DMCA Loophole For Peer-to-Peer TV Show Sharing? 371
An anonymous reader writes "Fortune.com asks, "Is TV Show Swapping Legal? For those using TiVos or new Windows PCs, it just might be." Why? "The law that ensnared ... DVD hackers, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, doesn't specifically address the question of [personal video recorders]. But when it comes to the legality of hacking digital media, the law zeroes in on 'circumvention' -- did hackers have to circumvent protection to copy the video? Several hackers who have published their techniques online say they didn't have to crack anything to extract video from their TiVos""
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:3, Informative)
Screw Tivo (Score:5, Informative)
"Traditional" copyright prohibits sharing anyway (Score:2, Informative)
!DMCA != legal (Score:3, Informative)
If you pay to receive programming, and you make a videotape of it, and you give that videotape to someone who doesn't pay to receive the same programming, you're violating copyright and are breaking the law. Using a TiVo doesn't change that.
The author of that story is confused (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing new in the Tivo doing this, and it does not violate any laws. If somebody takes a copyrighted TV show and transmits it to others, they may be violating copyrights, and this has nothing to do with the DMCA or anything else.
In fact, the Replay doesn't really do much different either. The studios are suing the replay because it makes it really easy to transmit shows, and they claim that this should be illegal. (Not transmitting shows, that's already illegal. They want it to be illegal to make equipment that automates the process.)
Again, this has nothing to do with the DCMA. The DMCA made building tools that decode DVDs illegal. It doesn't actually much affect the rules on what you do with a decoded movie once you have it -- regular copyright law still applies there, and it can be illegal to make a copy of the movie for somebody else, and legal to make a backup copy for yourself.
Tivo did indeed not have any protection system in it. They used a different filesystem to store the files but otherwise they were in a minor variation of standard mpeg formats.
Circumvention required for SOME Tivos (Score:4, Informative)
I wanted to mention that extraction of video from Standalone Tivo does not require circumvention, but extraction from DirecTivo units does.
DirecTivo's store the stream from DirecTV directly to the hard disk. Though it is stored AFTER the Access Card has decrypted it, it is re-encrypted when written to the hard drive.
A smart person over at the forums wrote a kernel module that disables this (noscramble.o). This allows you to extract TYstreams (almost MPEG-2
So, from what I've read above, this loophole only applies to Standalone Tivo units.
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:there is that whole (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:4, Informative)
by glesga_kiss (596639) on Monday January 06, @02:28PM (#5027101)
I would tend to think that most people who watch recorded shows skip the commercials.
Even if the people watching the shows from a p2p download did watch the commercials, the network still wouldn't get paid for these viewings.
I have a revelation for you... they dont know that 99.997% of all viewers see them or are even watching the show. they dont know that your Tv is tuned to channel 4 from 3:30pm to 7:30 pm during the soft core porn afternoon.
the cable Tv companies do not YET collect the viewing demographics and sell them.. (I said YET.. it is coming!)
your point is moot
They get paid on the commercial UP front based on the viewers in that area.. if UHF-62 in your town has 20,000,000,000,000 viewers and has a high rating point number then they charge $$$$$$$ for that spot... even if ony 3 people watched that commercial and everyone else tuned out, they still got paid all that money for that airing.
NOBODY pays on how many people saw that show/commercial... they pay up front for X amount of subscribers at X rating for X daypart..
I'm inside TV advertising... I know this stuff.
1201(b) merely codifies Betamax (Score:3, Informative)
Contributory infringement, admittedly, already existed, but there is a redline test involving "primary purpose or effect". The DMCA doesn't require any such test to be applied if "circumvention" has occured
Actually, the DMCA does require such a test to be applied, in 17 USC 1201(b) [cornell.edu], for devices designed or marketed to break "a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title". The right to exclude others from making unauthorized fair use of a copyrighted work is not such a right. Thus, section 1201(b) merely codifies the guidelines developed in e.g. Sony v. Universal.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure about 1201(a).
Re:there is that whole (Score:3, Informative)
Not a lawyer and all that, but:
Your argument about cell phone transactions is specious, at best. It is generally illegal to record those private conversations, whether they go out over a landline or a cell transmission (because the citizenry has chosen to create/retain their rights to privacy in these cases), but I don't believe that has anything to do with copyright law.
However, even if it did, don't forget that copyright is a LIMITED monopoly, and one of the limitations of that monopoly is in situations of pressing government interest. A court ordered wiretap or a subpoena for phone records are just hte types of pressing interests that trump copyrights. Patents also have the same sort of limitations (don't forget the "taking" of the Wright airplane patents in the First World War).
Here's the link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, and this is a very good thing. I don't know how many
By the way, news channels and channels such as TechTV would probably still get by with advertisements. It is channels trying to sell content that would have to improve their business models.
Re:What's the big deal about show swapping? (Score:2, Informative)