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."

Comments

They may try and control the content, but...

[the_rajah]

I control the "OFF" switch. TV is less and less important to me with each passing day.

Who controls *my* television?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, some mysterious guy keeps telling me that he controls both the horizontal and the vertical.

You can't fault them for reaching for the sky

[fair_n_hite_451]

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.

If I wasn't sadly jaded, I'd have put the article down to outrageous hyperbole ... but I'm guessing it's pretty accurate.

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 ... if I was the majors, I'd fear the next generation who doesn't care one whit about "their" content.

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.