TiVo or not TiVo , that's the question

[Helen Thomas]

TiVo's Plans Lead to Fight On Copyrights

It seems very useful technology. Why should people be forced to come to your house to watch a programme when you can take it to theirs ?

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Helen Thomas:
TiVo's Plans Lead to Fight On Copyrights

It seems very useful technology. Why should people be forced to come to your house to watch a programme when you can take it to theirs ?

I don't think the parties involved are out of line to protect themselves that way. You can't take a recorded NFL game on a VHS to a public pub and show it without written permission from the NFL. Should a Tivo recorded version be any different?

It also makes sense due to the current issues with pirating music, movies, etc. People are going to do it somehow, why should Tivo make it easy for people to break the law?

[Eric Pascarello]

Buy a tv video capture card and a dvd burner...

[Jason Menard]

The content owners are bent on destroying the fair use laws and are using technology to push their agenda. Simple as that. The politicians seem all too eager to go along with it, and have already talked about writing new laws to get around previous Supreme Court cases which enable fair use. It also seems that many consumers are all too willing to give up their rights as consumers and allow the content owners to dictate exactly the manner and on what equipment their content may be viewed. This is not a privilege that content owners are granted under copyright law, but they seek to take it anyway.
[ July 22, 2004: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]

[Richard Hawkes]

Originally posted by Jason Menard:
... writing new laws to get around previous Supreme Court cases which enable fair use...

From Wired: Copyright Bill to Kill Tech?

..."The bill as it is currently drafted is extremely broad and not entirely clear. It would, at a minimum, undermine the Sony Betamax decision."

In the Betamax decision, the Supreme Court ruled that any technology that people use for legal purposes would be legal -- even if the device could be used for illegal purposes, like content piracy. Because of the ruling, the consumer electronics industry and Hollywood went on to develop a thriving market in home video and DVDs.

"This takes an objective standard and replaces it with a subjective one that allows a copyright holder to try and determine the intent of a company when producing a product," Erickson said. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that you would be placing the entertainment industry in charge of technological innovation if this law were passed."

[Helen Thomas]

Originally posted by Jason Menard:
It also seems that many consumers are all too willing to give up their rights as consumers and allow the content owners to dictate exactly the manner and on what equipment their content may be viewed.

Not all consumers are happy to dance to the Hollywood producers tune.

Lawmakers Approve Bill to Let Parents Strip Smut from Movies
[ July 23, 2004: Message edited by: Helen Thomas ]

[Jeroen Wenting]

There is and always will be friction between the right of the user who wants to record a program to watch it at a later time and the pirate who wants to abuse the recorder to duplicate rented tapes either for his own collection or more frequently for sale.

In the case of VCRs there is a definite loss of quality in the duplicate which makes the number and severity of incidences relatively low.
In case of digital technology like DVDs there is no loss of quality and the number and severity of incidences is far higher.

It is estimated that over 35% of all music CDs and movie DVDs in circulation worldwide are pirated, up 4% from 2003 and 14% from 2001.
That's several times more than the percentage of pirated video and audio tapes ever was.

Unless steps are taken to combat this it won't be too long before there is no more economic incentive in creative activity.

It is only natural that in such a climate there will be experimentation about how to protect the rights of the consumer as well as those of the producer, experiments which will have both technical and legal faces and implications.
How to protect someone's right to tape a TV show while preventing someone else from taping the same show in order to sell the tapes?
With DVD recorders that strip commercials in combination with digital TV receivers which pipe movies to those recorders without loss of quality it's now possible to make recordings of movies that are as good as commercial DVDs at far lower cost.
Steal a DVD box from a store and make colour copies of the box artwork (this is happening at an alarming rate) and you can have a commercial grade product at practically no cost to yourself.
Those DVDs are sold in car boot sales for under $10, and will often sell dozens before the seller has to shut down to avoid being caught.

That's the cottage industry that needs to be fought and fought vigorously.

[Helen Thomas]

Socialising mp3-based music listening

There is this rather strange trend of listening to your mp3s and a web site automatically updates which tracks you listened to. You'd probably end up defending or trashing whatever you have listened to which would simultaneously increase or decrease your social rating.

Well , it gets a lot more freaky.

Leaving aside the patterns in other people's 'scrobbling for a moment, as my Audioscrobbler page developed over time I started observing my listening. And now my obsession has got to the stage where I've been 'teaching' it, 'seeding' the system with a fair representation of what I'm into by leaving a 'Top Rated' playlist running overnight in iTunes' party shuffle mode. This is quite odd behaviour if you think about it - playing music not to listen to, but to ensure that Audioscrobbler has a decent understanding of who I am, musically. As Tom Coates astutely pointed out, it's another aspect of presentation of self. Which means it's quite important (as well as being not a little self-regarding, obviously

I can see this happening with books read , videos watched.