Digital TV Foreshadows Erosion of Net Rights

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager offers insight on how digital TV is rapidly heading toward the kind of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet. Standards such as HDMI and HDCP are acting in concert to strip your equipment of its functionality, displaying 'incompatibility' messages when plugged into older HDMI-enabled devices, shutting down analog outputs when active, and requiring balky handshake credentials that force many consumers to reboot their TVs to recover permission to watch them. Even broadcast flagging, which has been overturned by the Court of Appeals, is still on the de-facto table, as the entertainment lobby retains the power to bully technology companies into baking broadcast flagging into their wares. Sure, digital TV has far fewer points of origin than the Internet and is therefore easier to control, but, as Yager writes, 'Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment' — and it is likely through that equipment that the entertainment and broadcast lobbies will chip away at your rights on the Web."

Comments

What a joke.

[RightSaidFred99]

I'm sure they worked all the anti-DRM nuts into a froth with this nonsense, but it's just complete bullshit. Rebooting TVs? What the hell are they talking about? It's a bunch of scary bullshit that's just not real. It's like that NZ moron who ran around screaming about Vista's DRM. Now to this day if you talk to people who should know better they'll swear up and down Vista's DRM is causing them no end of problems, but when pressed they just say they saw someone on some Video forum talking about it - they can't really say exactly how it's affected them outside the realm of copyrighted materials they bought which are explicitly DRM protected.

The DRM scare bores the piss out of me, it's meaningless. If I don't like the terms of a DRM product, I don't buy it. Problem solved. I've never had any of these make-believe "TV reboots" with my 60" 2 year old HDTV, or problems playing HD-DVD or BluRay (thank you AnyDVD) or anything of the like. It's just a non issue that gets dweebs all riled up for no good reason.