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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.
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.
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.
Which has so far proved 100% successful at preventing any high def content from being pirated... oh wait...
that I don't have cable TV anymore. Screw them all and drive their 20th century panacea into the sea faster.
Bye!
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.
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?
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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.
You're saying there's no choice like that status quo has no alternative. It could be made illegal to geo-restrict streaming from overseas in the spirit of free-trade agreements. If consumers could connect to streaming services in Asia that have lower fees, American companies would change their practices.
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.
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