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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.
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.
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.
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.