AOL T-W & Intel Issue 'Joint Statement of Principles' 9
morgue-ann writes: "AOL Time-Warner and Intel have released their Joint Statement of Principles in response to recent hearings in the Sentate Judiciary and Commerce Committees (Leahy/Hatch & Hollings/Stevens).
The cover three issues: the broadcast flag, the analog hole and p2p. The first two are nearly a given for the CE and content industries even though they threaten fair use rights of HDTV PVRs (when/if they're developed), but on the third, they agree that 'No single silver bullet solution - technical, legal, legislative, or business - exists to address this thorny form of piracy.' and call for 'Active co-operation and participation of all sectors--content, CE, IT, service providers, and government--will be necessary to develop a range of solutions to this complex problem.'"
Since AOL-Time Warner released this... (Score:1)
Never gonna happen... (Score:2)
To first understand AOL/TW's position, you have to realize that they are in a difficult situation.
On one hand, they run at least 2 major ISPs (AOL and RoadRunner). They know that restricting their user's usage rights by blocking access to certain types of P2P will only mean their users go elsewhere. So, the only way of keeping this from happening is to get everyone to do it at the same time (therefore removing all options for the user).
On the other hand, they are a huge content provider. From this perspective, the longer it takes, the more money they lose.
So, after looking at that, we come back to the origonal comment...
Asking for "content, CE, IT, service providers, and government" to all actively cooperate is equivalent to asking for world peace. It might be a nice thought, but it's not likely to happen. There are too many agendas involved and nothing gets done.
Re:Never gonna happen... (Score:2)
Sure there in bandwidth on one hand, but there are marketing, shelve locations, packaging, shipping and so much more.
AOL et. al. is in the position to make a lot of money providing P2P. I think they will someday.
They have Nullsoft in the pocket and provide plenty of "On Demand" cable services - they look to be a company poised to jump.
Considering they've got a lot of wire out there and they also have the content - they aren't buying it! - they could make a sweet penny.
If I was a shareholder I would write to them. Be smart fucko's
Broadcast flag? (Score:1)
What about this broadcast flag and their proposed "narrowly focused government regulation"? Does that mean all software capable of copying or transmitting files would be required to somehow detect the "flag" and not copy/transmit the file?
This still seems to be a bit SSSCA like to me. Will the process to detect the flag be patented? Will detecting the flag take a siginificant amount of processing time? (and "significant" is a relative term--on a busy server just a few hundred clock cycles per detection could be too much) Will implementation of detecting the flag be trivial to program or very difficult?
All I can say is that they'd better have some really simple free method for encoding/detecting this "flag". Like maybe putting 0x82, 0x94, 0xa6, 0xb8 as the first four bytes of the file, and nothing else needed to detect it (the values should probably be more random, and shouldn't conflict with any other file formats...)
If this "flag" is buried somewhere in all video / audio files and you have to read their specific format's header to find it, I can see a whole lot of commercial programs getting more expensive and/or reduced functionality when they're sold the US. ...and many US based open source programs disapearing from the internet.
(Not to mention non-US programs won't bother to comply and will therefore be illegal...)
Re:Broadcast flag? (Score:3, Informative)
The broadcast flag is for over-the-air (OTA) HDTV broadcasts. It's a proposal by the BPDG (broadcast protection discussion group) subgroup of the CPTWG (content protection technical working group, pronounced see-pee-twig).
The analog hole is the component video connection between an HDTV "receiver" (8VSB for OTA, satellite (?mod) or QAM64 for cable demods + MPEG-2 decoder) and an HDTV "monitor." The concern is that "premium content" (monopolized by Eisner's minions) can be recorded by products like the Cinewave HD [pinnaclesys.com], DivX;-)'d and uploaded to Morpheus.
The "consumer" HDTV cards for PCs from Hauppage have the 8VSB receiver/demod built-in & no component inputs, but sub-$200 HD analog-component-in cards are probable given time.
The "analog hole" problem is that even with (relatively) closed networks (cable & satellite) where the net controls the box, the box needs to connect to the TV (monitor). DVI + HDCP or IEEE 1394 + DTCP protection is the answer for new sets, but they don't want to obsolete existing HDTV monitors, so the compromise is that selected content will only be converted to unprotected analog at 1/4 resolution (960x540 instead of 1920x1080). The AV Science Forum [avsforum.com] people are NOT happy about this.
The EFF has a nice section [eff.org] on DRM for HDTV. There's a presentation of a proposal [eff.org] there that seems to say that broadcast protection would entail a flag or watermark that "compliant equipment" would obey if present.
OTA doesn't have the option of replacing everyone's tuners or simply blocking them out of premium content, so I guess we'd all better buy non-compliant receivers now! There might be law passed in the vein of SSSCA to require compliant receivers in the future, but the CE mfgs aren't fighting this the way the IT mfgs are fighting SSSCA, so it might go down as a voluntary program.
(OTA is a.k.a. "digital terrestrial" to separate it from direct digital broadcast satellite)
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copyright isn't ownership: it's monopoly control of distribution
Democracy (Score:1)
-> 80 MILLION people DO NOT want companies to get more control
-> $80 million (and prb a lot more) does want
Guess who'll win ?
The way I see it (Score:1, Insightful)
They essentially had everything they're crying about wanting now... an encrypted format that required special hardware and/or software to be accessed, and all in a highly successable and affordable package that people actually WANTED.
Had they been fully compitent in implementing this technology, it could've been used for any sort of "secure" media distribution.
If secure content distribution is important to you, do it your damn self. If you fuck it up or fail to make it sufficently resilliant to "hackers", it's your own fault.
Don't force the rest of the world to do it for you.