MSNBC reports about how the TV industry (in the form of Hollywood and the NFL) has decided to go the way of the MPAA and the RIAA (TVAA? Methinks Ted Turner will drool over that idea) and has started to "crack down" on TiVo and ability for digital distribution of that which it captures.
Here's my question: Does it matter? Anybody with a capture card and a scheduling program (go cr0ntab!!!) has their very own open-everything TiVo they can use anyways. Hook up your TV to your computer, and huzzah! Instant Entertainment Center! You can even script it to automatically edit out commercials!
Oh well. I guess they're gonna start suing people next for sharing TV shows. On the most part I've found, though, TiVo means squat for the piracy community (I like how Television is an industry and piracy is a community. Makes you kinda wonder which one is more capitalist...) as a lot of the communities who are trading tv shows (Digital Archive Project being my personal favourite) do so with full intent of merely providing people with what they want: High-quality distribution of TV shows, similar to tape trading, based on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 model. What that means is that if the TV show is commercially available, don't trade it. So I don't think that this supposed TVAA would care about that type of stuff.
So, if we've already eliminated all the non-commercially available stuff, that leaves us with Family Guy, Futurama, Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City.... wait a minute... These are all available on DVD! And since the MPAA made absolutely sure that DeCSS would be made readily available to ANYBODY simply by trying to clamp down on it (What's your favourite? Mine's gotta be the DeCSS Haiku), all the stuff that's commercially available is going to be available to the pirates as well.
So what exactly is this mythical TVAA attempting to control? The P2P services have deemed it impossible to stop the distribution of these things. Let's face it, the technology community has found a cheaper means for distribution of art. Television, Movies, Music, Software and information have all become a part of the digital revolution, and it's moving faster than the companies' beaurocratic designs can keep up with. IMHO, this is a good thing. Beaurocracy is becoming obsolete and is being replaced by technology. About bloody well time. After a few revolutions in which the working class has been rendered obsolete, it's nice to see people designing stuff that can replace upper management.
Posted by ebbomega at July 22, 2004 11:34 AM