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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."
The general population doesn't have a 'right' to watch a movie, read a book or listen to music that someone spent a lot of time and money making for free unless they want them to.
To suggest that everyone should make content for you to consume for no money (or at least no exposure to advertising to pay for said content) is a laughable excuse people try to use to excuse their copying of material.
Only until the studios notice the insane traffic going to certain nodes, shut them off, then sue the providers of exit nodes for providing a service that allows the circumvention of DRM. I'm fairly sure you can bend the DMCA that way, too, the law seems pretty flexible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You also need a willing backbone provider, all of which would also be your competitors. so you'll end up being a vassal of one of them.
Even if you were able to negotiate peerage with other ISPs, most of them are going to be vassals of the big ones.
Much as I would love to see a huge geek co-op raise a new net (Internet III?), I just don't think it is possible anymore.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I did the same.
Actually, I was watching a lot more anime around those days along with discovering the wonders of Netflix, and since the laptop had a DVD player, having a TV didn't make much sense. So I chucked it.
Later on, I borrowed my friend's rather modern game system (won't say which due to stupid jokes), and bought an El Gato TV Tuner and haven't looked back.
Plus, the torrents satisfy any curiosity for a broadcasted series and the extra padding known as commercials is stripped.
Oddly enough, I wouldn't mind product placement as long as it's tastefully done.
The last brand-new TV I bought cost $300 and was big enough for my living room. HDCP isn't even on my radar as long as comparably sized sets that use it still cost 2-3 times that much.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Didn't I read somewhere that television viewing was actually DROPPING? Come up with crappy shows and reruns and wonder why viewership is declining? Perhaps the writer's strike had something to do with it?
Perhaps it's because of Youtube and Vimeo? In my household, we probably average about as much YT as TV, even with a dish DVR. We don't watch commercials much at all, and what network a show is on is, for us, irrelevant because it records the shows we want, not the stations we like.
Anybody who'd say that things haven't radically changed is simply oblivious to the fact that they have. Business is no longer usual!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The Internet is not a public resource, and never has been. Same with broadcast spectra. Both were bought and paid for, first by the government, then by Big Media. Big Media paid for the infrastructure that we now use, either by computer, or by radio and television.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I read in New Scientist a couple of years ago that there was a system in used in India which used a similar system to UUCP but with 802.11g connections, so that each computer on the network would maintain a database of what were effectively bang paths to as many other computers as possible. This meant that any computer could transmit messages to any other computer.
This sort of system would allow very large areas to be connected cheaply, but would have low bandwidth and high latency.
IIRC, domain names were looked up and connections could be made as though you were using an ordinary Ethernet connection, but I no longer remember all the details.
Technically no. Even if the DMCA is bought and paid for, it is part of copyright law, and breaking it is copyright infringement.
You can look at it like this: now copyright holders have the right to determine whether or not their works are encrypted. If someone goes against their wishes, they are trampling a right that copyright gives copyright holders, and thus infringing on that copyright.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm pretty sure they got very upset and maybe even outright hostile to you when you told them that they can't use their tools as intended and that the music they bought doesn't work anymore. I'm sure you had to deal with a lot of verbal abuse because of it all.
But what happened then? Did they sue? Did they cancel their contract? Or, what I'd rather believe, did they leave it at that?
What's the net effect? So they buy stuff, it doesn't work, it pisses them off, they yell at the call center agent... how does that reduce the profit of the company? Because that's all that matters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... or is the phrase "reboot the TV" just a sad state of affairs? Seriously, folks: TVs have - with the exception of older models which needed to warm up the tubes - always been "instant-on" devices, and I, for one, have become accustomed to that.
The idea of having a start up time for a TV while some micro-kernel boots inside its guts is repulsive, and having the signal shunted around within that morass of silicon to implement fucking permissions is a vile, horrible thought.
I pay the bastards enough for the satellite service, and they certainly make enough on the five minutes of advertisements they air every tenth minute... Why should I be forced to watch the scant programming they do offer on their terms?
</rant>
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
I just got "locked out" of my pioneer HDTV trying to replace a noisy fan. There is a kill switch in it.
So now I have to call Pioneer tomorrow to figure out how to get the stupid TV to turn on again.
That is fucking stupid considering any thief can easily circumvent. Any ordinary user wont even be trying...
I'm not sure that's entirely a fair question. I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised if most tech support roles included tracking things like customer lawsuits and dropped contracts. Maybe if the guy causes the problem, but not if the problem is company policy.
Well, that all depends on the timescales involved. We're talking Creative Labs and the sadly oxymoronic "Plays For Sure" platform. In which case, I'd expect that anyone getting that angry about a device probably isn't going to buy a second one from Creative. Which in a world where teenagers absolutely have to have the latest model iPod may prove to be a bit of an own goal to a company trying to carve a chunk of the portable media player market.
Of course, that sort of loss is to point to on a balance sheet. And even if the connection is made, it's unlikely that those who set the policy are going to accept the blame. But that doesn't mean that the company suffers no ill effects.
Presumably you intend that to mean that profits, considered over the shortest possible time-frame, are all that matter to the company? I'd agree with that. Extreme short term thinking is doing tremendous damage to the economic infrastructure all over the western world, so far as I can see.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!