Interesting People mailing list archives
Has TiVo Forsaken Us?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:08:01 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Seth David Schoen <schoen () loyalty org> Date: November 14, 2004 12:21:08 PM EST To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] Has TiVo Forsaken Us? David Farber writes:
Begin forwarded message: From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com> Date: November 13, 2004 12:53:05 AM EST To: undisclosed-recipient:; Subject: Has TiVo Forsaken Us? Has TiVo Forsaken Us? Wired Magazine November 2004 Buy a TiVo lately? Sometime in the next few months, your machine will quietly download a patch that makes it respond to a new copy protection scheme from software maker Macrovision. The app puts restrictions on how long your DVR can save certain kinds of shows - so far, just pay-per-view and video-on-demand programs. It's the first time your TiVo won't let you watch whatever you want, whenever you want. We asked TiVo general counsel Matthew Zinn why he thinks Hollywood will settle for an inch when it can take a mile. ... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/view.html?pg=3
Until about a year ago there was a nice bright-line rule between unencrypted stuff like free-to-air broadcasting and basic-tier cable: open standards and no license required to receive them, therefore no legal restrictions on what you can do with them. (You are still bound by copyright law, but the legal default for unencrypted signals has been that technology is not required to enforce anyone's notion of copyright.) Some programming is encrypted on cable and on satellites. Cable and satellite companies nowadays supply proprietary set-top boxes and/or smart cards to let you receive these -- a quintessential "access control" used to make sure you pay for certain services. If you don't pay, your access is turned off. (There are many different key management approaches to this.) In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress said that at least the cable companies ought to standardize their smart card interface format to promote competition over equipment by allowing third parties to produce set-top boxes (or to allow people to produce TVs with integrated "navigation" and a smart card slot). This policy goal is called "commercial availability of navigation devices". But the cable industry people went off and created a scheme under the Telecommunications Act framework that would result in _re-encrypting_ the signals within your house. In other words, the smart cards and set-top boxes would decrypt the programming as it came into your house and verify that you were authorized to receive it. But then they would encrypt it again in order to enforce _copyright holder_ policies about what you could do with it after you had received it. That re-encryption makes the new generation of pay TV services (after you've paid for them) different from free TV services because the pay TV services can be subject to additional controls after the point of lawful reception. The FCC was asked to ban this re-encryption -- in a sense, to limit the use of encryption under the 1996 Act to making sure that you initially pay for pay TV, not to controlling what you do with it afterward. In a decision in 2000, the Commission declined to do this (it accepted the cable industry's rules with re-encryption in them as a valid implementation of the "commercial availability of navigation devices"). This decision was unfortunate in its implications because it vastly increased the potential leverage that movie studios would have over technology companies. If the FCC had forbidden re-encryption of pay TV programming, companies like TiVo would not need to negotiate with movie studios (or broadcast groups) in order to get lawful access to pay TV. That would be a more aggressively pro-competitive policy than the policy that the FCC ultimately found Congress intended to adopt. Instead, companies like TiVo _do_ have to negotiation for lawful access to encrypted pay TV. And TiVo has chosen to do exactly that. While they started out with a product that received only unencrypted signals, they have had a lot of success in grooming themselves for negotiation with, and in actually negotiating with, copyright and broadcast interests. The result is that TiVo can access lots of encrypted pay TV services, some pay TV providers have become commercial partners of TiVo's, and TiVos can legally record a lot more TV content. Of course, that negotiation has come at a corresponding cost: TiVo implements digital rights management, takes steps (to date not very strong steps) to control reverse engineering and aftermark modifications, and generally implements a lot of restrictions on recorded programming. TiVo often omits potentially controversial features or implements them in more restrictive ways than some of its engineers might have chosen. And in order to keep other industries happy, TiVo applies many of these restrictions _to unencrypted TV programming_, where it is not at all legally required to do so. TiVo customers are obviously happy enough with this strategy that they keep buying TiVos in large numbers, although there is a devoted community of "TiVo hacking" enthusiasts who learn how to add functionality to their TiVos -- and they have a very complicated relationship with these restrictions. The upshot of all this is that, when you buy a TiVo, it is missing features _with respect to unencrypted TV_ that it could have had under the law. And, as the present article shows, TiVo has the ability to disable more features if its commercial partners ask (or demand under the terms of a contract) that they be removed. It can even do this via field upgrades. The FCC seems unlikely to reverse its 2000 decision on the commercial availability of navigation devices -- even though such actions would give companies like TiVo a much better position, and perhaps a much more functional product, by removing some of the legal incentives to appease so many other industries. Instead, the FCC has actually headed in the direction of giving movie studios _more_ legal control over the technology people use to receive television. (More on this in a moment.) There is an alternative -- if you only want to receive unencrypted TV (free-to-air terrestrial broadcasting and basic-tier cable in the U.S., and possibly these plus certain types of pay TV in Europe). You can use a personal computer as a PVR by putting one or more TV cards inside. Then you can run software that turns the PC into a PVR. One of the most impressive programs along these lines is an open source package called MythTV http://www.mythtv.org/ which has already implemented functionality competitive with TiVo's PVR functionality, plus features that TiVo won't touch. As I described it the other day: IR remote control, program guide data, scheduled and recurring recordings, WWW interface, themes and plugins, network streaming, multiple tuners (as many as you can fit in a PC) and concurrent recording of multiple channels using available tuners, NTSC/ATSC, background transcoding, previews and picture-in-picture, ripping and archiving, commercial detection, and the traditional abilities to rewind and pause live TV. Of course, all recordings are unencrypted and can be exported, streamed, or burned to removable media. And the entire project is 100% open source and actively encourages hacking and third-party development. There is a problem to which I alluded earlier. The major movie studios have persuaded the FCC to change the rules for unencrypted digital television to apply DRM there, in the "broadcast flag" or "digital broadcast content protection" proceeding. (That's why I say that the FCC is unlikely to change the DRM requirement for cable TV!) The result is that the equipment that makes a program like MythTV work with U.S. digital television will be illegal to manufacture here from July 1, 2005. If you want to use something like MythTV for digital TV in the future, your best bet is to buy the equipment before then. MythTV works well with the pcHDTV HD-3000 card, which is finally shipping: http://www.pchdtv.com/ There is also a MacOS X package (not open source although I'm hoping because I hear there have been interesting discussions) with an external tuner -- that will also be illegal to manufacture from July 1, 2005 -- with an interface described as more polished than MythTV's although less PVR-like. Like MythTV, it records to unencrypted files on your hard drive. http://www.elgato.com/ (They also have a comprehensive line of products for the European market, which has its own set of looming legal problems. It may be just as advisable for Europeans to buy such equipment in a hurry as it is for Americans to do so.) For a bit more advocacy and background information on the broadcast flag rule and using personal computers as PVRs, see http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/ I would not get so worked up about any one action that TiVo takes. We know their strategy, and it involves co-operating with movie studios to impose restrictions on end users. The reasons why they do this are not mysterious. If you want to criticize TiVo -- and that's fine with me! -- the right place to start is much earlier in the company's history. But if you actually want to opt out of the DRM game, it seems to me that the thing to do is to spread the remaining unrestricted technologies as far and wide as possible while they're still legal. People who got excited about "convergence" last decade often didn't mention DRM (and sometimes weren't even aware of it). Today MythTV describes itself as "the ultimate convergence box" -- like several other products, it brings TV into the PC environment _on the PC's terms_. Programmable, extensible, subject to third-party innovation. I have seen this running and found it simply incredible. But because of the legal and commercial incentives, this isn't where _most_ of the industry is going today. I've often thought of writing an essay called "converging up, converging down?" about the ambiguity of the "convergence" ideal. PCs and consumer electronics (CE) devices have very different characteristics -- beyond just the technical differences, veering into cultural differences -- even though today they are usually made out of the same chips. Among other things, PCs in the past were friendlier to user innovation and third party innovation; you could teach them to do more. CE devices in the past were much more single-function and fixed-function, and upgrades (if available) typically had to be provided by the manufacturer. Ultimately PCs were much more under end user control and CE devices much more under the manuacturer's control. Movie studios have appreciated this distinction; they have better, older, and closer relationships with the CE industries than with the PC industries. (On the negative side, PCs are seen as more expensive and more difficult to use than CE devices. CE devices have enjoyed wider and faster market penetration. To some people, the CE device is the ideal in terms of user interface even if it's not the ideal in other ways.) If these device families actually do "converge", on whose terms will they converge? Will the PC grow more like a DVD player (or a TiVo), or will the PVR and cell phone grow more like PCs? And, since "being like a PC" or "being like a CE box" is not just a single dimension, in _which ways_ will they become more like one another? Which particular characteristics will each now imitate? (For example, many CE devices today do have a CPU, RAM, and operating system, and do run software, as in a PC -- but it's not software chosen or loaded by the owner of the device! The same is true of many cell phones and other mobile devices.) In terms of end user control, there is an opportunity for CE devices to converge up (enhancing customers' control) and a risk of PC devices converging down (eroding it). I think the world the entertainment companies have built is providing exactly the wrong incentive at every point as this question is worked out. --Seth David Schoen <schoen () loyalty org> | Very frankly, I am opposed to people
http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | being programmed by others. http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/ | -- Fred Rogers (1928-2003), | 464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984) ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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