Hollywood Wants Control of Your HDTV

By Kevin Spidel, Patriot Strategies.

The race to get quality content directly to your HDTV has been building for a few years. TiVo now includes podcast aggregation ability, AppleTV includes the ability to watch movies, independent films are distributed via iTunes directly to your TV, and Boxee now aggregates and scrapes the social web for online video that your social network is watching and allows you to broadcast directly to your home theater.

Consumer electronic devices have gone from component HDTV connections to HDMI and optical inputs for quality HDTV viewing.

Hollywood would like to break your TV and revert your viewing experience back a few years. Never mind the evolution of media distribution created by an open market. The large corporate trade associates want to control distribution abilities directly by breaking your TV.

The MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) has been trying to increase movie distribution while maintaining full control of their content. Throughout the years they have joined forces with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to take on media related websites, bit torrent technology, and various file sharing programs in an effort to crack down on illegal piracy.

Enter Selectable Output Control (aka The Cable Kill Swith).

“Selectable Output Control” (”SOC”) is the remote signaling of home devices by content providers or distributors, to turn off consumer home interfaces on a program-by-program basis. The interface in question would simply not operate for the particular program. It would mean that a consumer who has purchased an HDTV display, and pays for a set-top box or other device with an HDTV output, still might not receive all of the HDTV programs he or she has paid for — because the interface between the set-top box and the HDTV display has been turned off by remote control. In the long term, imposition of SOC could have the effect of driving from the market any home interface that supports home recording. HRRC has opposed imposition of SOC by law or in any context subject to regulation.

SOC is activated by data “triggers” that ride along with program information when it is sent to the home. FCC Encoding Rules currently ban SOC use, but the FCC has left the door open to its use in the future.  – Home Recording Rights Coalition

Here is a video about this technology: (more…)

Right Click, Copy and Paste

Images often times express more than words.  I, for one, very much enjoy including images with my blog posts to compliment the topic of the post.  I certainly do not take my digital camera out and take my own pictures but do a Google image search to find that perfect picture that embodies my post, I right click on the image and place it in my post.   I admittedly have a nonchalant attitude towards intellectual property on the Internet.  Perhaps that is because I came of age during the Napster revolution or I am accustomed to copying images and text from other websites and including it in my work.  Digital technology has revolutionized how society views IP rights online.

The California Assembly is taking steps to protect photographers and public figures whose images are used without consent online.  AB 632, introduced by Assembly Member Davis, would require a social networking site to prevent an image of a person that is posted on the site from being copied or reproduced by another person without the permission of the user who posted the image.  In a further measure to protect unauthorized reproduction of a person’s image; social networking websites would be required to create a mechanism for users to flag images for removal of images of that user that are posted without their authorization. (more…)

“Changing the Law to Save Newspapers” – at What Cost to New Media?

Yesterday Jennifer wrote about Intellectual Property laws, specifically US patent laws, as they relate to emerging and traditional media in the world of news. It spurred  discussion in the comments section below, Facebook, and Twitter.

Today, Jeffrey Neuburger posted a great article titled, “Changing the Law to Save Newspapers: Some Modest Proposals,” on the PBS MediaShift blog.  The article is from traditional media’s point of view, not surprisingly, some of these proposals infringe on emerging news distribution technologies such as SEO regulations for online news.

After reading this article I was struck by the question, “what is newsworthy content?”

We encourage you to read the below article and post your thoughts.

(more…)

News Release: Copyright Issues Top Congressional Agenda for New ABA Task Force

The American Bar Association Section of Intellectual Property Law announced today that it has established the Copyright Law Reform Task Force to make recommendations to Congress on upcoming copyright-related bills and proposals.

The new task force, chaired by June M. Besek, section council member and executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School, will focus on proposals to change existing copyright laws and to create new domestic and international mechanisms to enhance compliance with copyright and other intellectual property law norms.

Following the model of the section’s Patent Law Reform Task Force established two years ago to respond to the ever-changing landscape in patent reform legislation, the Copyright Law Reform Task Force selected its members from the leadership of the section’s key copyright committees, copyright experts from academia and the section’s senior management.

The Copyright Law Task Force forms at a critical time in Congress. Both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees are now addressing copyright matters after postponing consideration of those concerns to concentrate on patent law reform during the first 16 months of the 110th Congress.

via Copyright Issues Top Congressional Agenda for New ABA Task Force – News Release.