Draft of 'Broadcast Flag' Treaty Now Available 324
The Importance of writes "If you liked the broadcast flag, you're going to love WIPO's proposed 'broadcast flag' treaty (PDF link). The draft treaty will give copyright-like rights to broadcasters, cablecasters and, if the US gets its way, webcasters. As a broadcaster, you wouldn't have to own the copyright in what you broadcast, but you could still stop people from recording your broadcast, reproducing it or distributing it. The treaty also includes DMCA-like protections, in case you try to circumvent the broadcast flag. The treaty is going to be discussed in Geneva, June 7-9. The draft is discussed over on Corante.com and late last year on the DMCA activists list."
This really won't change a thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Even after the existing non compliant decoders/recorders/etc on the market are retired to due age or death, newer hardware which ignores such protections would still be available, you'd just have to pay a fair amount.
Uh. What's wrong with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see what's so outrageous about this.
Too many bosses (Score:3, Interesting)
BAH!
Those who won't follow it can't be forced to and those who will aren't offending anyway.
Taiwan will still be the primary source of bootleg video movie and software and the US will be a primary consumer.
Re:"Fair Use" What's that? (Score:5, Interesting)
Content (Score:5, Interesting)
Good content sometimes makes money.
Bad content sometimes makes money.
Good content sometimes loses money.
Bad content sometimes loses money.
YET people still make money making content WITHOUT restrictions on "fair use". The question is, does RESTRICTING fair use make MORE money or LESS money?
The various media outlets know that CONTENT is going to be King soon, and that Advertisements are slowly going to lose out.
They are trying to prop up revenue streams with bad ideas that aren't going to work. All technological measures can be twarted, and in the long run, do not work.
People will pay for content worth consuming. Bands will have to play more concerts, poets will have to do more readings etc. Recording is/was just a new form of revenue which has approached the end of its useful life, in regards to generating a profit stream.
Now we are going to have to go back to what worked 200 years ago, before we had TV, Radio and the Internet.
States of the broadcast flag? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the discussion following a similar article a few months ago, someone posted a list of the different states for the broadcast flag, and their corresponding values (ie. 000 forever, 001 1 hour, 010 2 hours, etc.). However, I've been unable to find it again.
Does anyone have this information that they could re-post here? It's pretty relevant to the current discussion.
Re:This really won't change a thing (Score:5, Interesting)
such a flag would pretty much be ignored by most systems if implemented.
At the moment, sure. However I don't doubt for a moment that there is a concentrated effort to develop and patent a chip which all broadcasts will have to pass through before it hits the TV set. The V-Chip is already in TVs but that's just to keep kids from seeing "bad" TV, the next step is having the broadcasters control what we do with the signals, as if we're all children.
nb: I cancelled my cable months ago
Call me crazy, but should we worry about a "flag"? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, here's how I think it will shake out. There will be a small bit sequence in a digital broadcast that says "do not copy". It will be trivial to add that support to hardware, and simple to include that in broadcasts.
AND
Maybe, eventually, some company somewhere will sue people who bypass this signal, or a company who makes a signal filter. When that happens, hopefully they will have the balls to take it through the court system to try and positively affirm the public's rights the way previous cases have.
- JoeShmoe
.
It's nice to know that we are going to pay for thi (Score:2, Interesting)
I paid for the TV set.
I paid for the PC. (The P is for Personal, remember?)
They came up with the DVD player and the Xbox. Fine, make those gadgets able to read DVD and obey *Their* rules. That's implied.
If they want PCs to read them too, well then, they can't have it both ways!
These TV people and Spammers want the same thing: a Free Ride on US.
Entitlement (Score:3, Interesting)
We Americans as a whole have become a bunch of self-important, arrogant, whiny twits, who seem to believe that we are owed something simply because we exist.
GPL license for entertainment (Score:3, Interesting)
Standard disclaimer - I am an entertainer, and I do both "freeware" shows (open mic nite) and paid shows.
Re:"Fair Use" What's that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not as long as I (and about a million other Engineering graduates) know how to build ADCs and DACs from scratch.
Just wait... one day you'll have to go to a DMCA accredited school for those courses and sign legal forms saying you'll only use your knowledge for Good (company profits) and not Evil (fair use)
Re:DMCA & Such (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Call me crazy, but should we worry about a "fla (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no MAYBE in that sentence. It is absolutely going to happen. With the DMCA tied to this, it will be illegal to even try and make a machine that will ignore the broadcast bit. And they've learned from their mistakes from DeCeSS, and failing to sue DVD-John from Norway.
The companies are slowly lining up everything exactly the way they need it to hit a home run and have an iron fist on this right out of the starting gate.
Ever wonder why HDTV is going so slow in catching on? Because they want to get all this crap out of the way to start with.
And the U.S. government will pass ANY LAW they can to make this happen because they have a deadline on selling all the HDTV airwave range to these companies. They desperately HAVE to sell this spectrum to the content companies because it's been allocated in their budgets for many years now.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
After all, the UN has always stood for freedom.
Until you read Article 29, Section 3.
Re:DMCA & Such (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
I know I'm just talking to an idiot kneejerk redneck from BackWater, Alabayma, but how is that different than Article. III, Section. 3 of the US constitution, which explicitly talks about treason?
What about Software Radio (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:oh, well (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Protectionism Double Standard (Score:5, Interesting)
Sooner or later, the whole system is going to implode. And it'll be nasty. I doubt restricting people's ability to record their favourite TV shows will be the catalyst... but it's not going to help. (Maybe Ashcroft's anti-Pr0n crusade will be a contributing factor!)
This will hurt HDTV (Score:2, Interesting)
My understanding is that the broadcast flag (at least in the US) is primarily aimed at High Definition broadcasts sent over the air, not via cable or satellite. Analog VCR's, and non-HD Direct Tivos won't be affected (I don't know about cable).
The way I see it, this will threaten the adaptation of HDTV by the American public before the deadline set by Congress (2006? 2007?), and cause the broadcasters more angst than copying.
For myself, I'm quite happy with analog TV (the little that I watch it). I have no intentions of spending a fortune for a High Def home theater. And, if I have to choose between High Def and my Tivo, the Tivo will win hands-down.
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are you asking me? I didn't say it was acceptable. I think the UN's lack of action was less acceptable, however. Nobody seems to care about that. Guess it's easier to hate the US than it is to see the problem that the UN created.
"Untill you realize that big friend Israel has been racking about double that amount of resolutions since 1867 alone.. when is the USA gonna take action there?"
Not really relevant to this dicussion, sorry.
"The bottomline is that GW and soem peopel he appointed to his government had an issue to settle with Sadam still. GW because he doesn't like peopel who try to kill his dad, and some peopel in his government because of wanting to finish what they had started when Bush senior was president."
Not a very strong point as Clinton had Saddam's ousting on his schedule as well. Even if this is about revenge for attempting assasination of Bush Sr., there's still the matter of the rest of the staff going along with it. Not very impressed with this argument.
"The rest fof it was a partially made-up, and completely blown out of proportion argument to justify it."
Perhaps. The problem is we don't know if the info was made up, or just unreliable. It's bad either way, but it would be interesting to know from a motive stand point.
One thing to consider, though, is re-election. Would Bush really roll the dice to make up a reason to hit Iraq and risk it being sniffed out just before the 04 election? Frankly, I'm not convinced of this. I mean seriously, how would he possibly talk Blair into going in on it? It's possible, but it doesn't make that much sense.
"Luckily there are many Americans who are sick of the idiot attitude of their current government as well and don't want to be ruled by a bunch of lying fascists, I hope they manage to do something about it because the way things are now, the USA is going to cause a major war if not a 3rd world war."
Heh. Well the only way we're going to fix our government is to radically change how people get into office in the first place. There is a lot of bad motivators out there to get into office, and a lot of crappy ways (i.e. abuse of the media) to get in there. It's not a matter of electing the right man, that's futile, it's a matter of removing those bad influences.
As for the 3rd world war, sorry, no, that's just not in our future. I don't doubt that more blood will be spilled, but it's very difficult to imagine that it'd escalate to nuclear proportions. A lot of things would have to change.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not exactly, I guess it is easier to blame the UN for the consistant undermining by the former USSR and the USA mostly (China had a bit of a share as well)
Does the UN need reform? definitely. But one of the most needed reforms is getting rid of the veto. That would have meant that France would have been unable to sabotage the discussion about Iraq (maybe with the same, maybe with a different outcome) and it would stop the USA from sabotaging any efford to get a less one sided picture of the situation in the middle east.
> Not really relevant to this dicussion, sorry.
As you can read from the above, it is very relevant because in both cases the inaction of the UN is caused by the exact same thing.
Also, it is relevant because the USA uses the exact same argument to block any actions regarding the middle east (linking it to other unresolved situations)
> Heh. Well the only way we're going to fix our government is to radically change how people get into office in the first place. There is a lot of bad motivators out there to get into office, and a lot of crappy ways (i.e. abuse of the media) to get in there. It's not a matter of electing the right man, that's futile, it's a matter of removing those bad influences
And there I can agree completely.
> As for the 3rd world war, sorry, no, that's just not in our future. I don't doubt that more blood will be spilled, but it's very difficult to imagine that it'd escalate to nuclear proportions. A lot of things would have to change.
You really think so?
It may be hard to imagine from your point of view, but that would be because of being out of touch with what the behavior of the current administration is triggering outside the USA.
In the end the most dangerous part of what the current administration is doing is demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. That is simply bound to make you a lot of enemies. SO while they may not be the first one to hit the button, they very much create the circumstances in which dangerous idiots can gather popular support and do very foolish things.
Just to get something straigt, I do not believe the USA as such is evil, nor that its peopel are. I do however believe that there are a few very misguided ideas about the world that have gotten a hold there, esp. among the current administration and their closest supporters, but with a resonance among a much broader part of the population.
You can get away for a while with not caring about that rest of the world with regards to what they think and want, but seeing how they have like almost 20x the number of people, and happen to have most of the real dangerous tech as well, that is really not going to last, and is bound to backfire very badly. That is why I am saying they have a decent chance of triggering a 3rd world war, I wasn't so much saying they'd start it directly.
Re:Protectionism Double Standard (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bring on the night (Score:1, Interesting)
The hardware he buys will have DRM included in every aspect of its operation. So, since he stays in that narrow realm of allowed usage, Joe will not have any problems. (The HD-DVD is CPRM protected, so any device that can read it, won't make copies, or let you copy it to a PC).
The problem comes in when you or I want to go beyond viewing it on our industry licensed and approved hardware.. If I want to pull the video into my editing program, to trim it down and remove commercials before archiving.. I'm out of luck. If I want to view it on my open source operating system, I'm out of luck. If i want to view it on my current PC, which does not have the DRM built in, I'm out of luck. If I want to transcode the HDTV program down to DVD resolution, or into MPEG4, for viewing on my laptop or archival, I am out of luck...
The question is, will the outcry from the more advanced users be enough to impede the big media players and all the congressmen they own? I doubt it.
This treaty is a sneaky way to bypass fair use (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
It blows me away how many people are completely unaware of why the UN was created. It wasn't created to be a world government body to solve all the world's problems. It was created to prevent WW III, which primarily involving giving the super powers a forum to work out disagreements instead of declaring war. The atom bomb had a lot to do with why the UN was created.
Veto power was and still is the only means of keeping the superpowers (those with the most nukes) involved, primarily the US, Russia and China. This hasn't changed. Proposing getting rid of veto power is an invitation to nuclear holocaust, because the US, Russia and China would simply withdraw. They have no incentive to permit smaller nations to dictate what they can and cannot do. If a ruling passed they disagreed with they could either ignore it, or go to war if the ruling resulted in harm to their country (e.g., global embargo of the US.) The veto power is the only thing that protects them from "majority rule".
This seems illogical to a lot of people, particularly if you subscribe to the philosophy that the majority is always right. But you really have to ignore the concept and reality of what a superpower is to pretend that no veto could ever work. Being a superpower means that even the UN and all the nations in the world can't force you to do something that you don't want to do. The solution? Why create a war over it when you can simply veto it?
The reason France was given veto power is slightly different, but at the time it revolved around ensuring stability in Europe.