Digital TV Foreshadows Erosion of Net Rights

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager offers insight on how digital TV is rapidly heading toward the kind of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet. Standards such as HDMI and HDCP are acting in concert to strip your equipment of its functionality, displaying 'incompatibility' messages when plugged into older HDMI-enabled devices, shutting down analog outputs when active, and requiring balky handshake credentials that force many consumers to reboot their TVs to recover permission to watch them. Even broadcast flagging, which has been overturned by the Court of Appeals, is still on the de-facto table, as the entertainment lobby retains the power to bully technology companies into baking broadcast flagging into their wares. Sure, digital TV has far fewer points of origin than the Internet and is therefore easier to control, but, as Yager writes, 'Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment' — and it is likely through that equipment that the entertainment and broadcast lobbies will chip away at your rights on the Web."

I wonder.

How exactly can one foreshadow something that's already happening?

Re:I wonder.

I know the telecoms are limiting bandwidth [slashdot.org] and dropping niche services [slashdot.org], but at least I haven't had any garbled junk land in my browser yet with the message "Upgrade your service to see this website".

Re:I wonder.

Worse yet, "you can't watch this webpage from your country", and not because the webpage doesn't want you to.

Re:I wonder.

Tor is your friend [torproject.org]
It may be our only option-onion routers to do what we want.

Re:I wonder.

Only until the studios notice the insane traffic going to certain nodes, shut them off, then sue the providers of exit nodes for providing a service that allows the circumvention of DRM. I'm fairly sure you can bend the DMCA that way, too, the law seems pretty flexible.

Re:I wonder.

I'm pretty sure they got very upset and maybe even outright hostile to you when you told them that they can't use their tools as intended and that the music they bought doesn't work anymore. I'm sure you had to deal with a lot of verbal abuse because of it all.

But what happened then? Did they sue? Did they cancel their contract? Or, what I'd rather believe, did they leave it at that?

What's the net effect? So they buy stuff, it doesn't work, it pisses them off, they yell at the call center agent... how does that reduce the profit of the company? Because that's all that matters.

Re:I wonder.

Remember that BBC is a non-profit entity funded by TV tax [wikipedia.org].
The international bandwidth costs come from those taxes, so it wouldn't be fair to the brits.

It would be nice if they made ad-sponsored videos, though. BBC news site already works that way, international users have advertisements rendered in the pages.

So:True, I wonder, what did we expect?

Capitalism, "Open" (as in FREEDOM) market competition, sound economic policy and laws....

Damn fools, that shit died years ago, get over it and start supporting our New American Ways of "Corporate-Welfare" socialism, Institutional Privatization of Personal Intellectual Property (IP-PIP), Government Bailout Protection (GBP) and Special Tax Incentives (STI) to support amoral Corporatist, Politician, and Clergy executive pay and privileges.

There is a new and better class of US Citizens representing their mantra "Separate, but equal" as the New America promise.

The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

No problem ...

MS tried to lock down Windows and Office.
result ... free alternatives

The Movie industry is loosing viewers in droves to the internet. If the experiance is substandard to Internet ... people will just not bother

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

The Movie industry is loosing viewers in droves to the internet. If the experiance is substandard to Internet ... people will just not bother

Tough call ... I've seen my share of movies with laughably bad subtitles, but something tells me I'll have to keep coming back to the internet to get my hit of really bad spelling and grammar.

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

Great. Now give me a free ISP (as in freedom, not as in doesn't cost) and we're set.

You are aware that we're heading towards (or already arrived at) a de facto monopoly for ISPs, yes? And there is heavy lobbying to keep it that way.

To create an ISP, it takes more than a few routers and some fat pipe to some uplink. It's the infamous last mile. And for that last mile, you need the cooperation of a lot of governmental agencies, whether you want to build that last line through a wire above the ground or below, even if you want to use wireless technology, you need some sort of permit. If you don't already, just wait and see.

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

To create an ISP, it takes more than a few routers and some fat pipe to some uplink. It's the infamous last mile. And for that last mile, you need the cooperation of a lot of governmental agencies

You also need a willing backbone provider, all of which would also be your competitors. so you'll end up being a vassal of one of them.

Even if you were able to negotiate peerage with other ISPs, most of them are going to be vassals of the big ones.

Much as I would love to see a huge geek co-op raise a new net (Internet III?), I just don't think it is possible anymore.

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

MS tried to lock down Windows and Office.
result ... free alternatives

Do you have any idea how much capital investment it takes to develop an "average" consumer electronic device? A modern semiconductor chip? A "simple" interface like IEEE-1394, or DVI, or HDMI, or DisplayPort?

Any schmoe can download GCC and start writing commercial-grade software. But free alternatives for silicon design and Open Access silicon fabs don't (meaningfully) exist.

It just kills me every time I see HDCP as a marketing bullet point, and not on the defects list where it belongs...

Schwab

Re:The more you squeeze, the more they slip though

Didn't I read somewhere that television viewing was actually DROPPING? [breitbart.com] Come up with crappy shows and reruns and wonder why viewership is declining? Perhaps the writer's strike had something to do with it?

Perhaps it's because of Youtube and Vimeo? In my household, we probably average about as much YT as TV, even with a dish DVR. We don't watch commercials much at all, and what network a show is on is, for us, irrelevant because it records the shows we want, not the stations we like.

Anybody who'd say that things haven't radically changed is simply oblivious to the fact that they have. Business is no longer usual!

Not exactly

That scary "lockdown" that you are alarming about is not what those "entertainment and broadcast lobbies" desire for the Internet. This is what they desire for their TV on the Internet, for crying out loud. This is a subtle yet important difference because contrary to what you are implying here the Internet as we know it is not going to change. So don't worry, you'll still be able to waste time on Slashdot all day long. That having been said, I personally consider the television itself to be an utter waste of time (or a "lockdown" if you will) but do I post messages on Slashdot about it? No. I just don't watch it. Viola. Problem solved. You should try it sometimes and you'll see that there is no need to scare people that they will be somehow "locked down" by having a choice to watch the TV on some additional medium.

Re:Not exactly

That having been said, I personally consider the television itself to be an utter waste of time (or a "lockdown" if you will) but do I post messages on Slashdot about it?

Uh, ya. Apparently you do.

copy protection is costing you money

In our tv's and dvd recorders we are being forced to pay for the copyprotection schemes operating in them. i had a $6000 tv set drop a hdmi port due to a faulty hdcp signal. why the hell should i even be forced into having hdcp to start with? we need to fight back in the only way possible - with our wallets.

and the insane part about it all, is that it's not stopping piracy. it NEVER will. whole seasons are still on bittorrent in HD.

Re:Closing loopholes != erosion of rights

New tech is able to prevent you doing this.

And as the cycle goes, newer tech is able to circumvent the prevention method. Analogy alert: After locks were invented, someone invented lockpicks.

eliminating Fair Use is an erosion of rights

You never had those "rights". Old technology just did not prevent you from recording/copying shows, music etc. That did not mean that you were allowed to do it, but many turned a blind eye to infringements.

The US Supreme Court disagreed with you when it decided in the Betamax ruling [wikipedia.org] that

the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time-shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.

Re:"fair use" != "right"

Okay, so they encrypt their stream.
I break it - not "bloody copyright infringement" yet.
On the other hand, what I just did violates a completely separate bought-and-paid-for law.

Re:Closing loopholes != erosion of rights

Your point is partly true; but the part that isn't true is important.

It is the case that a fair few of the things that HDCP and friends are designed to prevent were never legal to begin with. Not all, however, are. If nothing else, building DRM that understands fair use exceptions is going to have to wait for the introduction of AI competent enough to interpret case law on the fly. Depending on the DRM and the country in question, various sorts of timeshifting and format shifting are also likely to be legal but blocked.

The problem with these DRM systems is that they, in effect, allow the companies that control them to make law just by setting a few DRM flags(under the DMCA and similar, DRM basically has force of law because you can't legally break it, and in other instances, joe user will de facto be bound by it). That is the really disturbing bit. If DRM were simply technology catching up with law, that would be one thing(still not a good thing, I would argue; but that is outside the scope of this particular argument); but DRM is something much, much, more than that. It is the expansion of technology to eclipse, and to write, law without even the pretense of legislative process.

Re:Closing loopholes != erosion of rights

Treating your customer as your enemy and assuming by definition that everyone buying your movie will try to create copies to spread them is also not really right in my books.

The main reason why there is a "market" at all for those copies is simply that, unless you happen to sit right in the country where the movie is shown first, you are forced to wait. Allow me to give you an example. I like Dr. House. I watch it religiously. In my country, we're now in the middle of season 3. Now, that's about 2 seasons behind. I enjoy the show, and I wouldn't mind at all to watch it in English. Actually, I'd prefer it. But I neither get the option to see it in English, nor do I get the chance to see the latest episodes. I can't even go and buy the DVDs for seasons 1-3, and I won't be able to buy season 4 when it comes out in August, because no local distributor has been chosen yet, and of course, our networks showing it here have contracts that prevent such things from happening.

Can you see why the incentive to fire up some P2P client and simply download the other two seasons is pretty high?

And it's the same for pretty much everything else. For the US, it works in reverse with Anime, which also suffer (interesting enough) from insanely crappy translations when done by some studio, yet fansubs happen to be nearly flawless and true to the original.

It's not that people wouldn't want to pay artists for their work. The problem is that you often don't even get the choice to do just that!

Re:Television not behaving?

Turn it off because of the advertisements, too.

Back in 2003 (when I stopped watching television) a typical 60 minutes of television contained 21 minutes of advertisement and 39 minutes of program. I thought, "Why the hell am I actually paying for this mess."

I can only imagine that it has gotten worse. Anyone have some numbers?

Re:Television not behaving?

I can only imagine that it has gotten worse. Anyone have some numbers?

IIRC, a 30-minute broadcast typically contains 22 minutes of programming, 6 minutes of national advertising, and 2 minutes of local ads.

Re:Internet TV

Unfortunately, Apple TV is still DRM-laden, and if the internet was to go the direction that Apple TV is, it's going to become a pretty awful place to be IMO.

Fortunately there's a project that looks like it's going to become the Firefox of internet tv... and it's called Miro [getmiro.org]. It's based on simple, common and open standards... RSS, bittorrent, and just plain old DRM-free codecs. It's not pretending to be something magical, and indeed, it shouldn't.

It's already pretty enjoyable to use, but I've been doing some volunteering on the project. Trust me, the next iteration is going to be really slick.