Stupid Hollywood Tricks
The “Broadcast Flag,” which would have allowed Hollywood to decide how, when, and whether you could record television shows, was thrown out by the DC Court of Appeals last month. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, MPAA lobbyists have convinced some as-yet unidentified senator or senators into sneaking new Broadcast Flag-enabling legislation into a giant appropriations bill. Somebody needs to remind Bill Frist that these guys are not on his side.
Bad Hollywood. Bad senators. Everybody involved should be forced to watch 72 hours of uninterrupted ’70′s TV show remake movies, “Clockwork Orange” style.
UPDATE: Either the EFF got some bad information, or they scared the senatecritters off. Either way, broadcast flag language apparently did not make it into the Senate appropriations bill.
72 hours ain’t nearly enough.
There’s an article on the EFF site that says Hollywood is going to try to sneak the broadcast flag in as an amendment on a massive appropriations bill.
https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?page=UserAction&cmd=display&id=145
This is clearly going to be a case where Hollywood hands some lackey Senator the text of the amendment, and has him insert it as if he wrote it from his own hand, and hope no one notices until it’s too late. Then they come back and say, “Lookey here, it turns out the broadcast flag is, wow, law!”
I haven’t watched broadcast network TV in a long time. Would this have any relevance to basic cable or premium stuff like HBO?
I imagine it would apply to all broadcast content, regardless if it’s over the air or cable/satellite.
I guess the value of my VCR is going to go up.
I’ve heard it only applies to cable/premium channels. The networks are over the “public” airwaves and won’t be allowed to encrypt their content.
Of course, that could all change with one crap ammendment.
Ok, just read up on EFF’s site. Cable channels already have to support the broadcast flag, but I’m not sure if any have turned it on. The rule that was struck down and the new ammendment don’t change that, they both try to push the same rules onto over-the-air broadcasts. In other words, the networks.
I’m not sure this will actually affect DVR time-shifting at all. It will, for sure, make it impossible for you to copy content off your DVR and onto the Internet or a DVD backup.
The Broadcast Flag rule would have made it illegal to sell or manufacture a recorder that does not recognize the flag. Whether the cable or television provider chooses to include the flag is (I think) optional, but it would have been illegal for you or me to buy a DVR, VCR, or DVD recorder (or anything else) that wouldn’t obey the flags. As of now, you can buy lots of hardware that ignores it completely.
So it’s buy early, buy often? My DVD player is on the fritz, may need to get a recordable one. . .
“It will, for sure, make it impossible for you to copy content off your DVR and onto the Internet or a DVD backup.”
I doubt that. There is always a way,and you may not have to break any codes to do it.
If they use an encryption key, you have to have a decryption key somewhere. Most likely it will reside on your DVD player that you own. All you have to do is build software to use that key and get the key our of the dvd player.
I concur with cube. I doubt this will spell the end for bittorrent (which is the real target here).
People having personal copies wasnt so threatening when it was in analog format because why would the average joe bother (or have the equipement) to rip “Battlestar Galactica” off of his VHS and onto the net? Not to talk of potential loss in quality and so on.
DVD is thus a mixed blessing mainly because of the space and quality and the fact it can still make money after the advertisers have been paid – we all should’ve seen this coming from the first box set of a show was released.
After 20 years of being able to record anything the citizenry wants, do we really think the average joe will take kindly being told “sod off?”
Dr. Frist is in way over his head. He may be a good physician but he is a poor manager. Bolton should have been voted on in Mar and is still waiting for a vote. After his last failure Frist told a news conference that he was done with Bolton. He was immediately called on the carpet by W. Less than an hour later Dr. Frist had to endure the humiliation of another news conference to say he was in fact going to go on with the fight for Bolton.
I am sure he is not sure if JFK or W ar on his side. The practice of medicine is looking better all the time.
Remakes? Shoot, I’m still waiting for the movie version of Three’s Company…
Gotta sneakin’ suspicion that my senator(Orrin Hatch) might be one of the lackeys.
Re: cube
Isn’t grabbing a decryption key to sidestep the broadcast flag pretty much the same, legally, as the whole DeCSS fiasco? You’ll violate the DMCA if you try or if you use software that can do it.
chris,
“Isn’t grabbing a decryption key to sidestep the broadcast flag pretty much the same, legally, as the whole DeCSS fiasco? You’ll violate the DMCA if you try or if you use software that can do it”
I would frist like to say I am not expert with encryption (though i do have a BS in comp sci).
I really do not know anything about the leagal issue surrounding it. I also am very unfamiler with the DeCSS issue you refer to, though I bet you are right.
I do know until they start encrypting the signals over the wires that go from you DVD,TVIO, or whatever else you are using to you actual TV, you can always get an unencrypted signal (It man not be that clean if they are punching the signal down to co axel).
Cube – I totally agree, this won’t shut down file sharing at all. The dedicated pirates will just use pre-flag hardware, or disable the flag detection in new stuff.
That’s one reason why I find this crap so frustrating. None of this technology will stop those that are actually trying to steal, at least not for long. The only people that will be hurt are the casual users, who don’t have the time or know-how to hack their hardware, who are trying to copy content in legal ways for fair-use purposes.
The DeCSS fiasco was, IIRC, that the FBI arrested a Russian programmer who broke the DVD encryption (CSS) by reverse engineering a commercial software decoder. DeCSS was then provided as an open source DVD decoder, I believe. The MPAA screamed (correctly, by the text of the DMCA) that breaking CSS violated the DMCA, even if DeCSS were never used for piracy and only for applications covered by fair-use. I expect that any reverse engineering/workaround to sidestep the broadcast flag would also break the DMCA.
As for the stopping file sharing and large-scale piracy, I agree that it’ll do little or nothing in the short run. In the long run, if someone is able to push through a standards change that invalidates older hardware, some sort of total ban combined with aggressive pursuit and prosecution of any technical tinkering might work.
The DeCSS thing involved a norwegian teenager who programmed a routine to break the DVD CSS encryption. Of course the code is out there, you can buy tshirts with it from thinkgeek.
Actually, all this is irrelevant. All Hollywood has to do to prevent people from copying their product is to continue producing stuff nobody would want to watch.