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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."
Hoard recievers and other hardware built before 2003 NOW. Hoard hardware built buy manufacturers outside of this DVB consortium. Then boycott the CONTENT of companies that use the broadcast flag.
The one good thing about capitalism is that companies that try to grab more rights for themselves than for their customers go out of business and get replaced with companies that don't. There will be pirate stations that will broadcast analog still, and there will be pirate content creators who create digital content without the broadcast flag, or better yet with all the bits turned on.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Is it me, or is "retroactively blacklist" the most unpleasant piece of this? So if I am a good-user who does nothing untoward, I would risk having my TV no longer speak to my DVR because a nephew came over and had had his X-box-cum-torrent-seed plugged in? Yuck.
I prefer technology which makes it easier to do what one wants to do, rather than harder.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Reminds me of an old Max Headroom episode
Janie Crane: "Edison... an off switch!"
Metrocop: "She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!"
- from Max Headroom, Episode 1.6, Blanks
Every year, another episode of Max Headroom comes true.
1.1: Blipverts - now we have ads designed to look OK at both regular speed, and at DVR-fast-forward "2 seconds" speeds.
1.2: Rakers - what's the difference between Raking and other "extreme sports" or "Wildest Police Videos"?
1.3: Body Banks - we now purchase organs harvested from Chinese prisoners
1.4: Security Systems - live, real-time monitoring of citizens, walled communities, etc.
1.5: War - both the Yugoslavian unpleasantness and Gulf War II appear to have been engineered for purposes of getting good ratings
1.6: Blanks - anyone without papers is "blank", and subject to arbitrary arrest, detention, and disappearance.
Anyone want to take on the last 6-7 episodes?
Broadcast signals are free. They are required by current FCC mandates to be backwards compatible to existing color TV sets. All one has to do it get a decoder, provided free by federal funds, and they can decode OTA digital HDTV broadcasts and play them back on standard HDTV sets. If we can do this, we can redirect that signal and record it in any form we want. Broadcast media, once sent, and recorded by a person can be used for any purpose excluding profit or public display. I can make LEGALLY as many copies of broadcast material as I want and give it away free to as many people as I want who were also within broadcast range under existing FCC rules. It is only illegal to do so for content that I am required to pay for to receive.
If they embed some kind of flag allowing me them to tell what day/time the show was broadcast, from where, and the ID of my decoder should I decide to illegally distribute my recording of their broadcast, that's fine by me, as long as I don't have to pay for any equipment upgrades to do so and can continue to use my existing TV and computer hardware.
I have no problem with them trying to protect themselves from blatant illegal internet distribution or rebroadcast without permission of content they charge for, as long as I can easily record, play back, copy, and store anything my receiver can decode without hassle, without additional equipment, and without enforced resolution degradation. I will not be bound to pay $1.99 for each TV show I want to store and playback later from DVD just because they're afraid I might give it to someone else, who could also view the same program for free anyway. If I want to capture a piece of TV footage and add it to a home movie, I have a legally protected right to do so. If I want to record a movie from HBO and watch it later at any point, I have a legally protected right to do that. As long as I don't re broadcast, distribute, or sell copies of it, I'm not doing anything illegal, and will fight vigerously to protect that right.
I think what they really want is a system for being able to easily back track any distributed content to the location at which it was originally received and recorded. This would make prosecution easy. As long as they do this without impacting my current rights, I'm completely OK with it. If it costs money to make the switch, or I have to trade out any equipment, I expect THEM to foot the bill and provide all the required labor services, cables, etc to replace my current setup.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Because I don't have a TV, and I haven't had one for years.
Sure, I've got a DLP projector. And I do have an Avermedia A180 ATSC tuner for my Vista Media Center machine.. but that is mostly a "oh.. i guess ATSC kind of works" thing. My wife will watch 1-3 shows per week recorded over ATSC. If it stops working, it stops working.
Recently, I involved myself in a conversation about IPTV, how long it was taking to roll out, problems with it, and so on.
Sorry - I've been enjoying IPTV for a while now. I've got an HTPC, and I've got bittorrent. All the TV i care about comes in over IP packet.
The internet truly routes around defective nodes, irrespective of the reason for the defect. When they're political or social, the internet works just as well.
Sometimes the ATSC signal is weak enough (poor antenna placement, but fixing it is low-priority) that the recording is unwatchable. my wife will let me know and then i'll go find the torrent (usually within 12 hours of the show airing) and we'll have it in another 2 hours. That is IP TV and that is available today.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
If you sell someone a product, you don't get to follow them home and monitor their use of it. If they reverse engineer it, good for them. If they reproduce it, good for them. If they distribute or sell their reproductions, sue them. You can't prevent all your customers from using what they bought just to make sure none of them misuse it.
It's like selling a sandwich and requiring the buyer to agree not to open it to see what it's made of, and then following them home to make sure they don't open it because you're afraid they might learn how to make it themselves and post the recipe online along with *GASP* a picture of the sandwich! It doesn't matter that they told everyone that you made the sandwich, not them. It doesn't matter that this free publicity drew hundreds of new customers to your little sandwich shop. No, you're a paranoid control freak who thinks his sandwich sales will drop because people can get the recipe online, even though there's no evidence supporting this. In fact, you're considering selling the sandwich in locked lucite boxes that only expose the sandwich one bite at a time, and while you're at it, why don't you collect information on sandwich usage, kitchen appliances, travel habits, and social security numbers? All this security is costing so much, the sandwiches that should cost about $2.25 now cost about $19.95.
And now you're wondering why you're being outsold by those unprotected sandwich shops charging $2.25.
http://toykeeper.net/media/Max_Headroom/1 583
http://video.aol.com/video-category/max-headroom/
Until a couple of weeks ago, I was an honest downloader. By that I mean I applied the shareware ideals to the content I downloaded via torrents. What do I mean by this?
Let's look at two TV shows I enjoy very much, 'Lost' and 'Heroes'. For the past couple of years I would watch a TV program on my TiVo and then download the episode via torrent for reference if needed further on in the season. If I enjoyed the show "that" much, once the DVD set would come out, I would purchase said DVD set and delete the downloaded files. This was until a couple of weeks ago when my ISP informed me that an agent of NBC Universal was whining that I was downloading/sharing a torrent of an episode of Heroes. You bet I posted this anonymously. Those bastards are relentless in their pursuit of my misery.
Based on a lot of searching online, it appears the broadcast networks have stepped up their assault on people downloading broadcast TV episodes. So, this begs the following question: How would the broadcasters feel if the torrent creators left the commercials in the broadcast? Would they shut up and go away? My feeling is no. They want to ensure 100% that we are forced to watch the commercials. Of course we all know it would be very easy to just take them out of the file once we had them or move that slider forward 3-5 minutes.
I know advertising is main money driver of Television, but these media industries need to realize that society is changing their business model for them and all they are doing is resisting and creating terrible quality online content riddled with DRM which makes their TV episodes completely unwatchable in full screen resolutions.
I am so sick and tired of all this broadcast flag and control bullshit. All of the media industries have continued to piss me off at various times between 1999 and now. I don't see this stopping anytime soon either.
Those of us that are downloading TV to keep mid/long term are fans and the companies are doing nothing but ruining the fan experience.
'Give us what we want, or we'll go away'
'...and the geeks shall inherit the earth.'
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. ... if I was the majors, I'd fear the next generation who doesn't care one whit about "their" content.
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.
Talk about the digital divide. I only have dialup at home. I only watch the occasional youtube during lunch at work. My kids barely even know it exists though. On the flip side, we don't have cable at all. We've deemed it too expensive. We do have VHS/DVD player, PS2 (with disc read errors), and N64. All the "TV" that my kids and wife watch are entire season DVDs. We usually only buy new ones for birthdays or Christmas. My kids play various older gen video games on the PC its usually GBA emulator stuff. (They just know to click the icon and open the game that they want.) About the only "online" resource that my kids are really aware of is wikipedia. They are strictly supervisored when online mainly because we are a single PC household and have to have an adult log on and do most of the browsing for them.
Is it a bit of a pain to do their net surfing for them? No. You don't just shove your kids out the front door and tell them to walk to/find the public library. You take them to public library/book store. The physical/online world is a dangerous place. To make sure your kids are o.k., you supervisor them yourself! O.k. That's my parenting advice for the day.