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May 06, 2005
Hot diggity!
Wired News: Court Nixes 'Broadcast Flag'
In a blow to the entertainment industry, a federal appeals court on Friday found that federal regulators overstepped their authority by requiring consumer-electronics manufacturers to help restrict digital home recording.
When you get right down to it, I want to use content in a way that the broadcasters don’t want me to. I want to be able to record and playback whenever. And if I miss an episode, I want to be able to go to the internet and catch up. Waiting for reruns is unreliable at best-- impossible for some shows...
Broadcasters don’t like that at all-- it cuts into their apparent ratings. The solution they came up with was to make it harder for me to catch up on missed shows. This make sound like a good idea at first blush. In the long run, it isn’t...
To offer one example: I am fond of the show Alias. It has a nice arced story which involves lots of character development. If you miss a couple episodes, however, you’re stuck; you don’t know who is doing what to whom and why. You may simply decide that the show is too much bother and stop watching...
This isn’t far fetched. My Girlfriend has the first 2 seasons on DVD, and lent them to my parents. They got hooked. The problem? It was half-way through Season 3-- they couldn’t get started watching until they could catch up. So they had to wait for the DVD of season 3 to come out, watched that and got started on season 4. They may have decided to simply stop after 2 seasons, and ABC wouldn’t have had their eyeballs watching lovely, lucrative ads...
If there are people doing stuff, there is money to be made. The broadcasters want to turn back the technological clock; something patently impossible. The sooner they learn how to deal with technology, the sooner they’ll make money from it, and the happier everyone will be...
Posted by Andrew at May 6, 2005 03:17 PM
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