future legislation and technology, by working NOW to develop tapping devices which are:
(a) so cheap as to be too ubiquitous (and too small) to make it practical to attempt to remove them from public possession;
(b) so generic as to be field-upgradeable from a binary download, as easily as current BIOS chips (so that, when DRM tech advances, there doesn't need to be another effort to distribute the tapping devices);
(c) *plausibly* marketable as being diagnosis / repair eqipment;
(d) capable of capturing (and storing, and replaying) a signal with fidelity and resolution equal to the signal which the terminal device would receive anyway, so that issues of multi-generation signal-degradation are irrelevant.
This sure sounds to me like the archetypal open-source project, surely within the capability of a community with such strong historical ties to phone-phreaks. There could even be "quilting bees", where people gathered to assemble these devices in mass quantities, to be subsequently distributed at nominal cost to all of their friends and family.
(True story: during the Viet-Nam War, the VC taught peasants to de-fuse, disassemble, and convert unexploded USA ordnance into very effective anti-personnel devices, using only simple hand-tools.)
Remember, this community succeeded in making first-class encryption unstoppable and available world-wide.
2. The Carrot . .
is to borrow from the traditions of RIAA broadcast royalties and UK consumer television-set licenses:
institute a system whereby revenue for Content-Creators is collected from taxes on each initial sale of play-back / recording devices and on storage-media. One way of assessing and apportioning the taxes could be from measuring popularity by the Watch-Dogs' sampling of legitimate broadcasts, ticket-sales, etc.
(Of course, in return for this, the RIAA etc. must see to the reversal of all anti-copying technology and legislation.)
Now, I can think of a lot of technological obstacles to The Stick which will be posted by readers of this post, but none which aren't practically and economically surmountable.
The sooner and closer that The Stick approaches reality, the sooner that the Watch-Dogs will view The Carrot as an attractive proposition. And the sooner that all this nonsense will end.
"When multi-meters (oscilloscopes, etc.) are outlawed, only outlaws will have multi-meters."
one of the fundamental rules of common law is if you let someone do something for too long withount complaining, you loose your right to complain about it.
Trademarks are this way: If you do not defend your trademark you lose it.
Homestead Rights are also this way: If you've conspicuously lived on land long enough and nobody complained, you now own that land.
And finaly, Common Law marrage is this way: If you've lived together for long enough, the woman you are living with IS your wife.
So yes, if people have been doing something for a long time, it is THEIR RIGHT to continue doing it.
Maybe you'd like to go back to the 16th century where kings made up laws on the fly to get rid of any person or situation they didn't like.
Unfortunately, this appears like the one of the only sensible solutions to piracy. Current technology allows the user to make perfect, redistributable copies. This is quite a major problem considering that media costs money to create.
This is a serious problem that needs to be resolved, without restricting the user's use of their computer/tivo/etc. Basically, someone needs to come up with a fair solution to the rampant piracy that is so common today.
Nope, piracy will solve itself once somebody comes up with a solution to the problem in the signature below. Most people feel no moral obligation to take piracy seriously when IP law gives away such ridiculous, unfair advantage to oligopoly players.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Now, without repealing the First Amendment, I am no longer permitted ownership of the work I have purchased, not even the copying of that work, not even the ability to copy for my own archives, for fear that I might distribute my archive without permission.
This, I think, means I am no longer permitted to own certain sorts of Presses. Henceforth, I will do as I'm told, and only as I'm told, by officially approved authority, as defined in the officially approved Press. So much for the First Amendment.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001