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

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."