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Broadcasters Want Cash For Media Shared At Home
marcellizot writes "What would you say if I told you that there are people out there that want to make sharing your media between devices over a home network illegal? According to Jim Burger, a Washington, D.C attorney who deals with piracy in the broadcasting industry, certain broadcasters want to do just that. Speaking in a recent podcast, Burger remarked that the broadcasting industry is keen to put controls on sharing media between devices even if those devices are on a home network and even if the sharing is strictly for personal use. When pressed as to why broadcasters would want to do this, Burger replied simply 'because they want you to pay for that right.'"
I read the referenced article, I fear listening to the 16 minute audio as I'm not entirely sure I have DRM clearance to do so, and do not want to be sued or accused of piracy.
That said, I'd be interested in more specifics on this. Does this mean potentially my Squeezebox from which I listen to my music stored on the mp3 server may no longer be a legal "share". Does that potentially mean mp3's on my samba share are no longer fair game on my XP box via WinAmp?
About a year or two ago I'd have accused people making these claims (that they're trying to do this) as ludicrously insane and paranoid. Today, I'm not so sure. I guess the most heartening thing to consider is these guys eventually cross that threshold where the consumer resentment goes from smoulder to explosion, and maybe the backlash settles it once and for all.
But then again, maybe not. I know people who pay more for bottled water price-per-gallon than gasoline... and they complain about the price of gasoline.
I've always known the end-goal for all media companies is pay-per-play, every single time.
Ibid.
I paid for that right when I made the initial purchase.
If they could get away with it, they would make you pay for content you don't even watch, but have the ability to.
Crooks, fighting to uphold a dying business model, and squeeze every penny out of it the entire way.
If they don't want us to have the rights to content, why are they selling us the content on a disk? Does no one see how dumb this is? The summary makes it sound like they want me to pay 5 more dollars or something to take a DVD upstairs and play it vs. downstairs... there is just no chance people will pay it. Movie tickets are an example of a license to view that doesn't include a physical copy of the content, so I refuse to believe they don't know they're selling you your own copy of the content.
stuff |
Would you pay for the privilage of bringing a CD into your 'unlicensed' bath room to listen to?
Burger replied simply 'because they want you to pay for that right'.
I already did, with my taxes. I have fair-use rights that trump the media industries desire to make money.
Discussion over.
I'm meeting more and more people who are shunning traditional TV and audio content--the very content that is being proposed to be locked down in TFA. The rush away from such content will become a stampede if such controls are enacted. Imagine not being allowed to record your favorite show in your living room while you're at work and then play it in your exercise room when you get home. The sheer lunacy of it will turn consumers off extremely quickly and therefore these companies will lose even more money. But they are far too short-sighted to realize this, so we will all suffer. Well, except for book publishers, who will see sales soar as we revert to earlier (and fully portable) media forms.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
In other news, paper companies want you to pay a fee if you reuse their paper.
-Daniel
first you would have to dismantle the fair use doctrine in the copyright act...unfortunately for them, sharing copyrighted material between devices at home currently is considered fair use... you paid for the material once already -- its going to be hard for them to prove that paying over and over and over for an audio music file is reasonable... I'm sure if you had to pay for repeat broadcasts of television shows, people would probably stop watching television...
I want $1 from everyone who does this too. And I have just as much right to it as they do.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What I would like to see is certain terms very, very clearly defined.
For example, you should not be allowed to hijack domains and call yourself an ISP. You can still hijack domains and sell some sort of service, but you shouldn't be able to call it Internet service.
You should not be allowed to sell a CD with any kind of copy protection (let alone rootkits) and call it a CD. You can still sell them, but they should include a fairly large disclaimer to the effect of "This is not a CD." Ditto for DVDs with any copy protection beyond CSS, especially deliberately breaking the spec to where it won't even play on your own players (I'm looking at you again, Sony) -- you could call it a movie, but not a DVD, and it should be very clear that it is not intended to be able to play in DVD players.
And you should not be able to sell media that has its fair use restricted and call it "selling" -- indeed, you must make it very clear that the customer is renting the media.
At least if we had a clear definition of terms, I could buy a movie and know it will play on anything.
As it is, they don't even need additional legislation to make this work. All they need is what they already have -- DRM + DMCA. They can use DRM to prevent you from copying the media around your house, and the DMCA will make it illegal to crack that DRM, even if you have the right to copy the media around your house.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No
The media conglomerates are training consumers otherwise.
The whole point behind those stupid trailers in front of DVD's, stupid FBI warning and RIAA lawsuits is to instill fear.
They want you to believe *they* are the ultimate authority. So far, it's working great.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
I say that because 11 years ago, we got the DMCA, which already gives them this ability.
Essentially, all they have to do to make it illegal to share around your house is to implement DRM which prevents you from doing that. Since it's illegal to circumvent DRM, you're fucked.
And this does, in fact, prevent you from exercising your fair use rights, and, indeed, even the rights inherent in purchasing a physical disk (or a download, even).
I'd love to see it go to court, though. If anyone from the media industry is reading this, I dare you to sue me for playing my movies on Linux, or even ripping and time-shifting a rental. Come on, make my day. Who knows? Maybe it would end in new legislation banishing DRM at all, unless it allows all forms of fair use.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First, many of us already are kind of doing this with the premium iTunes music. I pay $1.29 so I can listen to a song on my laptop, my iMac at home, my home office PC and my computer at work -- without worrying whether I've gone over the five computer limit because I keep changing my home office PC and have to reauthorize.
Second, if I buy a song online to listen to in my home office, are they going to charge me to upload it to my media center PC in the living room? Now, what if I install a second set of speakers from my home office into my living room? Does that count? What's the difference?
What if I have it on a removable drive that I then bring from room to room and listen to the music on it on different computers? Charge me for that? What if I just walk from room to room with an iPod? Music in the office, music in the kitchen? What's the difference? Obviously, I can argue the fine points here, but that is just it. The various gray scenarios are absurd...
I should be able to buy music and listen to it (me and anyone within earshot) in any fashion, on any machine, no matter where I am.
[1] E.g. You don't have to buy a copy of content to exercise fair-use, like excerpts, etc.
[2] You don't have to pay taxes to have rights. Children, people who are unemployed, homemakers, and many other classes of people may not pay taxes but still have these rights.
If this happens, I have 2 choices -- either ignore the new laws or cut back/eliminate the consumption of media. I only have so much money available per month for entertainment, and with the cost of fuel and everything else going up (but not my salary), entertainment will be the first to go. I can live just fine without big Media -- there are still books, and that big room with the real high blue ceiling that I can reach through my front and back doors.
If big media wins, they lose. I (and many others on this planet) cannot just create more money every time someone wants more $ for the same or less service and/or product.
Beware of Sleestak
"According to Jim Burger, a Washington, D.C attorney who deals with piracy in the broadcasting industry, certain broadcasters want to do just that."
What part of 'FUCK OFF' don't you understand. We already pay a 'piracy tax' on all blank media, pay way too much for music as it is, and now you want me to pay for sharing my music on my internal LAN? Uh, I seem to remember something called "Fair Use".
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Slashdot apparently didn't run the article, and the same link had been sent in by the time I put it in the Firehose, but Microsoft patented some kind of TV that has biometric sensors to get information about who is watching the TV and to deliver targeted advertising. Of course, it would be simple to combine that with DRM schemes and force all kinds of weird licensing restrictions like those they're asking for here.
Was someone reading 1984 for "good" ideas again, or what? I wish the media middlemen would hurry up and die before they retard progress any more. They're no longer useful, but they have enough cash to buy obstructive laws.
No, but it does mean that you're TV isn't a vampire.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Whenever I hear a scheme like this, I wonder where these people got the idea that copyright gives them the right to tell people how they can use the copyrighted work after they've sold them the copy.
AFAIK, there's no law preventing me from purchasing a book then using a magnifying glass or opaque projector to read it. Why do they think that copyright for music or movies prevents me from using different technology to access the paid-for content?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Surprised noone has brought up the 360 example yet.
I have an xbox 360 on my home network which I sometimes use to stream stuff from my XP box. It's doing nothing illegal, it's acccessing the same media which I would normally watch/listen to/look at on my pc, but just doing it remotely. The idea that I would have to pay for anything twice in this example is foolish - My guess is that this kind of thinking stems from business execs that don't understand computers.
For that matter, that could be the source of most of the worlds problems...
(But those aren't shared devices! Oh yes they are. Well, if you're running PCI-e 2.1, or virtual machines, or have sharing enabled through the OS, or a myriad of other options.)
Oh yeah, this means that Plan 9 users will presumably need to have factorial the number of nodes in their system licenses for each CD and DVD they buy in order to play any CDs or DVDs at all, as hardware location is largely unimportant under that OS. And I dread to think of what happens to people who actually run Beowulf clusters...
How will they get away with such an obviously unfair, unreasonable and obnoxious burden on unconventional desktops? Well, it'll be very easy. Most users are ignorant of the capabilities of modern machines, most users are ignorant of the fact that modern computers ARE a home network, and so most users will assume it's someone else's problem, not theirs. Once a few precedents are set in court, the broadcasters can bill who they like what they like, with no fear of retribution and an almost total guarantee of winning in court. Ignorance - even of technology - is not a valid defence in the legal system, which is reasonable enough when not taken too far. Here, it could be exploited by gold-diggers to create a perpetual stream of income.
Would the judges go for it? If the attacks start with "obvious" targets and then move to subtler and subtler definitions of home network, provided they keep winning, they'll create case law. Judges don't necessarily understand technology too well, but they do understand case law very well. A clever enough team of lawyers could easily manufacture a legal understanding of what a network was that could include a cluster that could only ever act as a single machine, any PC with a PCI-e 2.1 bus, a box running VMWare or Xen, or anything else in which multiple "top level" devices (physical or virtual) can access a single data source.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If I have to pay to share songs throughout my house then I have a foolproof plan...
:(
I'm going to turn up the volume in the lounge till I can hear the music in the bathroom.
Hang on...what if someone introduces a volume tax? Imagine the payments for turning the dial to 11!
"When pressed as to why broadcasters would want to do this, Burger replied simply 'because they want you to pay for that right'."
A 'right' is something that you can do without asking anyone else's permission. Once you have to ask someone's permission, then it no longer becomes a 'right' but a 'priviledge'. He just admitted that they want to charge people for exercising their right to use their own property. At best, he's just not that bright; at worst, this is yet another unwarranted advance on our freedoms.
It's all part of the book publisher's and librarian conspiracy. For the last couple of decades fewer people spend time reading actual books. They sit and stare at the TV all day or listen to music in larger and larger quantities. To fight this the publishers and librarians have been helping develop P2P software and slowly infiltrating the TV, music, and movie industries and getting them to enact this kind of stuff to alienate users. If the plan succeeds the vast majority of people will no longer be able to afford any kind of media except for books.
Look how far they have come, in a few short years most TV sets will no longer be capable of receiving over the air broadcasts unless the user buys a new digital set or tuner. That will drive more people to cable if they can afford it. At which point the cable companies and the show producers will up the ante and start trying to charge for each viewing of a show.
The decline of theaters is on going. Fewer people go to the movies now, many wait for the DVD to come out because it is cheaper at the moment to buy a DVD than go to the theater. Now that they have people conditioned to that they will increase the price of DVDs so most can not afford them or put DRM systems in place that make it impossible to use a DVD.
Librarian's around the world are all working toward this end.
I take it one step further and state that it is my responsibility to ensure my activity.
The addition of the government as a protection method just bothers me. They haven't been looking out for my constitutional interests for quite some time. So why would they protect me, as an individual, from being oppressed by someone else? Police don't help me in the matter at hand, they come into play after the fact.
I really take the inalienable rights concept to heart. While you stated:
you can always do whatever you want as long as there is nobody around that is capable of stopping you from doing it and you have the necessary resources available
I say you can do anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the consequences of your actions, whatever those may be and however fair they are.
"Burger replied simply 'because they want you to pay for that right'."
You don't pay for rights. Rights are inherent (or God-given, if you prefer). You pay for privileges.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Not so long ago, it was 'illegal' to split your analog cable inside your own house so that you could have more than 1 tv hooked up too.
Fuck that.
That is all.
Hell is other people - Jean-Paul Sartre
Bingo. You've hit upon exactly the model that I think would work... in fact the only realistic model in a world where copying is effectively free and effortless.
The best part is that in such a model you can still have middlemen. Imagine independent companies get set up to collect these donations. Like you have a "top 20 songs consortium," a "historic drama consortium," a "sci-fi consortium," and so on. So instead of sci-fi fans going to dozens of websites and adding to the tip-jar, they just pay a lump sum to the consortium of their choice, which then distributes the money to worthy sci-fi projects (and takes a cut for themselves, obviously). If consumers find that the consortium is doing a bad job (taking too big a cut, not funding good projects), then consumers will switch to paying directly to the things they care about, or funding a different consortium.
So, basically, you will have the consortiums fighting each other for our cash. This will tend to force them to be good at picking worthy projects to fund. They may even spend money on ads and so forth, convincing us to support them. That's all fine, because unlike the monopolies that exist now, they will actually have to compete with each other (since the flow of money is voluntary... that is, anyone can circumvent the consortiums if they are doing a bad job). Another type of middleman that would develop (or remain, rather), would be producers, who gather investment money for the thing to be made (movie, album, whatever), and of course set the "release price" at a level where the investors gets some return. The free market does its optimization thing, people make money, everyone is happy.
Of course there will be a certain 'free-rider' aspect, because some people will persistently wait for others to pay for content to be released. I say: so be it. We have plenty of free-riders now, and we're surviving. Some people are never going to want to contribute, no matter how hard you try and force them. Others will always be willing to pay for the things they care about... not just so that they have access, but so that everyone does.
I am not an economist, but it seems like it would work. For those of you who don't know, the project "A Swarm of Angels" is trying to do exactly this--they are trying to get 50,000 people to contribute £25 each, so as to produce a big-budget movie that will then be released under a creative commons license. Consider becoming a subscriber! (There are >1000 subscribers so far...)
Gasoline can mess your mind up badly over time.
If you smell it inside your car you should really get it fixed.
I had a relative who was apparently going crazy and then we rode in their car and my friend (I missed it) pointed this out. In about 30 days her apparent sanity improved enormously.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Anybody know the term?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
Basically, the idea is that in classic economic theory (Adam Smith et. al.) you make money either through wealth creation (mining stuff that's useful, producing food, manufactured goods from raw material) or by trade (I buy tea in china and sell it for more in England).
When companies/individuals try to "game the system" and have the regulatory environment changed to suit their interests.
A simple example would be, say the US government was talking about legalizing drugs (I know, huge suspension of disbelief required), and a lobby group consisting of organized crime interests and central American cocaine producers came together to keep the current status quo in place.
It's a classic moral hazard, and when this behavior becomes common, it's probably a sign that things are seriously wrong with your economy.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Broadcasters say that only one pair of eyes may watch a show at a time if the show is licensed for one pair. It cannot be watched by two pairs at the same time. A camera is defined as one pair. Same goes for ears and listening.
2010
Broadcasters say that you may not discuss a show with others. It is only licensed for one mind at a time.
2011
Broadcasters say that you mustn't carry the memory of a show for a duration longer than the duration of the show. It is copyrighted and you have no right to etch it in your brains. This constitutes violation of some license.
This is crap - yet another group who haven't learned that ruining the experience for the customer and attacking how the customer wants to acquire and digest their media not only doesn't work, it actually works against their bottom line in the end and ruins their image in the process.
We can speak out about this, write a million posts, contact congresspeople (who are mostly bought and paid for), but, like many things these days I get the feeling that the decision has already been made and that any "process" involved is likely just for show.
If this turns out to be correct, then since this government and it's corporate whoremasters doesn't listen to us, subvert our rights, sell us out to each other, and do a whole host of other illegal, extralegal, and unethical things - that I am just going to do what I want when it comes to my media regardless.
These media conglomerates can keep trying, but they're too big and too slow; and there will always be a way around DRM/restrictions -and that's not even looking at market based solutions; because if they cripple their devices there will always be somebody innovative enough not to cripple their offering to the public, or to at least leave back doors to easily enable features technically advanced users want, kind of like what Philips does with some of their products.
I don't care if he squats on the MIT campus. And he has a MORAL reason.
Calling him a loon because he doesn't live the way you do, or the way you want him to, is... well... they stuff NERDS in lockers because of the same mentality.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
They already got paid twice when I replaced my albums and tapes with CDs. I'll be damned if I pay them again. And they have a lot of fucking nerve charging damn near $20 for a CD that has made them a fortune a thousand times over. Check the price of classics such as Led Zeps Stairway to Heavan CD, or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Both phenomenally successful. Both well past the intended length of copyright. Both sold a zillion copies. Both over priced.
And now you want to charge me again (and again and again) because I've ripped all my CDs to my server so I can stream them through a password protected web page (usually from work)? I don't think so. Fair Use Bitch!
I have not purchased a music CD in over a year because of the RIAA. Nor have I downloaded anything. I'll be content with what I already have until I see some serious change in the music industry. Most likely when the revolution comes and we put your asses in front of a wall and put a bullet through your collective brain cell.
-- Will program for bandwidth