We Control The Horizontal

We control the analog output.

OK, I don’t get it. I don’t take the input for my audio receiver and recording devices from my television — it comes from my satellite receiver. Functionally, the television is just a video monitor. Are they saying that they’ll be cutting off analog output on the satellite receivers/cable boxes as well?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I think I understand now. They’re saying “set top-boxes,” so I guess that means the cable box (though apparently satellites are going to be a separate issue). That would probably also apply to digital fiber from Verizon or AT&T. And the sets that are affected are the ones without digital inputs? I still don’t see how this prevents piracy, unless you don’t have HDMI or other digital inputs to your DVD recorder.

22 thoughts on “We Control The Horizontal”

  1. The idea is that the digital outputs can be encrypted and limited, but analog is unencrypted and therefore evil and must be blocked. Already many (if not all) blue-ray players have a feature where when playing DVD’s they will upscale to HD resolutions on a secure HDMI output, but not on analog or other outputs.

    Of course as with all the other attempts at digital security, it’s laughable that they can actually secure the connection, so all they’re doing is inconveniencing the legitimate customer while not hampering the pirates at all.

  2. It’s like training a dog to do tricks. The more hoops you give it to jump through, the more it gets used to jumping through hoops.

  3. We’re not breaking anybody’s TVs

    Uh, yeah they are. We used to buy things. Now they’re all licensed. Has Bill Gates infected all businesses?

    I just hope they keep a liberal license on our own bodies. I keep thinking it belongs to me.

  4. It’s worth while noting that when the Democrats are in power, they’ve been very friendly to the RIAA and MPAA. It is not a coincidence, I think, that the large bulk of the entertainment put out by these folks have a leftist slant to them. Sometimes quite pronounced, cough AVATAR cough.

  5. It’s a little better than this.
    The flag tells the box to NOT display full HD with the component video outputs or HDMI without end-to-end certified copy protection. So no 1080 or 720 without HDCP.

    The box WILL output the flag protected video in a little better than SD/DVD quality on the HDMI or component lines. Audio outs are still on.

  6. “Already many (if not all) blue-ray players have a feature where when playing DVD’s they will upscale to HD resolutions on a secure HDMI output, but not on analog or other outputs.”

    They all do. The High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) standard was there from the very beginning, to keep unauthorized devices from using that signal. Thus the need for HDCP compliance in authorized devices, that the players look for.

    Or at least that’s the plan…

  7. Won’t the really determined ones just build solid, optimized rigs around a top-notch TV and a decent HD camera?

  8. I’m sure this attempt to control content will be just as successful as every other attempt.

  9. Ken: Actually, it’s more of the other way around. I want to be able to buy something, and OWN it, not lease it under terms that arbitrarily (and often retroactively) restrict it by whatever means one particular powerful party is coming up with this week.

    This is somewhat more of a gray area, because it deals specifically with cable service, which *is* a subscription/lease model, and always has been. However, it seems a very slippery slope, indeed, to me. How long before the MPAA forces all major equipment manufacturers to stop including analog outputs on their devices?

  10. It only takes one unencrypted digital copy of whatever to get into the “wild” for the entire process to become besides the point. Professional (and amateur) pirates will find a way around the process, and a copy of the movie/TV show/infomercial will be available to anyone with a broadband connection. Any process that takes 6 or 7 figures to develop, but can be defeated with an afternoon of effort, seems to be a waste of time and effort.

  11. George Orwell, 1984 by the back door! If this becomes true then the powers that be – or wannabe — can force anything on us. Net result zero watchers, zero sales and they will have killed themselves. Markets are supposed to be open, piracy is still alive on the high seas it will live on the net and digital broadcasting too. The strange thing is though that DVD’s still sell well. Maybe if the MPAA, RIAA etc stopped trying to criminalise every user they would make nice fat profits. Reminds me of the time that lawyers for Paramount tried to sue the US Navy for using the name “Enterprise”!

  12. “Reminds me of the time that lawyers for Paramount tried to sue the US Navy for using the name “Enterprise”!”

    I’m guessing the Navy’s defense was prior art, either that or “if you don’t back down we’ll use your studio as a bombing range!”. 🙂

  13. Hmm, I’m already not watching or listening to their products. License fees to checkout library books?

  14. Big D. I’m wit’ya. It’s my point. We want to encourage creativity by giving the author a chance to profit. But intellectual property is a legal fiction with the emphasis on fiction.

    Possession is ownership in a general sense. Information is only possessed while hidden. Once you make it public it takes cops and lawyers to prevent it from being what it naturally is… public property… like a math equation.

    I absolutely hate what programmers can do to take your property away from you. I’m using Windows 7 right now. It phones home after checking all the software on my machine and if it doesn’t like what it finds it can shutdown functionality on my machine… MY machine. The one I paid money for.

  15. Well, I personally kinda like IP, for the same reasons that I like patents. I just feel that IP has been twisted, perverted, and abused by producers who act as though they believe that they have full monopolistic control over all possible uses of their creation for all eternity. No patent law offers such protections, nor should it!

  16. “I’m guessing the Navy’s defense was prior art, either that or “if you don’t back down we’ll use your studio as a bombing range!”.

    Better yet, we will make your studio (from an aerial view) look like a munitions/armaments/aircraft factory.

    I think they pulled that stunt off during WW-II.

  17. Big D:

    The really cute trick would be to have multiple HD cameras focused on overlapping regions of the screen (or one making multiple passes!), and a processing pass afterward to join them, filter noise, and generally clean-up.

    There’s no closing the analog hole. Watermarking, on the other hand, just might be feasible – at least technically…

  18. The thing is this: hackers (or rather, “kids” in general, and that’s relative to y’all) don’t care about high fidelity. MP3 rips are entropic, but they don’t care because they just got the latest “Avatar”/GaGa/JayZ release for free along with their 40,000 closest myspace “friends.”

    High fidelity media is expensive, but young people measure value in how loud the sh1t sounds in their cars and how much the frame resonates. Otherwise, they’re happy to listen to any track that sounds like it was cut at the bottom of a dumpster.

  19. Titus misses one of the points because he’s an Olde Farte; for nothing else but the nitwit conflation with “kids” with “hackers.” At the very least he has no clue who genuine hackers are.

    As for the rest of this, it reminds me of the hysteria produced when HBO & Showtime originally appeared. Oh, my God, they can copy movies!!! Then there was the deliberate murder of DAT (can’t allow digital copies), CD-burners invalidated that approach. CD-burners are now (what?) thirty bucks? High-quality DVD dual-layer burners aren’t much more, and Blue-ray burners are dropping price.

    They can’t lock out piracy without locking out fair use. Not to mention the simple fact that DVD sales have very nearly eclipsed first-run ticket sales as a revenue source for movies.

    So instead of approaching alternate digital sources as an augment to their revenue, the studios have decided to treat customers as potential thieves, which worked so well with respect to recording via HBO, or copying DVDs, or… You get the idea.

    Would I pay $10 (one movie ticket) to download Iron Man 2 today, in high-quality divx format, no “extras?” Heck, yes! Instead, I’ll wait for it to be available on rental, and the studio will make one Hell of a lot less from me, considering I only pay $2.99 for a “first-run” new movie (from which they’ll net quite a bit less than $10 a pop at the local video store) a few months from now.

    The movie studios still don’t get it, although many in the music industry finally did. It’s easier, and in the long run more profitable to offer cheaper legal alternatives. I cite Apple’s iTunes as evidence. They make tons of money off of 99-cent songs. This goes back to what I just said; many people would be quite happy to pay for a digital download of a new movie, which would give them a far better copy than a cam-job or R5 edition would.

    Honestly, the best-quality copies don’t come out until the rental DVDs are available anyway, so why not sell the audience who wants the movie now, but not in a theater, a copy anyway?

    Heck, most of the time it’s cheaper and easier to wait a few months to buy a $9.99 copy at Meijer’s or Best Buy, and downloading a pirated DVD rip in the first place.

  20. Titus misses one of the points because he’s an Olde Farte; for nothing else but the nitwit conflation with “kids” with “hackers.” At the very least he has no clue who genuine hackers are.

    cool story bro

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