MPAA Pushes Once Again To Close the Analog Hole 275
Tyler Too writes "The MPAA is once again trying to badger the FCC into approving Selectable Output Control, which would plug the 'analog hole' during broadcasts of some prerelease HD movies. MPAA bigshots met with seven staffers from the FCC Media Bureau last week, calling the petition a 'pro-consumer' (!) move designed to 'enable movie studios to offer millions of Americans in-home access to high-value, high definition video content.' At least the studios are now acknowledging that SOC would break the functionality of some HDTVs, an admission they were previously unwilling to make: 'What's interesting about the group's latest filing, however, is that it effectively concedes that the output changes it wants could, in fact, hobble some home video systems. "The vast majority of consumers would not have to purchase new devices to receive the new, high-value content contemplated by MPAA's" request, the group assures the FCC.'"
Like any partially treated wart (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they mean.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
"High-value content ?!"
MPAA, listen closely: when it comes to TV, there is no such thing.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:3, Insightful)
"High-value content ?!"
MPAA, listen closely: when it comes to TV, there is no such thing.
I think you have made the mistake of assuming that they "listen".
More heavy-handed every day (Score:5, Insightful)
Just once I would like to know what it was like to have a government that represented me, and told the MPAA/RIAA to shut *its* hole. Unfortunately, with the Democrats beholden to Hollywood, and the Republicans beholden to big business, it's likely that the MPAA/RIAA will get whatever they ask for in the end.
If their DRM only effected pirates, it would be one thing. But at this point, the DRM is becoming so oppressive that it's having a negative effect on those of us who *try* to be honest. When I have to crack my player just to be able to skip 10 minutes of mandatory commercials at the beginning of a DVD/blu-ray, that's a sad day. I have already refused to pay for any more movie tickets because of this--I'll be damned if I'm paying $10 to sit through a bunch of TV commercials at the beginning of a movie (anyone remember when the beginning of a movie had a cartoon and a couple of trailers, and *NO* soda or car commercials?). Now the DMCA has turned me into a criminal just because I insist on controlling the $20 disc I legitimately *bought*.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:3, Insightful)
If you equal "cost" or "price" to "value", then yes.
In the view of the MPAA, "high-value" probably means "content that will generate lots of money". Not anything related to artistic merit.
Re:More heavy-handed every day (Score:3, Insightful)
Just to add to your point, FYI, according the MPAA you haven't bought anything.
Next they will try to figure out a system where you pay more if more than one person is in the room viewing the disk.
I don't understand (Score:1, Insightful)
This will 'enable movie studios to offer millions of Americans in-home access to high-value, high definition video content.' So what's preventing them from doing that now?
I'd like to leave my car parked with the doors open to make it easier for me to put the shopping in when I get back to the car park. There's nothing stopping me but I don't because I don't want it stolen. If they think someone will "steal" the content then just don't offer it. If they want people to see it then offer it.
Who is the customer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies who lose sight of who the real customer is often die - a slow, lingering demise, but terminal nonetheless.
Methinks the great failing of Vista (and M$'s overall strategy flaw) was that M$ decided the customer is Dell (and other huge-volume buyers), IT departments, and DRM-lusting IP/content owners - forgetting that the real customer is each user clicking their way around the screen. Result: some 50% of Apple users are new to the product line, happy to put up with Jobs as a benevolent dictator who cares about their experience, happy to escape being treated as a mere marketing resource of eyeballs and wallets.
So long as we still have some technological liberties, someone will realize who the customer really is, serve them, and be rewarded - and drive **AA & government control out.
What about this one? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I have absolutely no problem with downloading anything and everything I want.
They claim their losing money because I download content for free... Something interesting here.
1. I wasn't going to buy the movie anyway.
2. You can't lose money you didn't have.
3. The movie sucked anyway.
4. It's not my fault you think $50 million dollar special effects makes a good movie.
5. You want me to pay you to tell me how to use my property?
6. You didn't know as long as I can see it I can copy it?
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was worth watching I would have watched in the the Cinema .....since it is on TV it is either old hat, or is about to go straight to DVD ... neither is High Value ...
I live in the UK so if this ever comes here they will discover that besides a flat fee TV licence, most people do not pay for TV at all ....and it is generally good quality
There is very little "high value" content that people can be bothered to pay for ... except for live broadcasts ....
Re:More heavy-handed every day (Score:5, Insightful)
If their DRM only effected pirates...
Ah, but their onerous DRM does effect piracy: It creates new pirates where there weren't any previously!
Re:More heavy-handed every day (Score:1, Insightful)
An apropos grammar error! It should be "if their DRM *affected* pirates". But, strangely, effecting pirates is also right, since their DRM does cause piracy.
Re:Like any partially treated wart (Score:5, Insightful)
A less-messy solution is to amend the People's Constitution:
Amendment __ : "Strike the phase 'exclusive Right'. Replace with 'temporary privilege'."
The law already says "for limited Times" which ostensibly means temporary, but the Supreme Court turned that into toilet paper by upholding serial term extensions in Eldred v. Ashcroft. An amendment to outlaw perpetual copyright on the installment plan would have to explicitly outlaw legislative extensions of the term of a subsisting copyright.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh noez! (Score:3, Insightful)
Millions of SDTVs still in use (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but blocking all analog outputs would break 80 million standard-definition televisions [engadgethd.com]. True, SDTV is the past and HDTV is the future, but the present has always been a mix of the past and the future. So I don't see how "The vast majority of consumers would not have to purchase new devices to receive the new, high-value content" when it isn't yet true that "[t]he vast majority of consumers" already own an HDTV.
More DRM... (Score:3, Insightful)
To protect pre-release HD movies ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where in reality, even 50 year old B/W cowboy films are region coded and copy protected when they are re-released on DVD.
Don't worry... they cannot stop "us" now (Score:4, Insightful)
No, OPEN some holes... (Score:2, Insightful)
to turn off the analog hole (Score:3, Insightful)
you have to get rid of that pesky thing called THE HUMAN EAR
otherwise, if people are still listening WITH THEIR FUCKING EARS, the signal has to go analog at some point, and there you can intercept a signal
fucking morons
Re:To protect pre-release HD movies ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are the same people that promised that the DVD region coding and CSS system was only to protect new films from being watched in countries where they hadn't been released yet.
Where in reality, even 50 year old B/W cowboy films are region coded and copy protected when they are re-released on DVD.
You did trust them, didnÂt you. I didnt believe their bull**** from day zero. I would have been positively surprised though if they hadnÂt been lying. The media industry is like that give them a knife and they will stab you if they see they can get money out of you. Ah and yes before that they will buy a law which makes backstabbing in certain cases legal.
Re:I still have my Super VHS camcorder (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, those are only for un-encrypted content.
Re:Like any partially treated wart (Score:5, Insightful)
Please do no present your rational and reasonable ideas on copyright. Clearly we have all moved beyond rational thought.
Think about who lobbies Congress on this issue, mega-Corporations that have everything to lose if they don't have perpetual copyrights. It's easily worth a few million to buy off Congressmen and Senators to guarantee unending copyrights that could generate billions over the years.
Corporations have taken over America.
The final straw (Score:4, Insightful)
If they do anything that stops me using my mythbox to record tv I will totally cancel cable.
I'm too busy and my time is too valuable to me to only watch live broadcast at their start times, mostly because of all the commercial breaks, but also usually I'm just too busy to be around a a set time.
A normal 90 minute movie on cable takes like 3 hours even though they have cut the movie down 'for content' which is a PC way of saying 'removed good content to make more space for advertising breaks'.
Cable is already too expensive and has so terrible programming quality that I need mythbox to filter out all the commercials and shitty shows so I get anything worth watching at all. If they break my ability to use mythbox I'm seriously gone from TV. Netflix, Hulu etc here I come.
Good job there MPAA on killing the cash cow.
Re:Like any partially treated wart (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless of what the auth^H^H^H^Hcorporation who owns the copyright does, allowing copyright for a century is insane. Statistically speaking, that's longer than my school-age children will live. Which part of "temporary" is so confusing?
Re:Like any partially treated wart (Score:5, Insightful)
b) between years 10-15 (term + 5 year grace period), and author with sufficient interest in maintaining the copyright should have to i) register the copyright, and ii) pay some less than nominal fee. The copyright will continue for an additional 30 years (a total of 40 years).
This "less than nominal fee" will be the next version of the RIAA/MPAA, here, waive all your rights to it and we will keep renewing your copyright because you can't afford it! Plus 30 years is too long, especially in the age of digital copies, lets see here, 30 years ago was 1979, assuming your hardware still works, most data will need to be painstakingly recovered using hard-to-find/expensive equipment, the data will then need to be read and then most certainly will need to have an emulator written in order to run the programs.
c) thereafter, the author pays an increasing amount for each additional 30 year period.
Again, it leads to new forms of the RIAA/MPAA in the future in order to pay for these.
1. everyone gets a copyright in their works without any formalities.
This is not necessarily a good thing. This leads to traps where someone might have came up with something, put it on the internet, you never read it but you make something similar and they accuse you of plagiarism.
2. If it is economically viable after 10 years, they can pay a nominal amount and register it (no more orphan works).
The same thing will happen, just with a large publisher with a huge sum of cash. The copyright never falls into the public domain, the artists get screwed and orphan works (as in works that are never released but still have copyright on them) still happen.
3. It will last for most every author's lifetime and then some.
Again, how is this a benefit? Look at Shakespeare's works, most of them were adapted from works that would still be under copyright if your system had been in place when he was alive. It is a natural part of art to borrow and adapt.
4. It puts works that an author no longer considers valuable into the public domain in relatively short order.
Which in general it won't. While the every day chatter of the internet would go into the public domain, if an artist doesn't think something is worthwhile they won't publish it. If it isn't published it isn't copyrighted, even after their deaths if someone takes it and publishes it they still have the copyright from when they publish it.
Re:Oxymoron (Score:3, Insightful)
"High-value content ?!"
MPAA, listen closely: when it comes to TV, there is no such thing.
I think you have made the mistake of assuming that they "listen".
And they make the mistake of thinking that we must watch.
Re:Who is the customer? (Score:5, Insightful)
When will we reach the pain threshhold? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any legitimate claims they have about preventing piracy is pretty much becoming meaningless.
When will we reach the point where the rights of the consumer, out weighs the rights of the manufacture to treat all their customers like criminals?
MPIAA/RIAA is pretty much digging their own grave. Any chance copyright holders have in preserving their rights to market their work without fear of poaching, is quickly diminishing through draconian measures the MPIAA and RIAA are taking.
Once you lose the will of the general populace to protect your interests, you pretty much lost the battle...
I'm all for enforcing the current laws by going after blatant copyright violators who sell pirated CDs or DVDs on the streets. I'm even for them going after the people who distribute copyrighted material through p2p networks without the consent of the copyright holder. However when they start making it difficult for you to actually use what you paid for, then we have no choice but to seek out the street vendor or the p2p network. I'm not buying more equipment just so they can impose more restrictions on me.
Re:Like any partially treated wart (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not necessarily a good thing. This leads to traps where someone might have came up with something, put it on the internet, you never read it but you make something similar and they accuse you of plagiarism.
So what? There is no legal liability attached to plagiarism; copyright infringement is the only legal issue. Plagiarism is merely a moral, ethical issue that share elements of copyright infringement. And to your example, copyright infringement has a defense of independent creation. Among other things, the author would have to show access to the "infringed" work.
The same thing will happen, just with a large publisher with a huge sum of cash. The copyright never falls into the public domain, the artists get screwed and orphan works (as in works that are never released but still have copyright on them) still happen.
Of all the works in the world, works owned by a "large publisher with a huge sum of cash" is likely the minority of all copyrights.
Besides, the point of the above plan is not to deprive people of their copyrights. It's a plan to balance to trade-offs: continued protection for those that see a continued economic value and release to the public so that others can exploit them.
Again, how is this a benefit? Look at Shakespeare's works, most of them were adapted from works that would still be under copyright if your system had been in place when he was alive. It is a natural part of art to borrow and adapt.
Copyrights don't protect the ideas of stories. They protect the actual physical work themselves. Ultimately, this comes back around to conflating plagiarism with copyright infringement.
Nevertheless, I'm not about to argue the merits of applying modern copyright law to a different era.
if an artist doesn't think something is worthwhile they won't publish it.
You don't know many artists, do you?
Also, there is a great deal of copyrighted work that gets published once and is essentially abandoned. Look at the software companies whose assets essentially go abandoned, or whose products and solutions have no current use because of hardware and platform changes.
If it isn't published it isn't copyrighted, even after their deaths if someone takes it and publishes it they still have the copyright from when they publish it.
So? I fail to see your point. If it isn't published no one gets the benefit of it anyway and if it is ultimately published then the same rules would apply, no harm no foul. The only questions might be over ownership of the copyright.
You can't close the analog hole, stupid **AA (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like trying to tell the stars in the universe to e ligmitht in the form of encrypted ones and zeroes instead of photons - it just isn't fucking happening because the majority of the universe, physics and all, works on analog, not digital.
If I can see this content, I can record it, period. There's not one fucking thing you can do to stop it.
It's actually pretty obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the name, they called it exactly what it was. Digital Rights Management: a system by which the rights of a user to in any way use a digital signal are managed. Whether that signal's passing from DVD player to screen, torrent file to hard drive, .avi on a CD to your college roommate, or NAS in the basement to the laptop propped up on your knees in bed; the RIAA has made it very clear that they want to (and, to a degree, have been able to) control the way the set of bits representing a work of art, that they feel they own, is used. DRM has never been about stopping pirates because that would be too limiting of a concept. Why put all this effort into stopping pirates when they can stop other small nuisances that *IAAs have probably never quite liked - things like lending DVDs to neighbours,
The biggest threat to this industry isn't the pirates, it's a population that believes that how they view content should be up to them and not dictated by a higher power. This is the mentality that allows people to justify turning to piracy when the legal route is too difficult. Rather than making the legal route easier (as the music industry seems to have figured out in only a decade or so), the MPAA is committed to creating a world where they are an altruistic god showering the people with "high-value content," asking only for our money and obedience in return. The scariest part is the thought that some of the people in control might actually believe that what they are doing is for the public good.
This hit the nail right on the head. Users feel they have the right to do what they want with what they consider "their property," whether it's that DVD they shelled out 30 bucks for, or the .avi of a free, independant movie they legally torrented from an animation studio. For some reason, organizations representing the industry (not the artists them selves) feel that in the digital age, our concept of property has to change in order for art to continue to be produced. Any rational person would beg to differ.
The worst part is that this doesn't even "close the analog hole" in any way. Sure, it stops one portion of it - recording/viewing media through component cable - but that's putting a band-aid on a chest wound. The real analog hole is the fact that, in the end, the screen is being displayed visually - it's just photons. We happen to have a method of captuing photons spread across a period of time, the video camera. Sure, it'll look crappy at first, but people will get better at normalizing the colours or finding different capture methods, and, as has been seen before [slashdot.org], users will adapt to the worse quality format because it's the one that's not fleecing them.
Personally, I'm keeping my older equipment until stores eventually realize that trying to redefine the legel definition of property outisde of the court system turns more customers away than pirates it keeps at bay - which, last time I checked, was virtually nil.
Sigh (Score:1, Insightful)
Sigh . . .
Only on Slashdot does a fucking whiney crybaby like this get modded insightful.
1. Rent it
2. Lost sales
3. I guess you don't pay for meals you don't like either?
4. You were stupid enough to still want to see the movie knowing it was all special effects and no plot.
5. It's not your property, since you infringed on the copyright.
6. That's because you are a cheap son of a bitch.
P.S. - Checkmate!!
Re:Close the digital hole first. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, what they want is a form of PK encryption on the devices. Even though there is an analog version of the content, you will be unable to convert this to a form that will play back on anybody's device, even your own, because you don't have the encryption key, only the decryption key. Devices that playback unencrypted content will be illegal because "pirates use them".
"home movies" may be playable, but only by keeping the recording device connected to the internet. It will negotiate a one-time key with the playback device on the other end.
Their goal is to make it impossible to create and distribute content without going through them. They will use "piracy" as the excuse to get this.
The Analog Hole Is Uncloseable (Score:2, Insightful)
1. A transducer is converting electrical energy into acoustic energy (almost certainly by driving a speaker cone)
2. Said acoustic energy (Sound) is an "analog" phenomenon. The compressions and rarefactions in the air that carry sound are continuous phenomena, there are no jump discontinuities in sound pressure, all sound is analog both in theory, and for all the sounds that we use to communicate or make music etc, in practice.
3. Thus, said transducer is being fed an analog electrical signal somehow (digital to analog conversion is beyond the scope of a transducer, they expect an analog voltage input, typically provided by a DAC somewhere in the hardware path between the CPU and the speaker)
4. Therefore, no matter what type of software bullshit protections there are, if I can hear it, I can record it in HIGH FIDELITY by simply ripping my speaker cone off, and connecting the former speaker input +/- to the line-in jack of my laptop or whatever.
I take for granted that most of you already know how obviously easy it is to obtain a recording in low fidelity: use another transducer, i.e. put a microphone in front of your speaker.
So what's the deal with the MPAA? The government? And any other group of morons who keep trying to defy physics by making media that can be played multiple times but not recorded? There is no such thing as DRM short of installing chips in everyone's brain.