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

Re:I wonder.

[martinw89]

I know the telecoms are limiting bandwidth and dropping niche services, but at least I haven't had any garbled junk land in my browser yet with the message "Upgrade your service to see this website".

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

[oldspewey]

The Movie industry is loosing viewers in droves to the internet. If the experiance is substandard to Internet ... people will just not bother Tough call ... I've seen my share of movies with laughably bad subtitles, but something tells me I'll have to keep coming back to the internet to get my hit of really bad spelling and grammar.

Re:Not exactly

[Gewalt]

That having been said, I personally consider the television itself to be an utter waste of time (or a "lockdown" if you will) but do I post messages on Slashdot about it? Uh, ya. Apparently you do.

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

[iminplaya]

American Idol...Britney... American politics... How "sub" do you want to go?

Re:Closing loopholes != erosion of rights

[Anonymous Coward]

You are piping horse-shit into the barn?

Man, at least write functional code if you want to say the horse out of the barn:

tar xf barn.tar horse

Geeks these days. Sheesh.

Re:I wonder.

[baeksu]

Well, it's in German, but it's Dr. Who! More or less...

More like Doktor Wer!

Bwahahahhaa!