Sci-Fi
March 2nd, 2005, 06:39 AM
Home recording ending as we know it (http://www.sfbg.com/39/22/cover_fcc.html)
Build your TV!
As the FCC and the entertainment biz get ready to end home recording as we know it, a bunch of radical geeks are working on a solution or two.
By Annalee Newitz
'ALL I WANT is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend," says Sarah Brydon, looking up from a long table covered with half-built computers. These sound like the words of a science fiction nerd, not a revolutionary. But Brydon is a new breed of protester – and she's expressing her discontent with the U.S. government by building a television.
She's one of a dozen consumer activists who have gathered on a Saturday morning in late January for a high-definition television "Build-In" at the Mission District office of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (where I work). Part computer hardware nerdfest, part hell-raising political action, the Build-In is a high-tech protest of a new Federal Communications Commission regulation called the "Broadcast Flag."
According to the FCC, the flag is going to ease the nation's transition from today's analog televisions to tomorrow's high-definition televisions. What exactly does it mean for a government agency to "ease" the transition from one kind of TV signal to another? In this case, it seems to mean making the entertainment industry feel very warm and fuzzy inside.
The Broadcast Flag is designed – poorly – to stop people from putting high-quality recordings of TV shows on popular file-sharing networks like BitTorrent. In reality, it will give the government an unprecedented amount of control over what we do in our own homes with recordings of HDTV. The flag is supposed to stop mass copying and infringement, but it will also stop most consumers from perfectly legal activities like saving HD copies of shows for personal use.
Past generations of media activists protested government and industry control of TV content. They battled FCC censorship, denounced market grabs by massive content conglomerates like News Corp., whose bland, mainstream programming turned a diverse media landscape into The O'Reilly Factor and 7th Heaven reruns. Those activists nourished independent TV content on local cable access channels, where they could talk openly about radical politics or get naked on a whim.
Now the Broadcast Flag has alerted a new group of media guerrillas to another way in which government and industry control pop culture: by locking down the devices that receive, copy, and remix broadcast signals. And these activists are responding by building independent technologies that don't bend to the will of the FCC or MGM.
The televisions created at the Build-In are also computers, and they contain a TiVo-like device called a personal video recorder (PVR) – you can use them to pause a show, record it, sample it, and even save a copy to DVD. Using the TV she builds today, Brydon won't have any trouble loaning her friend a copy of Buffy.
The television liberation front
By noon every surface in the EFF office is covered with computer guts: multicolored ethernet cables lie in snarled piles all over the floor, hard drives occupy precarious positions near half-eaten bagels, TV antennae poke into the air, and exposed circuit boards are tenuously connected to monitors whose output isn't always good. These TVs are going to rock, but getting the software running perfectly is a pain in the ass.
Celebrated consumer gadget blogger Phillip Torrone is bouncing around the room, interviewing everybody with his iPod for a Podcast about building televisions. He's flown down from Seattle just for the Build-In. "Tell me about this machine!" he says excitedly, thrusting the little white device at audiovisual geek Gregor Menasian, who has packed the last bit of open space with a computer full of extremely sweet components: quiet fan, capacious hard drive, fast CPU.
As the two of them talk, EFF special projects coordinator and attorney Wendy Seltzer snaps photos of an error message on Menasian's monitor. Seltzer, who helped organize the Build-In, wants to be sure that accurate reports of glitches go to the hackers who wrote the software everybody's using today to turn their computers into HDTVs with built-in PVRs. Called MythTV, it's named for the "mythical convergence box" gadget-crazy futurists often predict will finally combine TVs, DVD players, Web browsing, and stereos in one simple machine.
What has galvanized this group – made up of TV fans, civil liberties activists, and politically minded hackers – is outrage at what the Broadcast Flag will do to the future of innovative, crazy-dream devices like MythTV. After the mandate goes into effect July 1, it will be illegal for anyone in the United States to manufacture a device that records high-definition television unless it's built to obey a special signal – the flag – emitted by stations broadcasting HD shows. The flag will tell PVRs and other equipment whether they're allowed to copy a show onto some other medium, like a DVD. In short, broadcasters and content owners will actually be able to control your recording habits.
Let's say, for example, that it's a couple of years from now, and your TiVo (bought anytime after July 1 of this year) has recorded the excellent Marx brothers movie Animal Crackers, which was just broadcast on TNT in HD. Tomorrow you're getting on a plane to Australia, and you'd like to save a copy on DVD to watch on your computer during the 15-hour flight.
You're entitled to make a personal copy under federal copyright law, so it should be no problem. And in fact, it was no problem back in the days of analog broadcasts and VCRs. But with the Broadcast Flag in place, TNT can send out a signal that tells your TiVo not to make HD copies of Animal Crackers. So when you burn that DVD and put it into your computer somewhere over the Pacific, you get a bunch of garbage. The FCC has just stolen your rights.
Think of it this way: if the Broadcast Flag applied to VCRs, it would, in effect, allow you to tape shows but not necessarily take the tape out of the VCR. And you'd likely be forced to erase your show in order to tape the next thing.
Certainly there may be broadcasting companies that refuse to send out the flag, or that send out a flag saying "go right ahead and copy this." But a company like Paramount, which owns the rights to Star Trek, is unlikely to allow them to do so, for fear that letting people make copies will undercut its ability to sell syndication rights to Spike TV and UPN. Networks like CBS aren't going to want to let their shows out of the box either – they don't want to lose control of their intellectual property. For years we've taken for granted our ability to record television programs to enjoy weeks or even years later. Now that we have a chance to get extremely high-quality, HD broadcasts, the FCC is trying to take our HD media libraries away from us.
Why would it do this, especially given that it has received absolutely no mandate from Congress? Basically, the agency succumbed to pressure from Hollywood. Entertainment companies figure that as long as the copies available online are of a lower quality than what's on TV, the broadcasters have a leg up on downloaders. But instead of relying on the law to stop people from infringing copyrights, these companies lobbied the FCC to take control of the marketplace and force vendors to sell machines that make all forms of copying effectively impossible. If your super-excellent HD copy of CSI can't get out of the TiVo box, then you can't stick it online and break the law. Too bad you can't do what the law permits either.
Even more disturbing, the Broadcast Flag mandates that recording devices be "robust against user modification." In plain language, that means consumers can't repair, tinker with, or optimize their own machines. What's more, it will also become impossible for small, upstart technology companies to break into the consumer electronics market for TV recorders. If they can't take apart the devices that output the HD signal, they can't build cool new devices to play with that signal.
Which also means that the devices people are using at today's Build-In will be illegal in four months.
Click on the above link to read the full article
:salute: :Nsalute:
Build your TV!
As the FCC and the entertainment biz get ready to end home recording as we know it, a bunch of radical geeks are working on a solution or two.
By Annalee Newitz
'ALL I WANT is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend," says Sarah Brydon, looking up from a long table covered with half-built computers. These sound like the words of a science fiction nerd, not a revolutionary. But Brydon is a new breed of protester – and she's expressing her discontent with the U.S. government by building a television.
She's one of a dozen consumer activists who have gathered on a Saturday morning in late January for a high-definition television "Build-In" at the Mission District office of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (where I work). Part computer hardware nerdfest, part hell-raising political action, the Build-In is a high-tech protest of a new Federal Communications Commission regulation called the "Broadcast Flag."
According to the FCC, the flag is going to ease the nation's transition from today's analog televisions to tomorrow's high-definition televisions. What exactly does it mean for a government agency to "ease" the transition from one kind of TV signal to another? In this case, it seems to mean making the entertainment industry feel very warm and fuzzy inside.
The Broadcast Flag is designed – poorly – to stop people from putting high-quality recordings of TV shows on popular file-sharing networks like BitTorrent. In reality, it will give the government an unprecedented amount of control over what we do in our own homes with recordings of HDTV. The flag is supposed to stop mass copying and infringement, but it will also stop most consumers from perfectly legal activities like saving HD copies of shows for personal use.
Past generations of media activists protested government and industry control of TV content. They battled FCC censorship, denounced market grabs by massive content conglomerates like News Corp., whose bland, mainstream programming turned a diverse media landscape into The O'Reilly Factor and 7th Heaven reruns. Those activists nourished independent TV content on local cable access channels, where they could talk openly about radical politics or get naked on a whim.
Now the Broadcast Flag has alerted a new group of media guerrillas to another way in which government and industry control pop culture: by locking down the devices that receive, copy, and remix broadcast signals. And these activists are responding by building independent technologies that don't bend to the will of the FCC or MGM.
The televisions created at the Build-In are also computers, and they contain a TiVo-like device called a personal video recorder (PVR) – you can use them to pause a show, record it, sample it, and even save a copy to DVD. Using the TV she builds today, Brydon won't have any trouble loaning her friend a copy of Buffy.
The television liberation front
By noon every surface in the EFF office is covered with computer guts: multicolored ethernet cables lie in snarled piles all over the floor, hard drives occupy precarious positions near half-eaten bagels, TV antennae poke into the air, and exposed circuit boards are tenuously connected to monitors whose output isn't always good. These TVs are going to rock, but getting the software running perfectly is a pain in the ass.
Celebrated consumer gadget blogger Phillip Torrone is bouncing around the room, interviewing everybody with his iPod for a Podcast about building televisions. He's flown down from Seattle just for the Build-In. "Tell me about this machine!" he says excitedly, thrusting the little white device at audiovisual geek Gregor Menasian, who has packed the last bit of open space with a computer full of extremely sweet components: quiet fan, capacious hard drive, fast CPU.
As the two of them talk, EFF special projects coordinator and attorney Wendy Seltzer snaps photos of an error message on Menasian's monitor. Seltzer, who helped organize the Build-In, wants to be sure that accurate reports of glitches go to the hackers who wrote the software everybody's using today to turn their computers into HDTVs with built-in PVRs. Called MythTV, it's named for the "mythical convergence box" gadget-crazy futurists often predict will finally combine TVs, DVD players, Web browsing, and stereos in one simple machine.
What has galvanized this group – made up of TV fans, civil liberties activists, and politically minded hackers – is outrage at what the Broadcast Flag will do to the future of innovative, crazy-dream devices like MythTV. After the mandate goes into effect July 1, it will be illegal for anyone in the United States to manufacture a device that records high-definition television unless it's built to obey a special signal – the flag – emitted by stations broadcasting HD shows. The flag will tell PVRs and other equipment whether they're allowed to copy a show onto some other medium, like a DVD. In short, broadcasters and content owners will actually be able to control your recording habits.
Let's say, for example, that it's a couple of years from now, and your TiVo (bought anytime after July 1 of this year) has recorded the excellent Marx brothers movie Animal Crackers, which was just broadcast on TNT in HD. Tomorrow you're getting on a plane to Australia, and you'd like to save a copy on DVD to watch on your computer during the 15-hour flight.
You're entitled to make a personal copy under federal copyright law, so it should be no problem. And in fact, it was no problem back in the days of analog broadcasts and VCRs. But with the Broadcast Flag in place, TNT can send out a signal that tells your TiVo not to make HD copies of Animal Crackers. So when you burn that DVD and put it into your computer somewhere over the Pacific, you get a bunch of garbage. The FCC has just stolen your rights.
Think of it this way: if the Broadcast Flag applied to VCRs, it would, in effect, allow you to tape shows but not necessarily take the tape out of the VCR. And you'd likely be forced to erase your show in order to tape the next thing.
Certainly there may be broadcasting companies that refuse to send out the flag, or that send out a flag saying "go right ahead and copy this." But a company like Paramount, which owns the rights to Star Trek, is unlikely to allow them to do so, for fear that letting people make copies will undercut its ability to sell syndication rights to Spike TV and UPN. Networks like CBS aren't going to want to let their shows out of the box either – they don't want to lose control of their intellectual property. For years we've taken for granted our ability to record television programs to enjoy weeks or even years later. Now that we have a chance to get extremely high-quality, HD broadcasts, the FCC is trying to take our HD media libraries away from us.
Why would it do this, especially given that it has received absolutely no mandate from Congress? Basically, the agency succumbed to pressure from Hollywood. Entertainment companies figure that as long as the copies available online are of a lower quality than what's on TV, the broadcasters have a leg up on downloaders. But instead of relying on the law to stop people from infringing copyrights, these companies lobbied the FCC to take control of the marketplace and force vendors to sell machines that make all forms of copying effectively impossible. If your super-excellent HD copy of CSI can't get out of the TiVo box, then you can't stick it online and break the law. Too bad you can't do what the law permits either.
Even more disturbing, the Broadcast Flag mandates that recording devices be "robust against user modification." In plain language, that means consumers can't repair, tinker with, or optimize their own machines. What's more, it will also become impossible for small, upstart technology companies to break into the consumer electronics market for TV recorders. If they can't take apart the devices that output the HD signal, they can't build cool new devices to play with that signal.
Which also means that the devices people are using at today's Build-In will be illegal in four months.
Click on the above link to read the full article
:salute: :Nsalute: