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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?"
As I recall in the recent past, a well-known seller tried to limit viewing of movies by introducing the Divx technology whereby, the machine would connect to a server to get a key to view. Now if Replay or Tivo try this then there will be a backlash from the consumer. What would be ironic is if one of these PVR manufactures goes bully up than I suspect that the software community will pickup the fragments and produce code to do whatever the original community want.
On a side note, I watch a video program on my PVR from PBS that was for educational instructional use and it had a disclaimer at the beginning stating that copies could be used up until 2006 or so. I don't have any intent on keeping the program that long but why should I depend on a 3 party source to keep and maintain material. A distributed system where PVR owners share programs is just about to become a rally by certain. This peeves me - the thing that manufactures/groups worry about the most is usually good for them and the consumer.
To sum the two paragraphs together: the video material should be in an inter-dispersed local (PVRs) and not limited because of popularity (Fair use). In fact the material should only survive if it is popular enough to be wanted/distributed from enough people wanting to exchange the information - If no one wants it then it would disappear.
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: "We offer 1.5 times the PPV time-limit over our competitor.") 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.
Take control, this is yet another reason to dump TV entirely and download what you want to watch.
Sorry, it's Friday, I'm in RantMode and I have First Damn Post.
Trolling is a art,
Enjoy!
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
That's crap!
Not that the story is wrong, but the idea is bullshit.
I have a TiVo and I upgraded it with a 140Gb drive, so I get over 100hrs of storage. I use it in exactly the way they should want someone to. I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap. Now that I have a TiVo, I can watch good shows.
We'll use their example of '6 feet under'. I may not get a chance to watch it til a week later. Should I miss the episode because they decided to set an arbitrary limit to how long I can keep it stored? What if I'm out of town for work for a week? Can't I come home, and catch up on the episodes that I missed. Yes, this has happened more than once, and it's *REALLY* nice that I can do it.
I haven't seen any black market shops selling '6 feet under' episodes recorded with TiVo.
How about PPV movies? My girlfriend has watched movies, and recorded them (on the TiVo). I may sit down a week or two later, and watch that movie. Fair use. The household paid for it. Or more like, *I* paid for it. If we had been home at the same time, we would have watched together. So if this goes through, now she'll see the movie or show, and I'll be out of luck?
They're not afraid of piracy, they're looking at possible revenue that they're missing. They could possibly get an extra PPV viewing fee because I would possibly buy it twice. Well, that's wrong, I wouldn't. I won't pay twice, I just won't watch it til it comes out on HBO and I happen to be sitting there.
As for '6 feet under', I actually was into that show in the first few seasons. I didn't have a TiVo, but my schedule permitted me to be at home to watch it. At the time, I didn't own a TiVo. My work schedule changed, and I missed several episodes, and was lost about the story line when I tried to start watching again. If I had a TiVo then, I could have spent some time catching up on old episodes, and still been interested in the series. Now that's a show I simply don't watch. It's a waste of their broadcasting time, because I don't know what's happened previously.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And if I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the two companies are both trying to make their restriction mechanisms as easily-breakable as possible. Think about it - if you had to choose between a TiVo and ReplayTV device, and a crack was only available (or at least only easily installed) for the TiVo, which one would you buy?
This space intentionally left blank.
First, can you still pull that content off your Tivo/ReplayTV and put it on something else? Yes.
Second, is the time limit as long/longer than a rental? I tend to look at this service as a replacement for going to my neighborhood video rental store. Is the quality, price, rental time limit, etc. comparable? If so, and it removes the hassle of driving out to the store, plus finding a movie that's actually in stock, then it sounds like a great deal to me.
What fair use rights are being eroded when you rent a movie for the night and return it the next day?
I haven't seen a single advantage to PPV. The movies that I see available on DirecTV have already been out in the movie store for over a month (ie Starsky and Hutch). I pay less at the video store and I get to keep the movie for 5 days...
So what advantage does a $4.00 movie via PPV (plus additional fees that they might charge) have?
Let me know when I can purchase DVDs over my Tivo and have a tangible piece of media to store it for life that doesn't take up my TV recording space and I'll be interested. Until then it's just another Divx knockoff that's going to die because no one cares.
Their argument for this is bogus. If they think pay-per-view is cutting into the videotape rentals that they so bitterly opposed (you should check out the problems blockbuster had when they first started up), then they should charge more for pay-per-view. It seems like everytime a technological advance comes along, the MPAA has to be dragged kicking and screaming....into a big pile of money. I wish they would stop their whining.
If they really want to get serious about this, it's obvious that they should be working on limiting how long people are allowed to remember the intellectual property they've consumed, much less how long they are allowed to keep it available.
I know that if I were still in the driver's seat, I would be ordering up plans on how to reliably blank the memories of the stinking mass of sheeple that suck the generous teat of mass media. Not only would it allow us to sell the same thing over and over, none of you bastards would even remember enough to care about 'fair use' and all that malarky. sheesh.
signed,
Ted Turner
It's perfectly fair. I just won't buy from them.
Feel free to continue to practice your Fair Use Rights by using DVArchive (or whatever equivalents are out for TiVo. Or buy some OTHER company's PVR. Or find out how to hack the feature back into the units. Or build a homebrew PVR using Freevo, Myth, Sage, etc.
Consumers still have a ton of options. This is just two corporations making a dumb decision--nothing to see!
> This is akin to renting a movie from Blockbuster...
When you rent a movie, you have taken one physical copy out of circulation. That's not the case if you tape a PPV movie/event.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I can't see this argument working well with the current crop of TiVo subscribers, who are used to retaining content for as long as they'd like. With the current TiVo boxes, you can even record off DVD (i.e. rentals) to your TiVo, and watch them as much as you'd like, since the recorder recognizes the Macrovision on the way in, and re-establishes it on output (so you couldn't make a VHS dub of the recorded DVD). I know of quite a few TiVo users that do this, and I can't see them liking losing this functionality. I know I'd be unhappy with this restriction, losing the content in as little as 24 hours.
Copies of Max Headroom, Alf cartoons, Animaniacs, coverage of Gulf War, etc. all will go when the VHS tapes they are on finally decay.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Sounds like a feature to me.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Instead of, say, limiting the length of time it can be stored, why don't they make it so that (1) once play has started, it must be completed within 48 hours, and (2) once it's finished playing, the file erases itself.
Let the TiVo store unplayed content for an infinite length of time -- but put strict limits on it once it starts to be *used(
it is intended to allay the piracy and business concerns that prevent the studios from releasing films to cable pay-per-view services on the same day they appear on DVD. Such issues also have made premium cable networks reluctant to offer on-demand services that would allow subscribers to watch any episode of, say, ``Six Feet Under'' they choose, at any time.
What piracy concerns? DVDs are available for download the second they hit store shelves (or days before as is often the case). Having some movie on a Tivo isn't going to increase the level of piracy.
"Business concerns" my ass.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
"How to permanently keep your recorded data"
mythtv-suite
And this is on the precompiled binaries page! How the heck will any non-Linux-geek figure this out?
Someone really needs to compile a MythTV LiveCD (or whatever) that you can just install and run on a PC with suitable video hardware. Having to figure out all this Linux mumbo-jumbo, or worse, compile it yourself, is a recipe for saying "screw it" and going back to TiVo, restrictions or no.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
Well, the Tivo has already been hacked. So, just get your movie from Netflix...then, burn it directly off onto DVD. This would all be digital too wouldn't it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you dislike the terms of the agreement, you are more than welcome to purchase your own copy of the movie and watch it whenever and however many times you wish.
Blockbuster leases you tapes. They don't sell them to you (well, at least the rentals)
Remember, the the original Sony Betamax decision at the Supreme Court didn't say that we were allowed to use VCRs to permanantly archive anything. It said that we had the right to time-shift content we obtained from TV broadcasters.
Therefore, a TiVo really doesn't have the legally established right to have a "Save Until I Delete" feature. Current TiVo devices offer that "green ball" as a keep-forever setting, but that's really in the gray area that we've never seen any court rulings about how legal that is.
So, another chip off the "fair use" tree has fallen away from us, but this wasn't really one that was well established to begin with. At least this is also a dent in the "broadcast flag" that might have marked PPV movies as being in a no-DVR-zone...
Hollywood's view on copyright is pretty unrealistic in my opinion.
When a film is released in cinemas, a large degree of copyright control can be expected by the copyright owner. They can effectivly control the distrobution and showing of the film.
When the film is released on video and DVD, a large degree of copyright control is lost to the holder. They can only loosly control the distrobution and showing of the film. People can buy films and view them whereever they please, and give the DVD to whoever they please. Maybe even copy.
However when a copyright holder makes the decision to broadcast a film to millions of people, over the airwaves, potentially to every human in the contry, and in future perhaps the world, it is fair to say they have abandoned all pretence to copyright control. They have in effect duplicated the film about as many times as it can be duplicated, almost infinitly, and in so doing have made a laughing stock of their grounds of complete control over their copyright.
If you want to use your copyright to broadcast your film all over the airwaves, fine. Just don't expect to keep the same control over it as you did the day before. If you blast your movie into my box, I've got it and possession is nine tenths of the law mate.
It's like an author emailing his book to every inbox on the globe and then complaining when people start printing it out or reading it on their PDAs. Rubbish.
Hollywood has lost its monopoly on the reproduction of media content. Tought luck. Evolve or die, dinasaurs. Don't drag more innovative compnaies like TiVo down with you. the situation in the UK is a little different. Sky+ actually encourages viewers to record TV content. Maybe it's the lack of a Hollywood there?
May the Maths Be with you!
Uhh have you used any of those so-called DVRs? They aren't even remotely close to a Tivo. I understand from a business perspective Tivo is F'ed, but I would never in a million years pay my cable company 5 bucks a month just to save 7 bucks a month over Tivo's cost to get the incomparably worse DVR service.
Its their content. Its their business how they license that content to you.
But the distribution methods are not theirs, this is why they are lobbying to control both content & distribution.
Take baseball, aired on public tv, they block home games, so the content owners can try to make more money, when in fact they are sponsered by the public (for the stadium) and agree to air games.
Regulations worth both ways, there is no reason you have to give content providers a gold ruler, and make everyone else measure up.
If they don't want to follow our standards, they can keep their content off tv. Works both ways.
it is collusion! normally collusion has to do with prices (and sometimes sales territory) rather than features such as this.
But think of this like an economist: reducing features and charging the same price is essentially the same thing as raising the price (go with me on this one). If two companies agree to limit functionality and maintain their prices (or agree to similar prices, or even simply agree on price) then that really is price collusion.
Think about this: Ford and GM executives at one point never even spoke to each other for fear of collusion accusations!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
Your view of intellectual property is flawed. Physical objects can be created or destroyed. They are composed of natural resources. Ideas are natural resources, just like anything else. Creative content is created from ideas, just like physical property is constructed from other resources.
Physical property can be transferred from one person to another. If I give you something physical, I do not have it anymore. If I give you some creative work or idea, I can still give it to others, and I have not lost anything. The idea of "property" does not transfer completely from physical objects to ideas. After understanding these differences, we can now discuss the current legal and economic situation of physical security versus security of intellectual property.
It is my right to protect my physical property through physical security. There are laws which punish those who would violate my physical security, because they will be depriving me of my right to my own property.
Bring this over to intellectual property, and you see that the model no longer fits. It is my right to protect my intellectual property through technical or other security. There are laws which punish those who would violate security on intellectual property, because (???) why? The owner hasn't lost anything but some "right to profit" which is not codified anywhere.
I do not have the right to profit from a flawed business model. The owner of some content wishes to prevent me from doing something which I could do legally, if his security was not in place. When I break his security, the only law I have broken is the "no breaking security" law. This is not equivalent to trespassing or theft, because no crime is being committed, besides "breaking the DMCA."
In the world of physical security, it is illegal to pick the lock on someone else's door without permission, because it serves no legal purpose. Whether you are going to steal from their house or not is immaterial, because there is no other valid reason to pick their lock. In the world of intellectual property, it is now illegal to "pick the lock" on a "protected" file, IN SPITE OF the fact that there are many legal uses, including exercise of my fair use rights.
Copyright in this country was fought bitterly until the idea of fair use rights were created as well. Many years later, the companies with their found copyright powers want to remove our fair use rights through technical security, and expect laws to prevent us from "picking the locks." Do you see my point?
The only loss to the author is the ability to charge me extra for something which I should be allowed to do anyway.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
And I paid them money, so I could have a copy. The government has decided that because I have a copy, it is my right to do certain things with that copy. (Fair use rights.) If I bought it, I may not "own" the copyright, but I certainly own the content to the extent that I should be able to use it however I like.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Actually, I'll bet Porn is driving this.
The price of Porn on PPV is significantly higher than regular movies. According to some friends in the business, the entire PPV business model is based around porn. There's no way they can make a profit based on the random "Let the kids watch some movie they've probably already seen". They just have to offer non-adult programming to make it acceptable to the community.
Since many people are embarrased to buy Porn, even via mail order, they certainly won't go rent it at the local video store. So they use PPV.
By expiring it, they guarantee a revenue stream, compared to letting the viewer record a few dozen shows and repeatedly viewing them.
No mystery here. Move along.
So long as I get to keep the PPV movies for "limited times" as defined by the Supreme Court "justices" that upheld the CTEA, I'm fine with it.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.