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TiVo, ReplayTV Agree to Limits
Grump writes "This story reports that 'The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices.' Is this fair, or erosion of more fair-use rights?"
Enjoy!
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Or in my case, we recorded "24" on our ReplayTV and didn't start watching the second season until we had the whole season. We've had other shows on there over a year because we just hadn't gotten around to watching them. Time limits defeat the whole purpose of a PVR.
Yet another advantage of PPV over video rental: Live events.
You know, those wrestling and boxing matches that are covered by PPV.
The previous sig has been removed due to
Never fear, every episode of Max Headroom but one (and it's coming) is available for download from the Digital Archive Project.
I think perhaps television companies are failing to see the true positives and negatives of these systems. Their true problem is not that people will turn their TIVO into a movie library (hence filling it to the point where they won't have any more space), but that they will skip commercials. The most likely response to this, besides desperate legislation, is to build more and more advertising into the shows themselves. Whether this is a good or bad scenerio, I don't know. It means less time wasted with commercials, but content becoming much more controlled.
The positives of these systems is there is no longer a 'prime time'. Once these systems are wide spread, you can schedule shows at any time, including the middle of the night, and people who want to watch them can.
As for Tivo and Replays "solution" here, well, not being able to keep pay-per-view stuff forever isn't so bad, though I'll stick with my MythTV box which I have total control over. The bad part of this is that this isn't likely to be the only restriction but the start of many restrictions which will further erode the usefulness of these systems, and even worse, the coming of new laws that would likely have made systems like Tivo illegal in the first place if they came a little earlier.
You mean like Knoppmyth?
Never confuse volume with power.
Nah, he or she should just be directed to get a copy of Knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/ and follow the much briefer instructions, as well as any special case instructions by looking at the handi wiki pages that are linked to from there.
You never know...
They have: Knoppmyth at MySettopBox
I do believe it is about as plug and play as you can get.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You obviously do not own a PVR.
I went from sitcoms and reruns to NOVA, Frontline, The Wire, The Sopranos, Dead Like Me and Six Feet Under and tons of the Sundance Channel.
If you think all TV is crap, you just haven't looked for the hidden gems.
As I said in my other reply, the courts have already decided that the MPAA can *not* limit your right time shift. Otherwise, they would have long ago declared that all broadcasts (or at least all cable) were simply licensed.
The Supreme Court has already found that time-shifting is fair use and no amount of "license" agreements have changed this fundamental limit of copyright.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Yes, I do believe it is....they do a 2 kernel monte type trick to keep Tivo central from messing with your mods...you can do pretty much all you want with series 2 that you could do with series 1.
I've not done it yet as I want to get my Myth box running before I crack into the tivo case...but, I've read there is a cd iso you can burn that will do the hack work for you when you upgrade harddrives. I've gotten most all the info needed for hacking tivo, extracting video, etc from here Deal Database Forums
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Fair Use extends beyond archival copies. The copy machines in a library are examples of tools for another kind of fair use--you don't own the books and periodicals, but are free to make copies of small sections for education, reporting news, and research.
"Fair Use" has been popularly applied to the right to record tv shows & keep them. While Title 17 Section 107 doesn't really explicitly grant these rights, the Sony Betamax case and others set a precedent.
There isn't really a black-and-white division as you want, but your current views are conservative compared to most people's ideas of Fair Use (though many slashdotters, including myself, have considerably more Liberal ideas on the subject).
From the article:
I know that in my case, at least, most of these time-limits would prevent me from even being able to transfer to tape. And one of the main reasons I got TiVo was to be able to record over a week's worth of content (either because I'm away or simlpy too busy for TV), so even the longest listed time-limit would render TiVo almost entirely useless for those purposes.
I'd have to cancel my account, but not because I was able to choose something better, but only because they'd effectively shut down their service to me. I paid for a lifetime membership, I'd feel cheated.
I have a ReplayTV and it still has the commercial skip feature...no modifications involved... They cleverly named it the Chapter advance button or something similar, just hitting the right arrow on the remote will advance the "chapters" which just happen to be at the end of the commercial breaks...not flawless but it works.
We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
from the grandparent...
These two competitors have agreed on a completely arbitrary limit for recording PPV shows. Why? Think about it: the PVR market is growing. Rather than focusing on new features for the consumer (ie:...) they've come to an agreement that is good for no one but themselves. There's no way in hell that they just decided to do this, the entire agreement has the fetid stink of collusion.
Get a clue, this "feature" is good for no one but the movie industry. My Tivo already keeps PPV movies as long as a choose to, as does a ReplayTV. It sure as heck isn't good for Tivo/ReplayTV.
They now have to differentiate and tag PPV content vs other content
They have to deal with more support calls ("My show is gone, even though I set Save until I delete")
They get put in a situation where old code/hardware is percieved as "better" than new code/hardware
This isn't collusion, this is concession. And it sucks, because if I use a VCR to record my PPV movies, I face no such restrictions. Fortunately, I don't ever buy PPV movies, but this begins a long slide where soon all content will be forcibly expired off my Tivo because Seinfeld's owners don't want me to watch the "Soup Nazi" episode at will. Which is foolish because the trick of Tivo is that I watch MORE TV now that I can always find something I want to watch, and I'm more likely to fast forward through a show than the commercials, because these days I'm amazed at the amount of crap that fills the "program" time; title segments, recaps, slow pans to establish location, end credits, watching guests walk accross stage and waiting for applause to die down, etc, etc.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
What they took out was the automatic commercial skip feature, while you have to manually hit the advance button (same as Tivo has) my ealier model ReplayTV's automatically skip commercials without me having to do anything at all.
Thats the part they got sued over and had to remove, along with some of the network streaming capabilities.
...I suspect that the software community will pickup the fragments and produce code to do whatever the original community want.
I think it is called MythTV and Freevo
Chop
Note: You'll still need to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to change the refresh rate or you CAN destroy your TV.
I'd say it still needs a little work before releasing it to the unwashed masses...
Have you read my blog lately?
I see this scored funny but I don't know whether that is accurate or not. I think that while this may sound like hyperbole, the fact is this principle is very much in existence already. Ever read the back of tickets for sporting events? "All accounts, descriptions and images of this event are property of..." If enforced, not only could you not take photos, but they own any description you give of the event as well. You wanna tell your buddy about the game? Sorry.
Vote Quimby.