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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.
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.
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."
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.