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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."
I control the "OFF" switch. TV is less and less important to me with each passing day.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
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.
artisan chapbook makers, live children puppet-shows, and, of course, Linux.
Seriously, if this crap goes down, I'm going back to reading Victorian novels -- and maybe watching the occasional episode of Entourage at a friends' house.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
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!
Well, some mysterious guy keeps telling me that he controls both the horizontal and the vertical.
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
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?
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."
My wife. Duh.
My wife, of course..
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.
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 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.