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.

[Opportunist]

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.

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

[UnderCoverPenguin]

To create an ISP, it takes more than a few routers and some fat pipe to some uplink. It's the infamous last mile. And for that last mile, you need the cooperation of a lot of governmental agencies

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.

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

[mcrbids]

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!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I wonder.

[Opportunist]

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.