US Copyright Office Sides With Cable Companies Against FCC's Set Top Rules (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The United States Copyright Office has sided with cable companies in their fight against a Federal Communications Commission plan to boost competition in the TV set-top box market. The FCC proposal would force pay-TV providers to make channels and on-demand content available to third parties, who could then build their own devices and apps that could replace rented set-top boxes. Comcast and other cable companies complain that this will open the door to copyright violations, and US Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante agrees with them. The Copyright Office provided advice to the FCC at the FCC's request, and Pallante yesterday detailed the concerns her office raised in a letter to members of Congress who asked her to weigh in. "In its most basic form, the rule contemplated by the FCC would seem to take a valuable good -- bundled video programming created through private effort and agreement under the protections of the Copyright Act -- and deliver it to third parties who are not in privity with the copyright owners, but who may nevertheless exploit the content for profit," Pallante wrote. "Under the Proposed Rule, this would be accomplished without compensation to the creators or licensees of the copyrighted programming, and without requiring the third party to adhere to agreed-upon license terms." There are already "third-party set-top box devices, mainly produced overseas, that are used to view pirated content delivered over the Internet," and the FCC's plan could expand the market to include devices "designed to exploit the more readily available [cable TV] programming streams without adhering to the prescribed security measures," Pallante wrote. Cable companies are willing to pledge industry-wide commitment, but have expressed no desires of leaving control over the UI.

Comments

Users side with pirating content for free

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so easy to pirate, so keep restricting paid services, go right ahead! You'll surely get me to switch back to paying!

Re:How's this different from telephone deregulatio

[jthill]

I think you've got monopoly-busting confused with something else.

Re:How's this different from telephone deregulatio

[number6x]

If by "they're doing just fine", you mean that they lost so much money and were on the verge of going out of business and sold everything, even their name, then you have a point.

The former AT&T is a now a small subsidiary of the former Southern Bell Corporation (SBC). The company you now see calling itself AT&T is really SBC who gobbled up AT&T and a bunch of other baby bells.

The federal government split AT&T into long distance and several local phone companies (baby bells). The Feds first deregulated the long distance business allowing for competition which led to price drops and then to declining profits. The plan was that a few years after long distance was deregulated, the local baby bells would be deregulated and their local monopolies would be broken up and opened to competition. This second step never happened. The local providers kept their monopolies, consolidated to become a few very large local monopolies, and even bought out the failing AT&T.

AT&T is dead. SBC, thanks to its government backed monopoly on local phone service, is doing "just fine."

Re:just an opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you're not 100% wrong, in the sense that when, say, the President says to Iran "we will not pay a ransom" it's just one person's opinion. Of course, it happens to be that the person is the head of state, the top executive officer, etc., so it pretty much is the position of the United States.

Much like when the Register of Copyrights speaks, she speaks for the Office.

Re:How's this different from telephone deregulatio

[Solandri]

The AT&T you describe was already dead. When AT&T was broken up in 1983:

• The equipment manufacturing branch became Lucent Technologies, which is now Alcatel-Lucent.
  • The networking branch later spun off from Lucent to become Avaya.
  • The telephone manufacturing branch later spun off from Lucent to become VTech / Advanced American Telephones.
• The research division became Bell Labs, which is now Nokia Bell Labs (Microsoft only owns Nokia Mobile).
• The left-over telephone sanitisers, account executives, hair dressers, tired TV producers, salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives and management consultants became the AT&T Long Distance that SBC eventually bought.

Re:How's this different from telephone deregulatio

[MachineShedFred]

100% correct.

I am a Time Warner subscriber. Because of their abuse of the CCI "CopyOnce" flag that they put on every single show that they legally can, it reduces my options for a decoder box to the following, due to the CableLabs certification for decrypting the content:

1. Rented box from Time Warner that is horrible, and they charge obscene amounts of monthly fees for;
2. Tivo;
3. Windows Media Center, which is now EOL and doesn't exist in Microsoft's current operating system.

No other cable company abuses the CCI flag this way. Not Charter. Not Cox. Not Comcast. Clearly there are not contractual obligations with the content providers, or the other cable operators would have to do the same thing. Time Warner does this specifically to limit customer choice, and lock subscribers into option #1, which is a cash cow for them.

If they turned off that bullshit and used the CCI flag properly (e.g. for premium content where there actually are contractual obligations), then I would have half a dozen other options available to me including open-source MythTV.