Satellite TV to FCC: we're special, don't make us open up: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
If you've tried to pump your fully-paid-up cable connection into, say, a computer running Windows Media Center, you've probably come up against the closed nature of pay-TV and the severe limitations of CableCARD. And what about satellite TV? Don't even think about it.
The FCC wants to blow open the market for third-party video devices, scrapping some of the current (failed) CableCARD rules and adding satellite providers to the list. read more... »
DVR is TV's New BFF: Via EFF.org Updates.
Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend. It's just the latest example of how the industry's constant warnings of the dangers of "piracy" frequently turn out to be baseless hysteria.
Remember 2001? Digital Video Recorders ("DVRs") like TiVo and ReplayTV were poised to win mainstream adoption, allowing consumers to fast-forward past advertisements more easily than before. In response, the entertainment industry behaved predictably — it freaked out and filed a bunch of lawsuits.
Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising." A coalition of television studios including Viacom, Disney, and NBC filed suit against SonicBlue, makers of ReplayTV, arguing that skipping commercials "effectively circumvents the means of payment to copyright owners for the programming being viewed... (and) thus constitutes copyright infringement."
Fast-forward eight years, and these claims turn out to be — surprise! — wrong. This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue." read more... »
Broadcast flag rears vile head, bars viewer from recording: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Irony alert: Sons of Anarchy gets broadcast flag. read more... »
DISH Network told to fork over another $200 million to TiVo: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
If it feels like the DISH vs. TiVo patent infringement case has been going on for ages, that's because it has—at least in relation to the Internet's attention span. DISH has already been hit with over $200 million in judgments relating to its infringement of TiVo's DVR-related patents, and a judge today twisted the knife in DISH's back, awarding TiVo an additional $200 million. read more... »
Supreme Court Serves Up Remote-Recording Victory: Via Threat Level.
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a copyright case testing whether cable operators may permit customers to store television programming on company servers to be viewed at a later time.
The issue concerns an August ruling by a federal appeals court, which lifted (.pdf) an injunction against Cablevision Systems blocking it from offering customers a recording service that stores programming on the cable company’s own servers instead of on viewers’ in-house playback devices.
Hollywood and television programmers maintained Cablevision’s service directly infringes their exclusive rights to both reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works. read more... »
S.G. to Supreme Court: Don’t Revisit “Remote Storage DVR” Case: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.
The Solicitor General filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Friday that is good news for anyone who likes the idea of being able to record digital television without having to acquire and install a digital video recorder (DVR) box in the home. More importantly, the brief significantly reduces the chances of a decision that could cast a legal cloud over a wide range common network and computing technologies. read more... »
TiVo, AppleTV, Boxee, and the future of HD television delivery: Via Freedom to Tinker
I don't watch as much TV as I once did. Yet, I'm still paying Comcast every month, as they're the only provider who will sell me HD service compatible with my TiVo-HD. Sadly, Comcast is far from ideal. I'm regularly frustrated at their inability to debug their signal quality problems. (My ABC-HD and PBS-HD signals are right on the edge, in terms of signal quality, so any slight degradation makes those channels unwatchable through the MPEG block errors, which seems to happen on an irregular basis.) Comcast customer service wants me to sit around all day waiting for a tech to come out when the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with my house. When I've attempted to report the signal strength measurements I've taken and how they vary from channel to channel, I've found I might as well be speaking to a brick wall.
Yes, I know I could put an old-school antenna on the roof and feed it into my TiVo. That would do pretty good for the local channels, but then why am I paying Comcast at all? Answer: for the handful of shows that we watch from cable channels. More than one person has asked me why I don't just download these shows online and cut the cable. You can get Comedy Central programming from their web site. You can get all sorts of things from Hulu.com. All free and legal! read more... »
Sony takes up DVR-blocking Selectable Output Control fight: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica
It looks like Hollywood's bid to take over your home video system got a second wind this week. On Tuesday two top executives from Sony Television and Sony Pictures, accompanied by an influential lobbyist, met with the Federal Communications Commission to talk up (PDF) "the advantages of expanded consumer choices in the marketplace" which would supposedly come with a waiver on the agency's ban on Selectable Output Control. That bright idea originates with the Motion Pictures Association of America. read more... »
Appeals Court Reverses "Remote DVR" Decision - Via Center for Democracy and Technology:
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals today reversed a lower court decision that, as CDT and a number of others argued in a 2007 amicus brief, had the potential to chill innovation in products that use the Internet to provide storage and computing functions from remote locations. The lower court ruling had blocked Cablevision from rolling out a digital video recorder (DVR) system that stores recorded television programs on remote servers instead of in set top devices in the customers' homes. CDT applauds today's decision, which finds that providing such a remote DVR does not constitute direct copyright infringement. CDT also welcomes the court's finding that transitory data held in buffers for a mere 1.2 seconds do not constitute "copies" for purposes of the Copyright Act.
(Read Original Article - Via Center for Democracy and Technology.) read more... »
Digital TV foreshadows erosion of Internet rights | June 18, 2008 03:00 AM | Tom Yager - Via Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager | InfoWorld :
With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet, we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We can thank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" to money from the entertainment lobbies, and forward-thinking artists and content distributors--I'm proud that writers and publishers took the lead on this--who recognize that reach is the currency of the digital age.
We should take as a warning sign of descent down the slippery slope toward the loss of Internet freedoms Internet providers' arbitrary blocking and throttling of BitTorrent traffic. The rationale points to the bandwidth wasted by BitTorrent. That doesn't ring true. There are other flavors of traffic such as VOIP, streaming news, advertising and entertainment, photo galleries, remote PC access, Usenet repositories, denial of service attacks, and spam that consume beastly amounts of bandwidth, but somehow none of these warrants detection and control at the provider's end of the pipe. It makes one wonder, what's so special about BitTorrent that it cries out to be controlled in such a radical manner?
That's an easy one. The entertainment lobby (my shorthand to avoid spewing the alphabet soup of movie, TV, and music trade groups), having failed to get the feds to impose a tax on videotapes and recordable discs, or to hold Internet providers liable for copyrighted content transferred through their networks, or (so far) to add a piracy tax to every broadband user's monthly bill, is using the most powerful weapon yet devised: "Standards." read more... »