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MPAA Asks Again For Control Of TV Analog Ports
suraj.sun passes along this excerpt from the Consumerist:
"The Motion Picture Association of American wants to rent movies to TV viewers earlier in the release window, but they don't want anyone potentially streaming that video out to other appliances. That's why last week they went back to the FCC to once again ask for the power to disable analog ports on consumer television sets. This capability is called selectable output control or SOC, and the FCC banned it back in 2003. SOC would allow 'service operators, such as cable companies, to turn off analog outputs on consumer electronics devices, only allowing digital plugs' such as HDMI. The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers."
Wonder how well that would work for people using a computer with a TV tuner for watching?
Caveat Utilitor
When is the MPAA and RIAA going to be broken up as a cartel? They all price match each other, control pricing, and even sue as a group.
It's a perfect cartel. I wonder if they like OPEC? Probably.
The problem with that is, *all* sets will be of that type, or people who buy new devices would complain that their device is supposed to be new, yet they're still locked out of whatever. A few years later, they won't release any content without the anti-analog flag. At which point old TV sets won't work, (again,) and grandma won't have access to important information about hurricanes and stuff.
If the anti-analog flag is there, many people will want to use it on everything because they won't consider the negative effects. It's just human nature.
Actually, not everyone. I tried using HDMI for everything and discovered that I was getting lots of audio dropouts. So I ended up switched back to the lovely component video which works just fine, TYVM.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Thought experiment:
World without content pirates gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
World without content producers gives you access to X life enriching pieces of content.
Choose the world where X is greater.
For the pirated content consumer, the obvious ideal is a world where the number of pirates and producers are both maximized. For the person who chooses not to consume pirated content, the ideal is a world where producers are maximized, and pirates exist only to make producers greatful for paying customers and provide incentive toward price moderation. Obviously, both these ideas are presented independent of any moral position or obligations.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
Choice three: No corporate content producers, music art and drama are produced by everyone "in the small". No blockbusters. Everyone enjoys gathering around telling stories, playing music, singing. Particularly creative people make videos, movies, write plays, books, lyrics. Shakespeare wasn't signed by a label.
The way "content" is owned controlled and restricted now most people only "consume" entertainment. In my grandparent's time everyone produced entertainment. Sure, it wasn't as polished or grand as the professionally produced entertainment we are fed today. But is passive consumption of entertainment really that entertaining compared to interacting?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
For the person who chooses not to consume pirated content, the ideal is a world where producers are maximized
However, the way to maximize producers isn't necessarily a broader scope of copyright. Without a meaningful right and ability to make fair use and other unregulated uses of a copyrighted work, a lot of producers can't produce due to copyright restrictions on derivative works.
At the point when "content providers" (I really fucking hate political incorrectness...) reach into my home, and disable features on a device which I own; I feel compelled to wish someone would kill them until they are dead.
Really, the FCC has no business interfering with my usage of my communications technology until that usage interferes with some medium they regulate.
Universal Studios, Sony Pictures, etc, can kiss my fucking ass if they ever get the power to do this, I will stop buying DVD/Blu-Ray releases, cancel my subscription to DirectTV and Comcast, smash my HDTV on the doorstep of the local BestBuy and take a shit on it. I will then use multiple computers/servers spread around the globe to pirate every fucking thing I can get my grubby ex-consumer neo-pirate hands on, even if it means going to jail.
Some causes require martyrdom to see the goals come to fruition.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Sort of. MPAA members are like the corporations to whom workers owe their souls from 9 to 5. Pirates are like the unions. They prevent the MPAA from having so much control that they start to abuse consumers.
I'll explain. The MPAA members, like any corporation, have no real incentive to do any more than is necessary for the consumer. Their natural tendency is to charge the highest price they can, offer as little as they can get away with, and maximize profits by forcing people to repeatedly purchase the same content. If they could, they would use an all-rental model as the DIVX debacle demonstrated, and nobody would ever own anything. Consumers rejected that because they had DVDs as an alternative, but there's nothing preventing the industry in all its near-suicidal goodness from moving steadily toward that model.
The existence of pirates makes such goals impossible. Pirates find ways around DRM that limits rentals to being rentals. The analog hole is the last guaranteed trivial way to achieve this, and as such, it is the last resort of those who feel we should be allowed to own content. Similarly, it provides limits on how high the price of media can get because if it gets too expensive, people will just pirate it.
The real problem here is the cost of making movies. We live in an era where the technical costs of making a movie are rapidly dropping, but the cost of hiring big name stars remains insanely high, and a significant number of people think that these big names are important when choosing what movie to watch because they are a sign that the movie has the full support of a major studio and is thus less likely to suck. While there is some truth to this, that means that it is nearly impossible to significantly increase competition due to scarcity of that resource. So no matter how abusive the MPAA member companies become, there's no reason to believe that new competition will come in to fix things---no reason to believe that the free market will correct the gouging. Add to this the nature of the relationships between studios and the movie theaters, and you have a very, very difficult market to enter without tying yourself somehow to one of the major studios (e.g. the Disney/Pixar relationship before Disney bought them).
In the absence of a free market, something has to provide controls over the operation of the monopoly or oligopoly. Piracy provide those controls. In the absence of piracy, it would necessary for the government to provide those controls to protect consumers from the industry, and I'm not convinced that our politicians have the intestinal fortitude to take on the MPAA members and limit them....
Im not saying that piracy is good---it isn't. I'm merely saying I'm certain that a lack of piracy would lead to an industry that is so abusive that it would make the current industry seem like Mother Teresa.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Really, the FCC has no business interfering with my usage of my communications technology until that usage interferes with some medium they regulate.
Without the FCC's interference, "content providers" would already be able to use the communications technology that you willfully purchased that supports their disabling the analog out on your devices at the providers' whim.
It's the FCC saving you from the providers. You already surrendered to them.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The FCC approved the broadcast flag. It was defeated in court as beyond the FCCs authority. The tuner cards I use are perfectly happy to "respect" the broadcast flag. They pass it in the MPEG stream, to MythTV... which then faithfully records it. Bad MythTV, bad :-)