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Who Controls Your Television?
Nurgled writes "The EFF, reportedly the only consumer rights organization to be granted membership of the Digital Video Broadcasting consortium, reports that TV and movie industry representatives have been pushing for DRM in the DVB technologies. This in itself is not entirely unexpected, but these talks have been going on in closed meetings. The EFF itself has been blocked from reporting on this until now as a condition of being allowed to attend. The proposed technologies allow rights-holders and broadcasters to severely hamper your ability to make use of broadcast television content, including the ability to retroactively blacklist any devices that consumers may already own that act in ways undesirable to the rights-holder or broadcaster. The EFF concludes that public interest and consumer rights advocates must fight back."
The taxpayers will own your TV set in 2009 if you are still watching OTA Broadcast.
Yay for the continued fleecing of Americans over this shift all of which benefits the coffers of the government when they resell the spectrum for billions.
Idiots. The more they push people away with their DRM bullshit, the more people are going to pirate shit off the internet. I can absolutely guarantee the MOMENT any of this is implemented, I will not be watching any of the TV shows that use it. I will simply download ALL my TV shows (instead of just some of them) and the TV people can kiss my ass. :)
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Given that governments routinely roll over to this group (and groups like it), you can't fault them for trying for the whole enchilada. Why wouldn't they, when they've yet to be smacked down over all their requests, and as corporations, they have incredible patience to keep pushing the same requests over and over again.
... but I'm guessing it's pretty accurate.
... if I was the majors, I'd fear the next generation who doesn't care one whit about "their" content.
If I wasn't sadly jaded, I'd have put the article down to outrageous hyperbole
However, I think they are missing the big point. YouTube is successful not because it has clips and full shows of copyrighted material, but because it's chock full of stuff - amateur and professionally done - that's free.
I've watched how my kids use it (9 & 12, and the next big consumer generation) and they watch stuff that people posted that they'd done themselves.
TV is becoming less relevant to us old folks, who grew up on it
Kids aren't "into" shows as they have been in the past, and will skip or watch an episode of something they see in passing on TV on a whim - when they bother to have it on at all.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
Whether it affects error correction or not depends on the exact implementation.
I imagine that the error-correction will be on the encrypted stream as opposed to the decrypted contents. In this case, error-correction should not be affected as it's (generally) no harder to run a error check (or whatever) on a random, encrypted stream than a not-as-random plaintext stream.
If they do the error correction on the decrypted contents, then there will have to choose deliberately weakened encryption (yay!). If I removed a random block from a stream of encrypted data, all the data after the missing block can't be decrypted *at all* unless 1) the cipher works in ECB mode (a weak mode of encryption) and 2) the fact that the block is missing is known to the decrypting device.
short example: the hr20 dvr from direct-tv records (when its not crashing..) HD content from satellite.
I had problems with mine and wanted to cancel. I called their CSR and asked to disconnect my service since I was sending this POS back.
now, I had the unit for a few days and there were some unwatched shows on its drive. shows I had planned to see before returning the unit.
you can guess what happened. as soon as they sent the 'disconnect' signal, AND while my unit was plugged in (key thing) - it proceeded to LOCK UP my saved shows and not let me watch them!
un freaking believable. and the CSR rep acted like it was a surprise to him. when all along, they knew they were gonna lock up your data if your bill goes unpaid (shows you DID pay for and have a right to still see!). or, if your dish goes down you may ALSO be unable to watch saved shows.
we are already 'here'. and it sucks.
and that was one reason why I cancelled. I now have my own HDTV tuner (hdhomerun from silicondust.com) and while I get no premium (hbo, etc) content, I do at least have control over the PURE MPEG shows that I save, with zero drm. in fact, I watch more PBS (in high def) now than I ever watched PBS before. in a way, this whole DRM stuff is probably HELPING free and open networks like PBS get more viewership!
just remember this issue about direct-tv and probably dish (and cable, too). if your receiver says 'no' then all saved shows are ALSO a 'no'. just know that going into it - if you decide to go in, at all.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It was this guy.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I found this out when I got a TiVo Series 3. I noticed that every show I recorded, including ones that were deemed copyright cleared (eg: cable in the classroom) were marked as "Copy Restricted" on my TiVo. This means that the show cannot be saved or copied off the Tivo.
I found out this was because my cable company was setting the CCI flag to 0x2 for all channels in my cable system with the exception of local broadcast stations. This means my local cable company was overriding the wishes of the content provider (in this case Cable in the Classroom) and copy protecting the content.
Other people have been restricted from even recording a channel to TiVo because the CCI flag was set to 0x3.
When I complained to my cable provider, Comcast, about them blanketly applying the CCI flag of 0x2 to everything they basically told me to shut up and take it.
I assume this is about putting back in the broadcast flag, right?
After all the equipment that has been sold without the broadcast flag, I assume they can't start encrypting broadcast signals, right?
This is just their attempt to have all hardware/software respect the broadcast flag.
I bought a HDTV compatible PC card (http://www.pchdtv.com/) years ago when the broadcast flag was supposed to hit. It got repealed and my wife yelled at me. Now, maybe I should get a spare?
What do we do? Write our congressman?
Lots of openings for guys like you in this thread!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.