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Preparing for the Broadcast Flag?
Couch Potato asks: "I'm worried that, come next July, the FCC mandated broadcast flag will soon take away all sorts of fair use rights I have long enjoyed. Given that there are only a few months left to make purchasing decisions, how best can one prepare for the advent of the broadcast flag?"
"I'm somewhat aware of projects like Myth TV, but it's not all that I want. Specifically, I want to make sure that I can record DVDs or similar files of any program I want off of cable, sattelite or broadcast TV, flag or not and without any other encumbering restrictions (such as the Macrovision DRM for DVDs) and without worry that someday they'll change something so that my old drivers and hardware are suddenly obsolete and useless when faced with updates to the formats. Note that this makes closed-source-only drivers an issue, because assuming the hardware can still be adapted to whatever they change on us, open-sources drivers can be modified and closed-source ones probably won't be, whether for legal or practical considerations. So then, what can someone with a modest budget do to make sure that their constitutional fair use rights don't succumb to planned obsolecense, like the VCR has?"
Hey, the FCC is an arm of the people you helped to elect. If you have a problem with what they're doing, you can either challenge their decisions in court (assuming that someone isn't already) or get people fired up to fight. What people fail to realize (assuming they're smart enough to realize when their corporate government is in the process of screwing them, anyway) is that they still have to elect congresscritters. If people really care about the issue, you can whip them into a frenzy and threaten the re-election prospect of the fat cats from your district.
If people don't care? Well, it's like the music industry's continued assault on aural quality. Too fucking bad. People are free to do as they will, and that includes fucking themselves over if they so choose.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Can't you just by cards made offshore that will not honor the broadcast flag? If there is a market someone will build them.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Move to Canada!
/ducks
Chris
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
like any other type of restrictive technology, 95% of the people won't care, the other 5% of us folks will find cheap and easy ways around it. Yeah it won't be legal, but the cops only care if you are selling them or distributing them in large quantities (on the internets).
Nothing different anti-CD copying measures, anti VHS copying measures, anti video-game copying measures, and so on.
Nothing new here, move along
" Given that there are only a few months left to make purchasing decisions, how best can one prepare for the advent of the broadcast flag?""
Not worry about it.
1-I doubt it's going to be widely available come July.
2-It's a bad idea that's going to quickly be realized as a bad idea.
I doubt it's going to last long, especially for programming people pay for.
As with all laws, the authority comes from elected officials. So i recommend that you purchase an elected official. You can probably get one cheaper than you think.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
the OP is trying to stay within the law.
Your assesment is kinda wrong.
You've never experienced things like a state tax filing amnesty? librariers that have fine amnesty?
never heard of realtors trying to close deals before laws change so they can be grandfathered in and legal?
the Question is,
"HOW BEST CAN I PREPARE MYSELF FOR SOMETHING THAT IS LEGAL"
not, how can I circumvent the law.
the advice being sought is in fact, ON THE SIDE OF LAW and wholly valid, I'm glad to see the topic, I was thinking about snapping up some hardware myself.
As I understand it- and I'd LOVE to be courteously corrected, the law only applies to products moved across state lines (or into the country) so a product manufactured, marketed and sold in the same US state, is actually still a possibility.
(fabrication facilitys then needing to be built in each state of course)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Sure, you can stock up on pre-broadcast flag HDTV cards, and you can do all sorts of other tricks, but to do what you talk of for long-term goals, you're gonna need to work from the inside of the "system". Like others have said, big companies can spend all they want on re-election campaigns, but they still get elected by those who vote.
What most people forget about American democracy is that it is designed to work well in facilitating peaceful revolutions- when people care and vote. The blame for the sorry state the American government is in lies with nobody save every last American citizen who is currently enfranchised (older than 18, etc.). And I write this as an American citizen.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
Once the broadcast flag becomes standard, can't the FCC be sued for violating the Supreme Court order mandating fair use in the Sony Betamax case? It would seem to be a slam-dunk of this argument is used.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Can't you just by cards made offshore that will not honor the broadcast flag? If there is a market someone will build them.
And this is why any attempt to controll how an end user uses media will fail. The whole system will work as long as everyone plays ball. As soon as you have somebody that realizes they can make a better product by simply ignoring DMR/Broadcast flages/whatever, they will have 'built a better mousetrap'. And since implimenting copy protection takes extra effort, the product without it will cost the manufacturer/consumer less than other products.
And the best part is, if all the companies get together and conspire to squeeze out anyone who doesn't play ball, we just start filing anti-trust suits, and let the government dismantle them.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Problem being, too many americans are too busy watching their spoon-fed share of culture on TV to care what happens, as long as the crap keeps showing up on their bigscreen they're fat and happy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm amazed at how many people think that simply not watching TV is any sort of solution.
Broadcast flags are utterly evil for two reasons.
First, they are contrary to our fair use rights to record programming via Universal v. Sony.
Second, they create perpetual copyrights. Under the current rules, broadcasters will even be able to stop recording of public domain programming. Why do broadcasters get greater rights than the creator?! That makes no sense. And what's so hard to understand about the phrase "for a limited time"?!
Merely sitting on the sidelines and ignoring the problem will NOT help! If and when broadcast flags succeed, similar systems will become even more commonplace.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Buy an HD tuner that doesn't respect the flag before 1 July 2005, or purchase any such preexisting device after 1 July 2005 (all non flag compliant devices can be resold after that date).
But it's not that simple, after all. Because the problem is TUNING the content you want to record, e.g., from a satellite provider or cable operator. And since more and more of the digital content is encrypted, and is only able to be tuned by devices sanctioned by the provider, and all such devices will respect the Broadcast Flag, the answer is to "What can I do to prepare for the Broadcast Flag?" is "Not much."
Unless, of course, you don't mind recording from an analog connection, such as composite video, S-video, or component video. But the FireWire ports that are, for example, also mandated on all HD/digital cable set top boxes after 1 July 2005 will be mostly encrypted. One might ask the question, if they're encrypted, then what the hell good are they? Indeed. But what can you do in the face of a cable provider whose call centers don't even know what FireWire is, or who argues that "technically" the FireWire ports are "functional" (as required by the FCC), even though their output is encrypted.
The real answer, of course, is that these ports will interact with OTHER 5C-compliant FireWire devices that also respect the Broadcast Flag. There's no way around it unless you go analog. And that INCLUDES all the nice things on the EFF's page. Sure, you can tune over-the-air HD channels and record them. And that's great. In some markets, that may account for a lot of content. But you won't be able to digitally record content that is flagged as Record Never that you're paying for from a cable or satellite operator, because you need THEIR EQUIPMENT to tune to those channels. (Or, something like a CableCard in - guess what - another device that respects the flag.)
All in all, we'll be able to do less with our current (i.e., digital) equipment than we could do with equivalent equipment (i.e., the VCR) 30 years ago. And most of the operators won't shoulder any of the blame. They'll just point the finger at laws or at the content providers. And then what is a customer to do? The only thing you really *can* do is write your elected officials, and provide feedback to the FCC. Or, not buy any flag compliant devices, which might ultimately prove to be a very hard thing to do.
In sum: anything you buy now won't guarantee you recording of ALL content you might legitimately have access to, unless you're ONLY concerned about OTA recording.
You mean the ones with complete contempt for the notion of the public domain, who have repeatedly bought extensions to the duration of copyright in order to deny us the free use of our own culture?
Yeah, they're thieves all right, and they're the ones who've brought this situation upon us. It really sucks.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
For someone who doesn't care, you sure can remember the most recent pop shows pretty well.
First, you need to know what the 19.3 megabit DTV "Transport Stream" looks like. The "Broadcast Flag" is a small collection of bits embedded in "Transport Stream." DTV equipment will be required to watch (or listen) for those bits and take the appropriate action.
But suppose you know where those bits are, and what they mean, too. Why couldn't you simply flip the ones you don't like and then record or whatever? All you would need is a serial to parallel converter to turn the serial stream into a 16 bit parallel bus (for example) and them suck those bits into a DSP, where you do a little bit bashing. Then run them into a parallel to serial conervter to reconstruct the transport stream as seen by your digital disk recorder? If you have a commercially made unit, it will be looking for the flag bits, so it will know what it can or cannot do, but your freshly set bits tell it that this program is OK to record and play as long as you like.
I think such a device is likely to appear as a small plastic box with 2 firewire ports and a wall-wart, selling for $20 in a year or two.
Remember Macrovision on VHS? Do you know how easy that was to defeat? All you had to do was to make your VCR run with fixed video gain instead of AGC all the time. A little hardware hacking was all that was needed. This shouldn't be much worse. But don't try bit bashing after the compressed video is expanded. The data rate there is likely to be upwards of a gigabit, and most folks don't know how to make PCBs to handle stuff going that fast. This is precisely why the DRM folks want the interconnects to be 1 gigabit or faster. But remember, the "broadcast flag" must be readable in the 19.3 megabit transport stream.
An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology.
I consistently download 8 shows a week, ranging from Sci-Fi to comedy, to drama.
Then I stream them to my PrismIQ. I have plenty of entertainment throughout the week, but feel no need to woprk around anybody else's schedule but my own. And I don't see commercials, to boot.
It probably won't last, but it works for me now.
The problem is that scumbags keep retroactively increasing the length of protection, and that is cheating
Why is it cheating? Because the people that BUY your IP do so at a set price with the assumption that after they wait x # of years the stuff they bought today will be theres to do with what they want. That is one of the decisions they made when they bought it.
Example: Lets say that in 1968 I purchased one of the original film reals of star trek, for say $5,000. I get to watch it myself, but I can't charge cash to others to see it... YET. For just myself, it would only be worth $4,500. But I know that in 20 years, it will be a rare commodity and I will be free to charge people to see the film. My $5,000 is an INVESTMENT.
now 10 years later, some scumbag lier has convinced congress to change it from 20 years to 50 years. I just lost my investment.
The real problem is HOW MUCH DO WE WANT TO PAY INVENTORS/CREATORS for their work.
And while they are certainly entilted to a fair price, we - as the PURCHASERS of that work are entitled to negotiate a fair price - and that price includes a limit on how long you hold the rights to it. May be it should be shorter, maybe it should be longer, but once our society sets a reasonable time limit and you "accept that condition" and create the IP, there is NO POSSIBLE, FAIR REASON to change it. That is just thievery by cheating, greedy scumbags. It is no better than if Ford suddenly decides to extend the 5 year rental agreement with an option to buy after 5 years to a 10 years rental agreement, after you already signed the papers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or, sit on your ass and suck it up...
As a Libertarian, my vote never gets anyone elected, even in local elections. So I am used to that. I have a comfortable chair.
This country used to be known as a country of individualists and, yes, anarchists to an extent. 'Tis no longer true of course, but I stand by our proud tradition of thumbing our noses at our government, poking fun at our ratlike leaders and ignoring laws and any other rules that I don't agree with. This is what makes me an American.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
"IP should not go into the public domain untill the copyright holders chose for it to or the applicable law forces it to."
That's a circular argument. You're saying that the law should exist because it's the law.
If you don't want "your IP" to be public, then keep it tucked away in a corner of your mind. Take it to the grave if you want. If you want to put "your IP" into the marketplace, the public is willing to protect your work within reasonable limits.
The problem in recent years is that deciding what's reasonable is being left up to people who are clearly biased.
A monkey has the right to copy what he sees other monkeys doing. Shouldn't humans have equivalent rights?
Your numbers sound about right. But you are forgetting something...
100% of the people who pay for cable are the ones who pay for cable! This might sound odd, but let me explain. The broadcast flag does not HAVE to be enabled at the source. The broadcasters can turn it on and off. If HBO started using the broadcast flag, they might change their minds if 10% of the people both wrote letters AND canceled their service. Men, you can grab by the balls. Companies, you grab by the wallet. The problem is that consumers TOLERATE this stuff. If ABC doesn't let you TIVO, then don't watch. Networks live and die by Nielson ratings.
I dumped all cable and broadcast TV over a year ago. I get my movies from Blockbuster, and I get my news from news.yahoo.com. I am happy.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
What right do you have to claim it as "your" culture? Did you create it?
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Yeah, it's really awful that people can continue to benifit from thier creations for so long.
Wow, Walt Disney is still alive? What great news!
hell, if logic isn't enough for you the damn thing is enumerated in the constitution itself:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
You're missing the point: It isn't about which person gets elected. Whichever one wins, s/he owes too many favors to the companies that paid for the campaign (likely giving money to both sides). Money doesn't buy elections; it buys elected officials.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I wouldn't worry so much about it. By the time your HDTV card becomes obsolete, the protection will have been cracked many times over.
These days, it doesn't even matter if the issues are obscure or not; members of Congress don't get elected based on the issues at all. They get elected if they happen to live in a district that their party managed to gerrymander well enough to guarantee them a seat. The number of competitive congressional districts is just depressing. In most of the districts around here, only one party even bothers to run a candidate at all. Do you think my Democratic representative or the Republican in the next district over cares about what his constituents think, when he was elected with 99% of the vote? Especially when they can make the convincing argument in the primaries that replacing them with another member of the same party will just cut down on the amount of federal spending in the district because the new guy won't have seniority?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Most Disney movies are based on old legends, fairy tales, and historical events. Those are pieces of my culture as much as they are Disney's. Content producers have the constitutional right to a limited protection of their works, after which they are expected to revert to the public domain.
If you mistakenly believe otherwise, then I hope you demand that the publisher of your "collected works of William Shakespeare" track down his rightful, legal heir and fork over the appropriate royalties. Or that Disney pays Hans Christian Andersen's family for "The Little Mermaid". Or that Mel Gibson found someone to pay for the rights to Jesus's life story. Otherwise, you're a corporatist hypocrite who doesn't really understand the "intellectual property" rights you seem to be in love with.
Dang, writing that made me feel dirty. I'm a pretty staunch conservative, but this idea that recent works based on old public domain offerings have some natural right to be privatized for the rest of eternity is just plain bizarre.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Indeed: neither the constitution, nor the copyright laws require copyright owners to make access to copyrighted works "easy." However, from a technical standpoint it only takes one person to slog through the hard work of figuring out how to access a protected work and then write document describing the method to everyone else.
The constitutional issue present is whether the government can impose prior restraint on that speech (which is exactly what the DMCA does), and whether computer software is, for the purposes of the 1st ammendment, protected speech. The US Supreme Court has yet to rule, however at least on the 2nd half of the argument, the 9th circuit had ruled that computer software was speech in the first ammendment sense. The 9th circuit was set to re-hear the question en banc when that case (this one was about export regulations on encryption software) was made moot.
In short, no, you do not have the right to insist that copyrighted works be made "easy" for you to use. But I believe that the copyright holders do not have the right to prevent anyone from documenting the steps necessary to access their works. And if I am right, then any copy restriction regime is nothing more than a waste of everyone's time.
(IANAL, of course, but I play one in my mind)
No, at least in this case, it's not the device manufacturers' fault. They have no legal choice but to comply with this FCC regulation. If you want to boycott the responsible parties, then boycott Hollywood film studios.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This is the same industry who's copy protection for CD audio data over digital is to have two bits set. Turn those bits off and you can copy all you want over TOSLINK.
This is the same industry who let the CSS decryption code leak out.
This is essentialy the same industry who tries to copy protect XBOX and PS2 games, only to have $10 chips start showing up a week after the machines come out, or, better yet, loading a save game file that creates a FTP server you can log in to by way of a buffer overflow in a font package.
I don't think we have anything to worry about here, folks.
Let them make their piddly little broadcast flag. Give it a week and you will see a story here on Slashdot that says, "HD Broadcast Flag stripped from content with 2 lines of Pearl."
Obviously you don;t see the big pictue, allow me to explain why this quote came up.
The parent mentioned that (and I paraphrase) as long as the rest of the country sat around snd watched (because it had nothing to do with them...yet) nothing would change, this quote says much more than its obvious meaning, you do more to trivialize it by narrowing its application than I did by sharing it. Also do you think the DVD thing is the only thing this broadcast flag can handle? It can have applications, such as disabling the 'manual skip commercial' features of future tivo-like systems, how about a flag that won;t allow you to change the channel when a certain commercial comes on, (ok this might be exxageration, but it makes a point), also the phrase shows how thinking 'well this is only happening in the USA, so fuck the yanks', when in reality, it will proably be adopted (perhaps by financial force) by other countries as well.
The words of the phrase itself do not apply, but the meaning behind it applies very much so.
I detest when such great quotes are marginalized.
Someone asked me the difference between ignorance and apathy, I told them I don't know and I don't care.
The issue is that if a representative is going to vote on a hundred different issues, people are going to vote based on whatever is most important to them. No matter how well you research the issue, if you are going to vote for a candidate, are you going to vote based on their position on health care, or their position on the FCC flag?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service