[mythtv-users] Time Warner & Firewire

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 08:22:16PM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
>    I agree with much of what you say but, agree with it or not, the
> folks that make the movies feel they have a right to protect their
> content. They paid millions of buck to get the movie made and do not
> want indiscriminate numbers of perfect digital copies being made and
> given away. As I'm sure you know the ticket office returns for movies


Actually, the copy prevention systems don't do anything about that.
Since it just takes one copy to get out into the underground nets, and
they can't make an uncrackable system, the only thing these systems do
is make it harder for ordinary users to copy -- but most importantly,
they make it harder for smaller entrants to compete in the media player
markets and impossible for open source developers to compete.


> in the States are on the order of a few billion a year. That's less
> revenue than one moderate semiconductor company like AMD. The returns
> from DVDs is far higher so without the DVD revenue the studios lose
> money go out of business and we don't get movies in any format. As

Actually not true.  They make more money now from cinema release than
they did (in constant dollars) in the old days, and on top of that
make even more from home video and tv rights.  (TV rights of course
don't stop copying, and nor has home video release stopped copying in
any effective way.)

So they have a thriving industry right now without copy prevention but
they are both worried about losing it -- and on keeping a lock on
the tech.

> long as Open Source tools continue to give all users the capability to
> make perfect digital copies of any source material there is going to
> be disagreements and issues like this.

Actually, the tech-savvy folks at the movie studios know perfectly well
their DRM is crackable and won't stop copies from getting into the
underground P2P nets.   I sympathise with their plight actually in
ways even they don't know (every dime that ever fed me has come from
media and copyright businesses) but freedom to innovate in tech is
even more important.
> 
>    That said I expect that over time the cable boxes will get much
> better about this. There shouldn't be any reason that I cannot make a
> copy of news shows, high school sports events or other low revenue
> generating shows for time shifting and I expect that cable boxes will
> make this stuff available over time. In the mean time it's not
> surprising to me that they take a somewhat draconian view and say all
> or nothing.

DRM requires a system where the default is no copying and only certain
exceptions are allowed.  That precludes open tools and open source.  It's
hard to imagine any DRM, even the most permissive, not shutting linux
tools out of the media playing space.   I have imagined some methods but
they remain ugly and still shut out the innovation that this space is
about.