Slashdot Mirror
TiVo Has to Fund Your Local Stadium
Strudelkugel writes "The Washington Post has a truly Kafka-esque article regarding TiVo, the broadcast flag, the NFL and limited file sharing. "TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It's asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature -- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the Internet to nine other people." Just wait until your read the rest of the story..." This one is actually really worth a read to see just how bizarrely corrupt this all is. Enjoy.
This article really highlights just how out-of-control the broadcast flag has become. As an owner of the HR10-250, the high definition Directivo, I wonder if this $1000 box will become worthless next July?
My favorite part of the article is the bit about going to Congress to get ligislation enacted to get rid of or disable analog outputs. That single line pretty much sums up (in my view) just how out of control this broadcast flag has gotten.
I'm tired of this. Stop restricting information flow with legal means. Stop having copyrights and patents. If people want to keep secrets, let them encrypt their data. If people want to hack that encryption, let them try.
It's a ridiculously tiny jump from freedom of speech to freedom of information. The only reason it seems like a big jump to having no copyrights is that, although we're far better off than some parts of the world, we don't REALLY have free speech.
Bottom line: if they want the TV revenue, let them take the risks associated with having it out there. As the article says, at this point an online viewer would be lucky to watch the game by the next day anyway, and who knows? Maybe this kind of exposure would draw in MORE fans and let them sell out MORE games. Maybe.
Of course, they'll be banking on the fact that relatively few people will stick to such technologies, but it only takes one person with a linux-based PVR and a copy of gtk-gnutella to totally screw the pooch.
And what happens when your capture card in that PC dies? Any new one you buy will have to honour the broadcast flag. The Broadcast flag isn't an over-night fix, but 20 years from now when all the hardware that doesn't support the broadcast flag has died, it will reign supreme - except of course for the foreign hardware that illegally trickles in from places that are not the land of the 'free' thus are not mandated to provide broadcast flag censorship.
n the case of literature and the like this is intended to keep publishers from printing copies without paying the authors, for a limited time. ...
If you want to make such a change, you need to amend the consititution.
That's a really tough road to hoe.
Especially if it is paved with asphalt. Really, that's "tough row to hoe" as in "row of corn."
I think it was Valenti who was quoted as saying that he wants to define "limited time" as "forever" but since his lawyers told him that's not possible, he'll settle for "forever minus a day."
But, just as the copyright industry is "legally hacking" the provision, we could do the same thing (if we had the power to get an amendment in place, we certainly would have the enough power to do the following) -- define "limited time" to the first 10 seconds after publication.
The difference between Valenti's absurdity and my apparent absurdity is that his position is akin to eating his own feedcorn -- by destroying the public domain, eventually there will be no raw material to draw on as a basis for new creations, everything will require licensing and royalties and you can be certain that as soon as there is no longer any "free" competition for raw material, the cost of the not-free stuff will skyrocket.
Meanwhile, my proposal still leaves open plenty of room for artists to make money. Not distributors and the other types of middlemen who make up the copyright induistry and only serve as bottlenecks today, there is no room for them to make much money, certainly not the gazillions that they do today. But the artists, the actual creators of the work can still get paid and even paid well if they are successful by implementing the idea of escrowed release to the public domain. Essentially, they set a total price for their work, interested buyers pay into an escrowed account. Once the total meets the price (or the seller lower his asking price), the work is released to the public domain. Artists who create popular work will be able to fetch successively higher prices for each new release.
One might argue that under such a scheme it is impossible to get started in the first place since no one will know the quality of your work. My response is that under today's system so many artists work for next to nothing all of their lives that simply releasing a few pieces of work for free as advertising is effectively no different than the way things work today and provides a much higher probability of achieving some level of success in the long run.
Perhaps a simpler, more catchy way to say "escrowed release to the public domain" would be - "work once, paid once (just like everybody else)."
PS, googling for "streetperformer protocol" will turn up a white paper or two describing one form of escrowed release to the public domain.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You forget the car companies. People always rail against Amtrak and the airlines for being subsidized by the government. They complain these businesses shouldn't receive subisdies and should stay afloat on there own. However they ignore by FAR the biggest transportation subsidies go towards the automotive transport systems. Rail companies are expected to build and maintain track yet how many roads have Ford and GM built? If the government spent even a small percentage of what it spends on roads on rail and transit systems that would be much more efficient, less polluting and far less dangerous
STOP ROCK VIDEO
Why should it be any different for football and basketball players?
Professional sports leagues shouldn't use our university system as their minor leagues. They should establish universities that grant degrees in football, basketball, whatever. Sort of like a trade school. You would attend, and work on your degree in football. Get your B.S.football or B.S.basketball, and enter the league. No taking up space at a university praying to be drafted before you graduate.
I, for one, would asume the risk of a "drug dealer" in importing it (from freer countries) and selling it.
If TC becomes reality, there won't be freer countries. Everything in the WTO will be required to build TC hardware only. Everyplace else that manufactures flexible computers will be threatened by the USA with supporting economic terrorism.