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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.
It's so easy to pirate, so keep restricting paid services, go right ahead! You'll surely get me to switch back to paying!
The head of the copyright office has resigned and has taken a new job on the board of directors for Comcast.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What about the ISP's that force you to rent gateways and then change you to rent them with no way to buy them?
This is not the position of the copyright office, its one person's opinion from that office. They didn't have an issue with cable card.
Before 1982, EVERY phone was leased from the phone company and you had no third party options. Deregulation proved to be good thing for everybody.
I think you've got monopoly-busting confused with something else.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
so ban pc's as that is kind of what the 3rd party boxes are. They are just getting stuff from the internet and not QAM / satellite transponder.
Do you want comcast to rent your pc so they can lock it down and up change you off the wall? Are you are game then you will like our $30 /mo + $5 /mo outlet fee pro gamer system with steam*.
*games not included / display not included / internet not included.
Want to game 4K or higher at full speed then you can get a our system super system for only $50 /mo with SLI.
have your system that you want to use then you can rent our Ethernet card for only $10 /mo + $5 outlet fee (windows only / secure boot systems only / must install Comcast software that locks out network shearing)
I don't see a reasoned argument that devices like Chromecast or Amazon FireTV stick; which can deliver copy protected Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime; can't also deliver cable channels. This decision is idiotic.
What about the boxes from Canada they are the same ones as in the us most of them even have cable cards in the card slot. They just have a different software loads but they should be able to hunt and download the local software from the local cable head end.
It was briefly bad for AT&T, but they recovered nicely. By which I mean they're doing just fine, we're suffering under their thumb again.
This may be unpopular to say, but I believe she has a point.
The cable and satellite companies often have no choice on the DRM and other bundling restrictions, since those are the terms for having the content in the first place. Most people don't care about most of Disney's channels, but they do want ESPN. So Disney pretty much dictates that you take all the channels or none of them.
3rd part boxes would be bound by the same agreements, and thus would become just as locked down as the current boxes. And I'm fairly certain people don't like those forced arrangements, so if such restrictions were added to Roku's and the like, it would be just as unappealing there as it is now (with a nicer UI, but locked down all the same).
Furthermore, 3rd party boxes would have to then pay for such licensing. There is a reason Roku does NOT directly offer content, they offer clients to portals that have already negotiated for the content (Amazon, Netflix, Cable companies, etc.).
It would be CableCard all over, since your 3rd party box would have to pay the fees to be vetted by both the provider and the content owners, making it just as painful.
It's very different. There were no copyright and licensing concerns with telephones. It's a valid concern. The FCC is on the right track but it just needs to put more thought into it.
they want the HDCP lock on content
Everyboby except AT&T, don't forget that.
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.
My Comcast box comes with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port on the back. What's stopping someone from just downloading the files from the DVR onto a computer? I've done some experimenting with my MacBook Pro, mounted the DVR drive as a Firewire drive, and was able to view files using VLC, so they don't seem to be encrypted.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I know this is slashdot, where we don't read TFA, but if you'd at least read the TFS, you'd know that none of what you're saying has anything to do with this story.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Licensing is not an end user concern at least it should not be. They are not party to the negotiations etc etc. It was and should forever be legal to make a copy for personal use of things you legally had the right to watch. Aka time shifting.
We took some steps back with the conversion to HD that needs to be corrected.
It's got nothing to do with pirating, pirates will get the content. I can buy HDMI with HDCP to SDI converters and rip any digital stream off any box it's allowed since SDI is a professional standard.
No sir I dont like it.
that I don't have cable TV anymore. Screw them all and drive their 20th century panacea into the sea faster.
Bye!
Most of the good content is available elsewhere on the Net. The feed is just a commodity whereas the UI defines the user experience and perceived value. And logically that's how their pricing should break down as well. But it doesn't, so I'm off to shop in a better market.
Have gnu, will travel.
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."
That has to be the most threadbare "because piracy" excuse ever. As if anything broadcast on cable wasn't already available in any format you might wish as a torrent.
Seriously, that's like saying let's not play the top 30 on the radio 'cause someone could record them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What is this "Cable TV"? I vaguely remember it being some old fashioned improvement over "rabbit ears", but I didn't realize people still used it today.
The cable companies may win a Pyrrhic victory on this one. I finally got rid of my cable box and went completely to Netflix + over the air TV (which looks fantastic thanks to digital broadcasting -- the over-the-air channels look a *lot* better than they did on cable (even when I was paying extra for "HD") because the cable company uses some aggressive compression that leaves very visible compression artifacts).
The laggy UI is what made me decide to get rid of the box -- taking nearly a second for each page of the program guide, plus at least a second to change channels. I can't help thinking that a third party could make a much better cable box that's both faster and more usable.
And all it took was a $20 antenna for my TV hanging on the wall behind the TV, saved me around $480/year in cable fees. Granted I don't have nearly as many channels as I used to, but 100 channels of crap TV wasn't worth the money.
Aren't these just cable card devices? So the DRM is still there, still controlled by the cable company. How is this any different then supporting the ceton tuners? So are we just witnessing a fight we have already had?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I don't argue your point per se, but I will add that I agree with the person from the Copyright office. Here's my rub on it though. There's those third parties that play nice and we love them, but then there's the others and what-not that are trying to build a company and make massive money with other people's copyright.
I totally agree with the idea of making a backup copy, I disagree with some dude making millions on exploiting that idea to the fullest extent. If third party boxes became a thing, I just imagine that 99% of them would be 1% popular and play nice. 1% would be 99% popular and try to nickel and dime everyone for "features" based around content that's copyrighted. I don't have any kind of problem with the first group, however, it's always the second group that comes and ruins it for everyone and tries to call it capitalism, freedom, fighting the man or whatever...
Based on that, I would say the Copyright office is doing something we're all asking government to actually do and be proactive. The FCC really needs to head back to the drawing board on this, they've got a great idea, it's just massively flawed and they just need to iron those out. And yes, I'm pretty sure that no matter how good the FCC makes the rules, the cable companies will be there to ruin the party.
You can buy you're own with our company. I've seen many junk set top boxes that will not work with hits. In fact those foreign set top boxes are usually trash and don't work well, especially with our higher bit rate HD. Higher than direct or dish I might add.
In essence, is the person in the copyright office saying, "We can't have a corporation give out water because someone else might build their own freezer. And that would be bad for Big Freezer Inc. and Big Ice Inc. who are both owned by the conglomerate HydroTwoOxy Inc."?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The cable companies have a choice:
1) Open up their stuff, letting other people sell cable boxes.
2) Do the following:
a) Stop charging for cable boxes entirely. Not a single penny for them - you want no competition? Then give it away for free. Whether you get one box or a hundred boxes. You can charge people to replace a broken one - but only if they break it more often than once a year.
b) Remove ALL advertisements from the channel guides ( no more adverts for VOD)
c) Allow anyone that wants to make Apps for your cable boxes, that can be free or charged money. Only rule for apps is that it can't facilitate Piracy - it is specifically allowed to replace the entire cable interface, or just parts of it.
d) Also, every single cable box must be able to connect to a standard hard drive, free of charge, to expand their DVR capacity. They can use whatever kind of encryption they want to protect the saved data - but the DVR'd content must be playable on any cable box connected to that same account.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It seems like the goal should be that no one is forced to buy or rent specific hardware to view content. The cable companies need to open the protocol so that anyone can manufacture equipment sufficient to allow a legitimate cable subscriber to view content provided by the cable operator. This wan't an issue when cable was analog - my TV had the capability to view content and I did not require the use of cable equipment. Now I have to have the cable company set top to view content - I shouldn't be forced to use the cable company equipment to watch TV.
But if we can do Blu-Ray on both hardware and software player variants, then I fail to see why we can't do the same with Cable Boxes.
Comcast just doesn't want to give up their free money generator via forcing folks to rent their hardware.
If they don't pull their heads out of the sand and soon, they won't have enough subscribers left for anyone to care.
It's just part of the turf war. Nothing offtopic about it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I signed an anti compete clause for my job, why not make every one working for the govt above the level of mail carrier do the same?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Actually, I don't think you're talking about something equivalent, even though I know what you're saying. (I have Comcast too, and my set top box also has a FireWire port on the back of it.)
The thing is though? In order to download the files on your DVR to your computer, you'd still have to do all of that via the hardware Comcast provided you -- meaning you'd also presumably only have access to content that you were paying your monthly subscription for in the first place. (I remember when people first discovered that ability to connect some of the digital set-top boxes to computers via FireWire, the whole "piracy" thing was a hot topic. But it quickly settled back down when people realized it was just a digital version of exactly what you could always do with a VCR or DVDR connected through a different set of connectors.)
I think what the cable providers don't like with the current FCC proposal is the idea that they lose direct control over what the set-top boxes do that decode their programming. For example... What if someone designed a digital set top box that worked the way the Plex media server works on a computer, where you can share your content with other users? One person could pay for a Showtime or HBO subscription, record a bunch of shows to a DVR built into such a box, and then allow any of their "friends" to stream the content to their own box of the same make/model, regardless of what their personal cable package contained in it.
The fear of Comcast and TWC etc are not about piracy. This is a straight up control mechanism. They have already had years to open up cable cards to do similar and have dragged their feet at every attempt. the reason the FCC is attempting this is because the prior non forced attempts have been responded to not in good faith by the ISP's. So the options here are to: Hold them legally accountable for their failure top open up cable cards until they solve their probably internally, or to move ahead without the the ISP's approval.
China and other countries rip us off every day and nothing happens to them, so why should we care?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At best those third party boxes will push the cable companies to open up theirs. If it's free with services vs pay for them 99% is going to use whatever the cable co gives them.
No sir I dont like it.
Not for green Bakelite phone manufacturers.
It's bitztream, the autism-hating Slashdot troll!
SBC was AT&T. That's like claiming you're left hand isn't a part of your body.
Google 'kodi box'. Amazon has dozens of models for sale.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Forget telephones, we have a much better analogy.
VCRs.
We've already been down this road with VCRs. The cable companies and their (presumably) paid shill can fuck right off.
Yeah, except that the encryption scheme / DRM is half assed, so in order to get certification to decode it, you must submit your solution to testing by Cable Labs, so as to make sure that you are playing by their rules. Otherwise they won't let you play in their sandbox.
And Cable Labs certification is incredibly expensive, so only TiVo does it. Microsoft used to, but killed WMC and no longer does.
The thing is we can already infringe the hell out of their copyrights the way things are right now. There is no shortage of websites available to stream or download anything we want for free. The only thing the FCC ruling would change is make things better for legitimate consumers and cut the cable companies out of their precious set-top box rental fees.
Yeah, I know, there still are a few people (like me) who have an old CRT TV that could, in fact, accommodate a "set-top" box.
and I went into a dream
she, laughing and weeping at once
"take me away"
That was just a Calgon commercial you left playing on your old VHS recording of Murder She Wrote.
"take a valuable good...and deliver it to third parties who are not in privity with the copyright owners" Sounds like they are making the argument that every turntable, tapedeck, and CD player should have been build and sold by the record companies. Phrase it that way and no one would agree with them.
horror vacui
"AT&T can trace its origin back to the original Bell Telephone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell after his invention of the telephone. One of that company's subsidiaries was American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), established in 1885, which acquired the Bell Company on December 31, 1899 for legal reasons, leaving AT&T as the main company. AT&T established a network of subsidiaries in the United States and Canada that held a government-authorized phone service monopoly, formalized with the Kingsbury Commitment, throughout most of the twentieth century. This monopoly was known as the Bell System, and during this period, AT&T was also known by the nickname Ma Bell. For periods of time, the former AT&T was the world's largest phone company.
In 1982, US regulators broke up the AT&T monopoly, requiring AT&T to divest its regional subsidiaries and turning them each into individual companies. These new companies were known as Regional Bell Operating Companies, or more informally, Baby Bells. AT&T continued to operate long distance services, but as a result of this breakup, faced competition from new competitors such as MCI and Sprint. Southwestern Bell was one of the companies created by the breakup of AT&T. "
"As part of the breakup of the old AT&T during 1984, the telephone operating companies Southern Bell based in Atlanta and South Central Bell based in Birmingham, Alabama combined to operate under the name BellSouth Telecommunications.
... Toward its end, BellSouth realigned itself in two important areas, wireless and broadband. In 2001, they merged BellSouth Mobility, their wireless enterprise, with SBC's wireless services, and took 40% stake in the resulting company, Cingular Wireless. The new company provided a large percentage of BellSouth's revenue. This joint venture continued after SBC purchased the old AT&T and rebranded as AT&T Inc. "
Oh, and I use to work for their competitor, ITT.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Sure sure... give us more reasons to cord cut already.
Also laughable that they'd argue this would have any effect on piracy... the discussion regarding relevant content from cable networks and piracy is already over. You can get ALL the pirated content you want regardless if FCC's set top rules get implemented or not.
With pirated series' episodes and whatnot getting released almost instantly through multiple channels, I can't imagine what set top boxes would be able to do to make piracy easier.
At the very least, if set top box companies started pirating content directly, they'd have a target to point their lawyers at.
But hey, I don't mind... I've been out of cable for years now, streaming has all I need, and the faster these conglomerates die, the better for me. They can keep shooting themselves on their foot for all I care. It's quite sad that lots of people still have to keep paying absurd prices for content they don't want just to get a couple of things (sports, shows) they do, but that model will eventually crash on it's face. Might not happen in our generation, but things are changing fast for new generations.
This is the fight happening in Canada right now. The Cable Co's want these Kodi boxes banned because they are facilitating piracy.
KEY POINT: WE HAVE A MORE LOCKED-IN SYSTEM IN CANADA, NO CABLECARDS BUT IDENTICAL TO THE US IN EVERY WAY.
As much as I have sympathy for the Copyright Cartel, this is one case where they are full of it. HDMI devices are supposed to transmit the "do not copy this floppy" flag, and the fact that there are known work-arounds to this (break the DRM on the Blueray, use a HDMI splitter with an authorized device to "copy" the key to a second device) and there isn't are serious dent in their profits proves that their concerns are exaggerated.
BUT. BUTT BUTTTTTT. That said, the devices cable and multicast IPTV, and VOD (also IPTV) user interfaces are some of the crappiest software I've ever had to deal with and if I could just search the schedule with my computer, I'd be so much happier.
Kodi devices are just junk-tier stripped-down computers with "plugins" for playing everything from licensed content to unlicensed content, and blurs the line between the two. It's not unlike an unlocked cell phone. Thus it's not really any more user friendly than a cable box (often worse) but an enterprising person can put all the "pirate" plugins in and sell the device (which is my point above what they are selling in Canada) and just go "hey I'm just the hardware sales man"
They tried this in Canada before with the grey market (us subscription) and black market satellite pirate cards, and the pirates didn't get away with it then, they won't get away with it now.
Which means that the copyright cartel is right, but they're crying wolf before even opening the door. The right solution is to arm-wrestle a bit over "binary blobs" and have a plugin that "downloads" the EPG from the cable/IPTV/VOD-IPTV provider (I wrote something like this once for a Microsoft Media-room setup) and then downloads device-and-subscriber specific decryption keys or however it's setup (Microsoft Mediaroom is actually unencrypted, but it's also multicast, so you can't just arbitrarily change to channels you don't have a subscription to, you actually need to tune one of your authorized devices to that channel first, and then tell your PC to join the multicast) the device can do a "GET HBO.ARM7?1470358703" and the headend can return a decryption module and have an expiry timestamp of when to use the next blob, and only advance the decryption blob every 5-30 minutes. In general the only thing the blob does provide a way to decode the video and audio stream to pipe it to the HCCP source and in the output of the stream. Linux users will complain about black-box binaries that might nuke their system, but I'd rather this approach than nothing.
So my cable company requires a STB to get... anything. :-)
They sell me a "package",X many channels,.... oh,you need this box to watch them, and you get to rent it, forever.
And, you can't buy one, or another device to replace it. Talk about a "captive audience"?
they advertise 2 bazillion channels, but its a Switched Digital Video system, They have all the channels, but they only serve up one channel at a time to your box,
so if you are like me, watching 6 channels a once... the lag of tearing down a session,starting up a new one for the next channel requested really ruins the whole TV experience for me
In my thinking they're kinda misrepresenting things
The Cable companies don't want to let go of the hardware rental business that their business plan is based on.
$5.00 a month for a box, that's for Basic cable? (no dvr etc)
$3.00 a month for a cable card ( yeah, they own the only mfr. of cable cards too)
multiply that by every TV/device in the house
and oh you need a cable wiring repair plan too...
I've been watching the HDHomeRun DVR software with some interest, but it means buying a different tuner (one made by SiliconDust) and it still isn't shipping. Their "beta" does everything but encrypted streams, so it's useless to me at this time.
My whole point is that I shouldn't have to throw away perfectly working hardware because Time Warner is run by fucking assholes.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I don't agree with the person from the Copyright office.
There are valid legal uses for being able to use third-party cable boxes. Therefore, the fact that they make a certain form of illegal activity easier isn't good enough reason to ban them. There have been lots of proposals to ban things that make breaking the law easier that were stopped because the things had good legal uses.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can buy HDMI to whatever converters that support HDCP. The $15 HDMI splitters for example pretend to be a HDCP compliant Samsung TV and then copy the digital signal without HDCP onto the outputs AND it works.
The problem being off course they don't accurately copy EDID and thus they don't work for anything but "TV" resolutions but a "good" splitter will correctly support EDID and by extension HDCP and then you get snow on the second display when HDCP content is displayed (or when a Windows machine is connected). So I'm still needing to strip out the HDCP signal in order to have Windows work on a split HDMI signal (so I'm using a programmable EDID in between the source and the splitter).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
silicon dust has been saying that for at least 6 years now. I have one of their first HDHomeRuns and they said CableCard support was "soon". Now they don't even support my HDHR anymore and instead want me to buy a brand new one to get the latest firmware.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I had tivo for more than a decade first directivo to get pure digitial copies of direct tv and then tivo with cable cards. Tivo is like apple now they keep locking things down more, it took forever to steam from one tivo to another in the home. A major issue with these heavily locked down systems if they slow progress. Tivo ends up being a rent seeker selling you hardware and then charging outrageous fee's to keep them working.
At the end of the day everybody needs to realize none of this should have ever been legal, we let them get away with a couple decades of its digital so we need more protections. With that we missed having firewire connect the whole media center much they they are trying to do with HDMI 15 years later.
CCI's copy once is part of the problem, the cable companies should not be in the position to decide how and how often you copy something. None of this puts a dent in piracy it merely keeps consumers locked into ecosystems.
No sir I dont like it.
Your use case is needing to strip off HDCP from a PC output and record it? Seems like a lot of effort vs recoding it from the frame buffer.
No sir I dont like it.
No, my use case is accurately splitting a High Definition 4:3 resolution from a computer to two outputs without HDCP interfering. I actually have a common use case that's prevented by HDCP and thus requires an "illegal stripper". I could use SDI (one of the outputs supports it) or other professional non-HDCP crippled HD "legally" if I want to invest another $10k or so in "professional and licensed" gear but I did it for ~$100.
End-to-end HDCP protection within the OS doesn't allow you to copy the framebuffer either (VNC just shows a black window instead of playback). That's why Windows Vista and up, if your hardware supports end-to-end HDCP will use HDCP for the entire OS some time during boot even if you don't need playback of any media. OS X at least only enables HDCP if iTunes or other protected content requires it, but otherwise (DVD playback etc) it doesn't give the gray snow on the second display.
It just illustrates I could easily convert a so-called protected signal digitally without any loss of resolution or artifacts because there are plenty of Chinese knockoffs that inadvertently let you do it. The system is broken.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The "third party boxes" referenced in the article are 99% strictly no DRM streaming linux media boxes. Anything they can stream are already freely copy-able from non-encrypted, over the air signals. Even with a cablecard based configuration, it's non-trivial to capture a DRM free copy. of rebroadcasted network television content (i.e., the 6 o'clock news delivered over your local cable company's run into your home). Much cable company chest pounding over nothing....
The encryption flags can be set 3 ways, actually:
Copy-Freely = unencrypted. This can be recorded directly to a PC or Mac or D-VHS unit. You could also play back a D-VHS tape which contains material flagged as Copy-Freely and use the 1394 port to send it to a Mac or PC (or even another D-VHS unit). If your recording were flagged as Copy-Freely then, yes, you would be able to transfer that to your computer via the 1394 port.
Copy-Once = encrypted. This can only be recorded once and no duplications\transfers are allowed. D-VHS units are able to record this, but you can't copy the tape. You only get that first generation, and it is not possible to create a 2nd or 3rd generation copy, nor is it possible to transfer the recording to a Mac or PC.
Copy-Never = This can't be recorded whatsoever (OnDemand/PPV type stuff)
Except for pay-per-view type content, the cable providers usually set the flag to "Copy-Once" with the 5C encryption, not "Copy-Never" -- so you get the chance to make one personal recording directly off the back of the 1394 port into a D-VHS VCR with the "iLink" (Firewire) connector on the back of it. Those units, unlike a PC, are licensed to decrypt the 5C for the purpose of making the first generation recording.