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

eliminating Fair Use is an erosion of rights

[schwaang]

You never had those "rights". Old technology just did not prevent you from recording/copying shows, music etc. That did not mean that you were allowed to do it, but many turned a blind eye to infringements.

The US Supreme Court disagreed with you when it decided in the Betamax ruling that

the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time-shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.

Re:I wonder.

[rts008]

Tor is your friend
It may be our only option-onion routers to do what we want.

Re:Television not behaving?

[jeiler]

I can only imagine that it has gotten worse. Anyone have some numbers? IIRC, a 30-minute broadcast typically contains 22 minutes of programming, 6 minutes of national advertising, and 2 minutes of local ads.

Re:Internet TV

[paroneayea]

Unfortunately, Apple TV is still DRM-laden, and if the internet was to go the direction that Apple TV is, it's going to become a pretty awful place to be IMO.

Fortunately there's a project that looks like it's going to become the Firefox of internet tv... and it's called Miro. It's based on simple, common and open standards... RSS, bittorrent, and just plain old DRM-free codecs. It's not pretending to be something magical, and indeed, it shouldn't.

It's already pretty enjoyable to use, but I've been doing some volunteering on the project. Trust me, the next iteration is going to be really slick.

bandwidth vs. throughput

[xalorous]

Stop confusing bandwidth with throughput.

Your connection is sold to you with a "bandwidth". Say an cable connection with 6 Mbps speed. That is a cap. And not even guaranteed. With US providers you'll probably get somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5 Mbps, depending how many others are on the wire with you and how many and how clean the connections between you and the ISP.

Your connection may or may not have a throughput limit. Unlimited throughput means the number of bytes you can download is not limited. In some places, there are limitations. Typically the ISP's that limit throughput also offer the possiblilty to purchase more.