CableCard Alternative Article

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by sdsean

I've never pirated a freaking movie or tv show in my life. . . ever. . . I have paid for say, a pay-per-view movie. . .and then yes recorded that via Sage, and kept it for myself. . .but so what. . ? I paid them for it, and i'm not broadcasting it all over hell and giving it away. . .that's called freedom. . . it's no different than a VCR, or taking a picture. . .or writing something down someone else said/thought.

Actually, it is quite different from a VCR, and that was the initial argument for CC to start with. VHS was a "lossy" format, and further it was recording analog which also tended to have already suffered losses even before reaching the customer. Sure someone could easily pirate with it, but each generation after the first would be of a lower quality. Further the health of the 1st generation tape would degrade with each copy or viewing that happened. That also doesn't get into the time involved, equipment wear, and so on.

Enter the digital age. Now a copy of a copy of a copy taken out to an infinite level is easily able to be of the exact same quality as that first generation copy. Further, the holder of the first generation copy loses virtually nothing by making additional copies. The time required to make a copy is often greatly reduced, and there are much fewer wear/tear costs associated with doing so.

Which isn't to mention physical space constraints, a VHS tape is rather large, and only exists in one place. A digital copy can be stored on a very small device alongside dozens or even hundreds of other comparable recordings. That digital copy, unlike the VHS tape, also is less restricted when paired with the right technologies. I cannot watch my 30 year old VHS tape while on the other side of the planet from where it physically is. I can however use Plex (or another such program) to view all my recordings of Modern Marvels even when I'm hundreds of miles away from the physical recording.

While I do agree with personal use, and agree that if someone wants to archive everything they watch and some more, so long as that use is restricted to their immediate family and maybe some close friends it should be permitted. It doesn't change the matter that digital recordings are a very different thing than VHS tapes, even if they contain the same thing.

Because going back to Plex for an example. In the VHS world, if you had a copy of a program and shared with a friend, they would either have your physical copy of that program or an xth generation copy of it(at a lower quality). If they have my physical copy of it, I can't watch it until it's returned. With Plex however, I can make my digital copy available, share it out to my buddy, and I can still watch it whenever I want without concern about when he gets around to watching it. (And have no concern about it getting lost or damaged)

[Skirge01]

But, none of that was ever part of the Betamax ruling, which I assume is what you're referencing.

Analysis from the EFF:

The Betamax case and its descendants go to a crucial question: will innovators be forced by copyright law to ask permission from entertainment moguls before building new technologies? If Sony had asked permission from Hollywood, the Betamax might never have made it to market (or might have had very different features). It's thanks to the Betamax ruling that the makers of VCRs and every other technology capable of infringing and non-infringing uses (e.g., personal computers, CD burners, the TiVo DVR, Apple's iPod, and Web browsers) can continue to sell their wares without fear of lawsuits from copyright owners.

What you're getting at goes to the heart of the above paragraph. Should innovators be required to first ask the moguls:

Can we give them a means to create perfect digital copy?
Can we give them a means to watch a purcahsed copy from afar?
Can we give them a means to make multiple copies?
Can we give them a means to quickly make a copy?
Can we give them a means to change the format?

If left up to them, you know what the answer is going to be and that's how innovation ceases.

You want to know why Sage is still the best software out there? Because of the DMCA. That piece of law effectively killed innovation in the field of media consumption. If Netflix didn't come out as soon as it did (about a year after the DMCA was signed), it probably would have been stopped dead in its tracks, just like Aereo.

[Monedeath]

As I recall there is a defacto (vice) tax (settlement) built into the cost of consumer CD burners and a portion of the revenue for each sale goes into some kind of fund to compensate "content owners" for "lost sales." Of course, I doubt any entity with less than a 10 figure budget sees anything from that fund.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but digital content is much easier to pirate, and the counterfeit copy is digitally indistinguishable from the authentic one. Which does give the rights holders to that content grounds to be concerned.

I do have an online associate who is doctorate level in media studies(or something like that, I forget his actual title), with particular emphasis on technology and "new media" and a lot of the hype around the basis for the DMCA is something he regularly tackles.

Plenty of studies indicate that piracy of music and movies(at least in the context of torrent sites) is probably a "noise level" concern. Now piracy, in the context of someone selling counterfeit copies as legit copies is another matter. The people torrenting content with cannot afford it, were doing "try before you buy"(which has actually benefited some performing artists, in particular new groups), or never intended to buy in the first place. Further, as already indicated, the try before you buy crowd often leads to more sales, not less, due to wider exposure. The cannot afford it crowd, likewise tend to go out and buy the stuff they like once able to afford it.

The thing that they initially used to push the DMCA was statistics showing declines in sales of DVDs and CDs. What they were conveniently forgetting was that in the late 90's and 00's is that a lot of people were upgrading from vinyl or cassette tapes to CDs, and from VHS to DVD, or starting video libraries and collections for the first time, as they didn't consider VHS to be very collectable(properly cared for disks are claimed to be able to last decades after all, even with considerable use). So they were basically riding a technology created bubble that had run its course, and it's collapse just happened to coincide with Napster, BitTorrent, and other file sharing options becoming widely available, so guess what gets blamed?

The entertainment industry sunk a lot of money and effort into their position, and they like the monetary payout if they can manage to hold it. So of course they're aggressively pursuing actions against anything that threatens their position. But you're probably talking a couple decades before a more rationale view on things takes root. The top several tiers of the present day entertainment industry will need to retire first.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

If Netflix didn't come out as soon as it did (about a year after the DMCA was signed), it probably would have been stopped dead in its tracks, just like Aereo.

How so? I don't see how the DMCA has any bearing on Netflix. Netflix's DVD business was pretty firmly founded on the first-sale doctrine. They weren't copying DVDs, or otherwise doing anything to bypass copyright-protection schemes.

And Netflix's streaming service has always been tightly bounded by licensing agreements, and is probably the biggest success story for large-scale DRM.

The Aereo case was certainly interesting. While the result was silly, I largely agreed with the decision. I mean, I don't see how you could say with a straight face that Aereo wasn't redistributing copyrighted work. Yes, that work was being distributed for free in a certain way, but just because I post a bunch of photos on my freely-available website doesn't mean someone should be able to come along and sell those in a book.

Still, I hated the outcome, since the content providers are so stuck in their ways. In a perfect world, they'd just fix their business model as opposed to imposing strange, artificial restrictions on how their services can be accessed.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by reggie14

The Aereo case was certainly interesting. While the result was silly, I largely agreed with the decision. I mean, I don't see how you could say with a straight face that Aereo wasn't redistributing copyrighted work.

I have agreed with most of your comments in this thread Reggie, but I don't know that I agree with you on Aereo.

Let's say I put an OTA HDHR tuner and connected it to a PC running SageTV Server and gave a copy of SageTV Placeshifter for subscribers to run at home. Why shouldn't I be able to rent that PC/tuner combination to anyone who wants? And Aereo also did address verification to ensure that the subscribers were in the city so that they should be able receive those OTA channels.

Is that any different than Aereo? I didn't see Aereo as redistributing content, I saw them as a way to outsource an OTA based DVR. So as long as OTA is legal then what Aereo was going should be legal. The OTA broadcasters are freely distributing the content over the air and Aereo was facilitating being able to receive that content but didn't alter the actual content in that the subscriber would still see all ads, etc.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by wayner

Is that any different than Aereo? I didn't see Aereo as redistributing content, I saw them as a way to outsource an OTA based DVR. So as long as OTA is legal then what Aereo was going should be legal. The OTA broadcasters are freely distributing the content over the air and Aereo was facilitating being able to receive that content but didn't alter the actual content in that the subscriber would still see all ads, etc.

I'm not privy to what went on with Aereo, but my first guess is "subscription service" is where it ran afoul of the law. Even your local cable company has to obtain retransmission rights for the local network affiliate in order to carry their programming on their system. Pretty good odds they didn't obtain those rights from the stations in question, which made distribution of their content as part of a commercial service illegal.

[reggie14]

I really struggled with the Aereo case. I disagreed with it strongly at first, but ultimately came to agree with it. I think you can easily come to two very different conclusions depending on how you approach it.

If you just look at the result, without regard for how Aereo worked, I don't see how you wouldn't conclude Aereo offered a unique service redistributing signals to customers. Would you agree with that, assuming Aereo was implemented in the technologically-sensitive way?

Alternatively, you could look at their architecture, and basically say they just physically moved customer-leased equipment to their backend, just using the Internet as a means of letting the customers access that equipment.

Aereo's architecture is particularly contrived- specifically and clearly engineered to attempt to use the earlier Cablevision precedent, because they knew if it wasn't, it definitely wouldn't have had a chance in court.

I'll admit, I suspect I'm heavily motivated by what I think are the implications. I find the outsourcing argument quite troubling. It really seems to provide free reign to redistribute copyrighted materials, so long as you legally-accessed each individual copy. As I noted before, this seems to have broad implications for materials that can be freely-accessed, but are still copyrighted.

I also tend to think it would absolutely kill free OTA TV. Cable companies could similarly just pop up an antenna (or a field of micro-antennas) and avoid carriage fees. Aereo-like companies could pop up, automatically stripping commercials on the basis that the customer could have done it themselves.

So, for me, it comes down to the sniff test. Aereo's architecture of thousands of individual antennas really feels like just a technicality that shouldn't be strongly considered. And when you put the architecture aside, it really looks (to me, at least) like Aereo was providing their own, unique service. It was accessed by a different mechanism, on different devices, with different features than were (directly) available from the copyright holder.

The implication, I suppose, is that I'm saying that things that are legally-acceptable under personal, fair use should not necessarily extend to third-parties offering that a service. I'm much more comfortable with that as a precent than the alternative.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Monedeath

I'm not privy to what went on with Aereo, but my first guess is "subscription service" is where it ran afoul of the law. Even your local cable company has to obtain retransmission rights for the local network affiliate in order to carry their programming on their system. Pretty good odds they didn't obtain those rights from the stations in question, which made distribution of their content as part of a commercial service illegal.

The laws aren't any different for free services.

I think it really comes down to whether you view what Aereo was doing as redistribution/retransmission. I think wayner would argue it wasn't redistribution, Aereo was merely placing themselves in the middle of an existing (logical) path.

For background:
Aereo was designed based on the "network DVR" concept that was challenged in the Cartoon Network, LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc. case. In that case, Cablevision ran a network DVR where their system maintained separate copies of recordings for different subscribers. The court upheld this architecture.

Following this precedent, Aereo architected their system to use thousands of different antennas- one for each subscriber (or, at least, active user).

[reggie14]

The FCC chairman backed down from his AllVid-like proposal. Instead he's trying to compromise by giving in to to cable companies desire to use apps while trying to demand recording capabilities within the apps. I don't really see how that's going to work...

Oh well. Once my CableCard stops working I'll probably just cancel my cable TV subscription.

[farscapesg1]

Originally Posted by reggie14

The FCC chairman backed down from his AllVid-like proposal. Instead he's trying to compromise by giving in to to cable companies desire to use apps while trying to demand recording capabilities within the apps. I don't really see how that's going to work...

Oh well. Once my CableCard stops working I'll probably just cancel my cable TV subscription.

I would assume it would work similar to PS Vue, aka "Cloud" storage. Being a Comcast customer, I'm still waiting to see their ROKU app to be released. Unfortunately, I'm guessing their DVR features (if present) will rely on cloud storage and be as costly, if not more so, then renting their DVR STB + at least one other STB. $20/month for 500GB cloud storage, and/or limited to 30 days retention? Of course, no commercial skipping option included

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by farscapesg1

8< snip.... Of course, no commercial skipping option included

Instant FAIL! Plus if the responsiveness isn't any better than their old STBs in the on demand stuff then another instant FAIL! Plus if they retain their idiotic "No FF" policy on many (MOST?) channels then that is the biggest FAIL of all!

[reggie14]

Just to state the obvious, this totally isn't happening anymore.

[BobbyDing]

Latest:

http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/16/in...VySWQiOiAiMCJ9


From the article:

"Two FCC sources briefed on the matter said the commission is not expected to approve Wheeler’s separate plan to overhaul the $20 billion annual pay-TV set-top box market that would have allowed tens of millions of users to scrap costly boxes."

So would this also mean our cable cards may still be relevant for a while longer?
.
.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by BobbyDing

So would this also mean our cable cards may still be relevant for a while longer?

I wouldn't count on it. Now, I don't think CableCard support is likely to go away terribly soon for companies that already have it deployed. But, I think the mandate might go away just as quickly under some new plan as Wheeler's plan.

I don't think the FCC will drop this entirely. There's broad agreement that CableCard wasn't successful and that an alternative is needed. AllVid died a while ago when Wheeler caved to industry's counterproposal to create apps. But, he tried to keep in protections for consumers that would have required some sort of support for recording, and a complaint process if a cable company isn't playing fair in terms of licensing terms for those apps.

Those last two items are almost certainly dead. The republican commissioners didn't like those provisions, and even one of the democrats was skeptical.

In other words, I strongly suspect cable companies will get a regulation that ends the CableCard mandate and merely requires them to do what they're already doing with apps. They might be extremely limited, and are unlikely to support recording. And they might only be available on a small number of platforms.

Without requirements for common standards, open licensing, or core capabilities, industry could start claiming they comply overnight.