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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."
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
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.
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.
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.'