Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Video
Remember over-the-air broadcast television? The kind that you can receive on a variety of devices, without scrambling or monthly fees? For decades, the principle that the public airwaves are just that – public property – has been an obstacle to TV studios’ efforts to control when, where, and how we watch their programs – and at what price-point. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. The latest target is Aereo, a New York City startup that lets users stream local broadcast TV from a dime-sized antenna on a Brooklyn rooftop to their personal devices.
New Yorkers: Worried about whether you will have a right to watch local TV broadcasts on your Internet devices? Aereo is a company that lets users watch their local channels by renting a dime-sized antenna at Aereo's facility - one per customer. The signal from that antenna gets sent over the Internet to a single user. In effect, the company moves the "rabbit ears" antenna from the top of your TV set to a central facility. Aereo, like the VCR, the DVR, and many other video technologies, simply lets people watch the TV shows they already have a legal right to watch at different places and times, and on different devices. And just like they did with many of those technologies, copyright owners are suing to shut it down.
At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #7, On-line Video, where we predicted:
Like the print business, the television business is being radically disrupted by the Internet. The disparate and powerful industries affected — telco, cable, satellite, ISP, software, and production — are engaged in a battle for dominance. But as big business dukes it out, consumer rights risk being left behind. [...]
As we've pointed out repeatedly, poor design decisions in YouTube's "Content ID" system have resulted in over-blocking of videos that remix copyrighted materials. Today we got perhaps the most vivid example of the problem: the "silencing" of a lecture by Prof. Larry Lessig about the cultural importance of remix creativity. This is just the latest of many examples. We've been on YouTube's case for more than two years about this problem, and it's high time for YouTube to fix the Content ID system to respect the kinds of fair uses that are at the heart of remix creativity.
It's the dawn of a new year. From our perch on the frontier of electronic civil liberties, EFF has collected a list of a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we think will play a significant role in shaping online rights in 2010.
In December, we'll revisit this post and see how it all worked out.
1. Attacks on Cryptography: New Avenues for Intercepting Communications
In 2010, several problems with cryptography implementations should come to the fore, showing that even encrypted communications aren't as safe as users expect. Two of the most significant problems we expect concern cellphone security and web browser security.
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