Digital TV Foreshadows Erosion of Net Rights

**TNT Bot** · Jun 18, 2008, 10:39pm

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager offers insight on how digital TV is rapidly heading toward the kind of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet. Standards such as HDMI and HDCP are acting in concert to strip your equipment of its functionality, displaying 'incompatibility' messages when plugged into older HDMI-enabled devices, shutting down analog outputs when active, and requiring balky handshake credentials that force many consumers to reboot their TVs to recover permission to watch them. Even broadcast flagging, which has been overturned by the Court of Appeals, is still on the de-facto table, as the entertainment lobby retains the power to bully technology companies into baking broadcast flagging into their wares. Sure, digital TV has far fewer points of origin than the Internet and is therefore easier to control, but, as Yager writes, 'Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment' — and it is likely through that equipment that the entertainment and broadcast lobbies will chip away at your rights on the Web."

Jun 18, 2008, 10:39pm	#1 (permalink) Digital TV Foreshadows Erosion of Net Rights
TNT Bot Elite Member Posts: 4,290 Karma:	snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager offers insight on how digital TV is rapidly heading toward the kind of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet. Standards such as HDMI and HDCP are acting in concert to strip your equipment of its functionality, displaying 'incompatibility' messages when plugged into older HDMI-enabled devices, shutting down analog outputs when active, and requiring balky handshake credentials that force many consumers to reboot their TVs to recover permission to watch them. Even broadcast flagging, which has been overturned by the Court of Appeals, is still on the de-facto table, as the entertainment lobby retains the power to bully technology companies into baking broadcast flagging into their wares. Sure, digital TV has far fewer points of origin than the Internet and is therefore easier to control, but, as Yager writes, 'Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment' — and it is likely through that equipment that the entertainment and broadcast lobbies will chip away at your rights on the Web." Read more of this story at Slashdot. </img> More...

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