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:techncial obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you have so many accounts that you probably can't keep anything straight anymore, including the links you're supposed to be pasting into your posts. You were probably just readying another sock to shill up your comment and ended up dazed and confused.

This is why people are giving up on TV

[stainlesssteelpat]

You have to admit this is a fairly successful business model they are starting to develop. Think about it the entertainment industry bullies tech companies into HDMI DRM use, when it's bad initially for their profits. Then when consumers buy said products like a $6000 flat screen that has bells and whistles but won't work with your VCR, Set top box or your valve amplifier. Said consumer now gets hit in the hip pocket for more tech stuff which is crippled by unnecessary electronic handshakes all so they can let their kids watch crap such as the lion the witch and the wardrobe or shark boy and lava girl when it gets broadcast. So whatâ(TM)s in it for the tech companies? Think about it you just stop producing hard copies of any film or TV shows, you only have it on pay on demand and that way if people want to see the shows/programs/whatever they have to pony up and pay for both the tech and the program. It becomes a self-propagating profit model. 1.Entertainment and tech hardware manufacturers collude. 2.Make hardware so heavily infringement proof that only digital TV and one use DVDâ(TM)s work. 3.Stop selling DVDâ(TM)s and screening free to air. 4.????? 5.Profit. The only issue comes from the net. Unregulated information is bad for their business model, same way that it's bad for just about everyone that isn't some kind of private citizen (like most of us on /.). Everyone that has power wants the internet shut down or so heavily regulated that you can't fart on your keyboard without the police finding out about it. This is precisely why I now only go to live gigs rather than buying music, don't watch TV and have rediscovered theatre. Maybe the hope of all of this will be that people will get fed up and start reading more, that way we'll end up with less Dan Brown's and more Salman Rushdie's. The bottom line is if you don't want to deal with it, Don't give the fuckers your money. The model works, and only works if they profit from it. People don't buy it, they won't make it.