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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.
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.
Peter wants a new vcr for Christmas because of what happened to his old one.
They flashback to Peter standing by his tv with a football game on and pushes a button on his vcr, then cops come busting through the door and ask if he has permission from both CBS and the NFL. Peter sheepishly admits that he only has permission from the NFL, and the police then proceed to destroy his VCR.
Truth is stranger than fiction it seems
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, it doesn't!
Copyright means that they have the right to control who makes copies, not whoever can get a copy! Otherwise I couldn't sell the copy that I have, nor could I even throw it away!
Title 17, thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, means that the only thing they can control about the copy that they sell is the sale, and that's it. After first sale, they can't control anything about that copy. (They can of course prevent the sale of any copies of that copy, but you are absolutely allowed to make at least one archival copy of the copy that you purchase.)
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.
I am always allowed to make one archival copy of any copyrighted object that I purchase, regardless of what Nintendo tries to tell me, and they cannot charge me for making a copy. They have no standing to. Not being a lawyer, I'm not sure if I can make an archival copy of that copy if the first is destroyed, but I'd imagine so.
I disagree. If they hadn't suborned congress, then I would agree with you, but starting with the "Mickey Mouse protection act" the media companies have induced the congress to pass laws in violation of the general welfare and not otherwise authorized by the constitution. And I don't care what blather the supreme court uses to justify their bending the knee to to media companies.
At this point I feel that nearly anything which is done to damage, or even inconvenience them is laudible. What I'd really like is to get all their managers and lawyers thrown in jail...and not a country club either. Well, this won't happen. The law is too corrupt. And since the "law" won't act, I won't condemn anyone else who does. I may think them foolhardy, but I won't condemn them.
The corruption of the congress, the presidency, and of the courts should be considered a crime on the level of treason. As such, anyone who comits such a crime should pay an extravagant penalty. And when a company does so, not only should the company be attained, but also the decision making officers and those who implemented the decision. And those managers or directors who approved it. In many ways it's a far worse crime of treason than a soldier deserting in the face of the enemy. And it deserves a harsher penalty.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
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.
"How else can I help the EFF," you ask? 30% of the profits from book purchases at No Starch Press (when follow the link from the EFF's website) are donated back to the EFF.
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.
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.
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!
While I doubt anyone will read this due to the lateness of this post, I still must do so.
Lemme just say first... I am something of an expert on digital television... it is my job.
Digital TV is for the most part based on the ATSC standard, which in turn is based on the ISO/IEC 13818-1 standard (AKA "Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information: Systems".
Our enemy though, is the "Redistribution Control" As defined in ATSC Standard A/65B, now for a quick overview...
Within 13818, a stream of data (the transport stream is made up of packets who's length is always 188 bytes, within the first 4 bytes of the transport packet there is a field known as the PID which helps a decoder to know what is in a stream.
100 dollars worth of hardware could easily build a part which would demodulate an 8vsb signal on one end and pass the contained transport stream into a FPGA for instance who's sole job would be to do basic processing of the transport stream's EIT's to see what PID carry's the Redistribution Control (RC). Once the PID is detected, locating packets which carry it would be a simple task. Finally, once a packet is found to be carrying an RC, the FPGA would restamp the PID of the packet to 1FFF (the PID of a null packet who's payload is ignored by the decoder) then finally pass the stream to a modulator which would create the signal your decoder would receive and bada bing bada boom! No more Redistribution Control!
Sad thing is... I work with hardware everyday which would be capable of doing this... but even with my employee discount it's still far out of my price range. Of course such a device (as described above) would be illegal as it's only real use would be to bypass a copy control mechanism.
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