Slashdot Mirror
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."
How exactly can one foreshadow something that's already happening?
No problem ...
... free alternatives
... people will just not bother
MS tried to lock down Windows and Office.
result
The Movie industry is loosing viewers in droves to the internet. If the experiance is substandard to Internet
That scary "lockdown" that you are alarming about is not what those "entertainment and broadcast lobbies" desire for the Internet. This is what they desire for their TV on the Internet, for crying out loud. This is a subtle yet important difference because contrary to what you are implying here the Internet as we know it is not going to change. So don't worry, you'll still be able to waste time on Slashdot all day long. 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? No. I just don't watch it. Viola. Problem solved. You should try it sometimes and you'll see that there is no need to scare people that they will be somehow "locked down" by having a choice to watch the TV on some additional medium.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Your point is partly true; but the part that isn't true is important.
It is the case that a fair few of the things that HDCP and friends are designed to prevent were never legal to begin with. Not all, however, are. If nothing else, building DRM that understands fair use exceptions is going to have to wait for the introduction of AI competent enough to interpret case law on the fly. Depending on the DRM and the country in question, various sorts of timeshifting and format shifting are also likely to be legal but blocked.
The problem with these DRM systems is that they, in effect, allow the companies that control them to make law just by setting a few DRM flags(under the DMCA and similar, DRM basically has force of law because you can't legally break it, and in other instances, joe user will de facto be bound by it). That is the really disturbing bit. If DRM were simply technology catching up with law, that would be one thing(still not a good thing, I would argue; but that is outside the scope of this particular argument); but DRM is something much, much, more than that. It is the expansion of technology to eclipse, and to write, law without even the pretense of legislative process.
Treating your customer as your enemy and assuming by definition that everyone buying your movie will try to create copies to spread them is also not really right in my books.
The main reason why there is a "market" at all for those copies is simply that, unless you happen to sit right in the country where the movie is shown first, you are forced to wait. Allow me to give you an example. I like Dr. House. I watch it religiously. In my country, we're now in the middle of season 3. Now, that's about 2 seasons behind. I enjoy the show, and I wouldn't mind at all to watch it in English. Actually, I'd prefer it. But I neither get the option to see it in English, nor do I get the chance to see the latest episodes. I can't even go and buy the DVDs for seasons 1-3, and I won't be able to buy season 4 when it comes out in August, because no local distributor has been chosen yet, and of course, our networks showing it here have contracts that prevent such things from happening.
Can you see why the incentive to fire up some P2P client and simply download the other two seasons is pretty high?
And it's the same for pretty much everything else. For the US, it works in reverse with Anime, which also suffer (interesting enough) from insanely crappy translations when done by some studio, yet fansubs happen to be nearly flawless and true to the original.
It's not that people wouldn't want to pay artists for their work. The problem is that you often don't even get the choice to do just that!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.