It’s been a good while since I posted anything. I know, I have been bad, and allowed real life to interfere with my virtual reality that is the Internet. That being said, there’s a few things that I feel the need to comment on, especially since they are fresh in my mind. I am sure I’m not the only one who says these things, but perhaps the more people talk about it in an intelligent manner, the more the “common person” will understand about the issues. Granted, these issues are not of the utmost importance, and I’d be much more inclined to have the healthcare system in the USA fixed before these issues are dealt with. However, the “common person” often times places greater importance on these issues than I do.
Have you bought any Blu-ray movies recently? How about subscribing to digital cable TV in a major metropolitan area in the USA? If so, you have either knowingly or unknownling encountered DRM. DRM, called “Digital Rights Management”, is misnamed. Since it does little to protect you, the consumer, and is all about protecting the rights that the “content publishers” (in this case, the companies that publish the movies or cable tv feeds) believe they have. It restricts what you may and may not do with the movie in your own home. Therefore, “Digital Restrictions Management” is a more apt definition.
Since you may not have knowingly encountered the problems that this DRM creates, I can present two scenarios that I have encountered. For starters, Blu-ray discs are usually encrypted with a pretty strong encryption routine. This encryption routine is much stronger than the one that is used on standard DVD discs. The “content publishers” would have you believe that the encryption is to prevent copyright infringement (notice I did not say piracy, as the real piracy is occuring in the waters off of the Horn of Africa by Somalis). Why do I have the strong suspicion that bootleg copies of Blu-ray movies have been out since they were released to market, especially in East and Southeast Asian countries? The answer is simple: those who do large scale infringement for profit can easily get around the encryption on the discs. So then one must assume that the encryption on the disc was either a naive protection against those large scale counterfeiters or simply a way of preventing you, the end user, from making copies and giving to your friends. With all the hype going around the media about how piracy is hurting legitimate sales, let me pause for a minute to put the clock back to the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, how many people made mix tapes and shared them with their friends, and those friends ended up sharing the mixes with their friends too? I’d put my money on it being the majority of folks around at the time with access to records and tapes. What’s the difference between the 1970s and 1980s and the current day? Simple: The Internet has given people some *limited* ability to quantify events and occurences that were previously too difficult to quantify otherwise. So suddenly the “content publishers” are able to see “OMG, there’s thousands of copies of our songs out on the Great Wild Internet! We must do something to force people to pay for every single copy out there!” Current Recording Industry of America Association litigation aside, the second prong on that crusade is to encrypt everything. Not only that, to be able to decrypt the content, your hardware and software must be licensed. That means that all free and open source projects are excluded, because one of the steps in getting the license is coughing up a big wad of cash. Another of the steps, I believe, is preventing users from getting the technical information and encryption keys necessary to decrypt discs on their own. The fact that the program’s source code is widely available means that all that technical information is right there in public view. This effectively prevents anybody from releasing a piece of open source software to allow even viewing of the content without taking on great legal and/or financial liability.
The situation with cable tv is pretty much the same. The only two differences that come to mind are the fact that instead of a disc being encrypted, it’s the signal that comes over the cable lines that is, and the fact that you as a consumer are paying a pretty hefty price monthly to subscribe to this service. I use an open source DVR at home known as MythTV. MythTV is similar in many ways to a Tivo, except that it has no corporate backing, no interest in financial gain via sale of software or services, and allows the user to have more complete control over what is done with the recordings. For example, I can retain my recordings forever, provided I have space for them. I can transcode them (means to convert from one format to another) in order to save drive space at the cost of quality (usually). I can automatically skip the obnoxious commercials as well. Tivo will certainly not allow you to skip commercials, only to fast forward through them. This means that Tivo is a somewhat more convenient VHS, and does not live up to its potential as a digital recorder. If you happen to have a Motorola 6200 series cable box, you’ll see that the box has the hardware for networking (the RJ45 connector), Firewire connectivity, and USB connectivity, which are all very likely disabled by your cable provider. Since digital cable and HDTV transmit what’s called mpeg2ts which can be streamed (sent) directly out the firewire ports, it would make sense to just plug the cable box into a computer with a firewire port on it, and record off of that, no? It cuts out the overhead of digital-to-analog-to-digital conversions, and simplifies everything. Comcast in DuPage County, Illinois, only allows for the firewire port to be used on channels that are broadcast in the region (i.e. channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 26, 32, 38, 44, 50, and 66) and a few public access channels. Everything else is disabled by encryption. So I end up paying $70 per month to not be able to simply and easily record off of the cable box, and instead have to resort to a convoluted solution involving infrared transmitters and Hauppage WinTV capture cards. It is far less successful than using the firewire, as sometimes the channel does not change properly. When I called to complain to Comcast about this, I was told “We disabled this because you might record a show and keep it forever.” Excuse me? First off, what about all those old VHS tapes of TV shows that my elders have in their possession? I don’t seem them tossing them out. I also don’t see them watching them anymore either, though. I do have several episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 2005, but I also have not watched them recently either. I would not likely buy seasons of The Daily Show on disc if they were offered for sale assuming that I did not have those episodes saved on my drive. The “content publishers” cannot even try to assert that this is a “lost sale”.
The only lost sales involved are these:
1. I have not subscribed to cable tv since moving back in November. I have no plans on doing so until the encryption is beaten to a pulp (which is unnecessary to do in my opinion) or is completely dropped from at least non-premium stations. So that means that Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, et al, are all out of the $70 a month that I would otherwise have spent on service from one of those companies.
2. I have no immediate plans to buy any Blu-ray movie discs. I do own a Blu-ray recorder on my computer, but it is meant to be used for data and for my own home movies. I own somewhere around 40 DVD movies (or more) right now, which I only bought because it was possible to watch them with open source software. Until this is possible and unencumbered, all the “content publishers” selling encrypted and encumbered discs are out the several thousands of dollars I would otherwise spend on updating my collection and collecting new titles.
The “content publishers” lobbyists constantly sell their sad sad stories to our elected (and unelected) officials all the time. For some reason, they believe that their products are of national importance, and that without them the national economy would crumble. I didn’t realize that music, movies, and tv, were on the same level of importance as roads, schools, healthcare, and protection. What would happen if they just vanished off the face of the planet? Simple – life would go on as it always did, and people would care less about American Idol and the next installment of Tolkien’s books into movie form.
Americans would not likely let the government control at what times they eat everyday inside their own homes. Why do they let companies like these control how they view and copy what they have legally paid for in their own homes?
The issues are even more complex than this, but this is already a good start.