Sometimes in the not to distant future?

 So you just spent the equivalent of a year’s Russian wage on that brand new 47 inch HD plasma TV. You’ve unpacked it, waded through the almost indecipherable instruction manual, and connect the thing. One of the new enhanced features of the set is that the manufacture promises it will never technologically become outdated because its firmware can be updated over the internet with the latest upgrades.

And now your able to sit down and relish perfect digital clarity. For about two whole days that is… because unknown to you the manufacturer has run afoul of the entertainment Cartel that the product you own doesn’t adhere to the latest digital rights specs and in order to avoid litigation the manufacturer has agreed to remove all HD features from that model.. So during the night your set undergoes the equivalent of a digital lobotomy and now it’s just as good as the 10 year old 20 incher you moved to the spare bedroom. And there is not a thing you can do about it.

Far fetched, perhaps but consider the recent interview in wired magazine with Tivo’s head of legal Matthew Zino.  About  changes to remove features from TiVo. And allow the Tivo box to delete content from the hard rive after a specific period of time.

Supposingly this would be limited to pay per view and video on demand but since the changes are to how the pvr handle macrovision it could possibly be just a preview of things to come.

Content could be blocked entirely, deleted after 90 minutes, seven days or some other intervals.

Many consumers have avoided going with DVR’s being provided by the cable and satellite companies because those boxes are restrictive of what content can be saved , now it seems that Tivo  , Replaytv and Microsoft are going the same route and at least Tivo may “upgrade” existing devices with those changes.

Tivo reps are fast to point out that this was a compromise to get the entertainment concerns to buy into new features such as TivoToGo, but tivotogo which is believed to use the digital rights management built into windows media player will itself be heavily weighted down in DRM.

Now its not that we don’t believe that copyright holders don’t have the right to protect there content , what disturbs us is that with a firmware update Tivo and other service providers can change the complete character of devices we already purchased  turning it into  a device that is much different than described on the box when the consumer purchased it.

Divx was a technology which essentially provided cheap dvd’s for a price.. The price was that they could only be activated on line and would work for a limited amount of time than the disk would degrade and become unusable. Consumers totally rejected the concept, now the content providers are attempting this again , but this time rather than just trying to push new set top boxes on the consumers they are changing the equipment that they already own.

And there is not a thing you can do about it… Congress has come down on the side of the entertainment companies and in fact are trying to broaden there hold even more with legislation such as the broadcast flag and the induce act.

No one is advocating piracy but it seems wrong that manufactures can without warning the customer change the firmware on the boxes anytime and anyway they desire.

There are two big reasons they can get away with this.
First, what exactly constitutes “fair use” has never been fully defined and the second reason is Senator Orwin Hatch  the sponsor of the Induce Act and the amount of contribution to his campaign by entertainment industry concerns. It is interesting to note that Majority leader Thomas Daschle also a supporter of the bill recently lost his seat in last week’s election.

The service providers like Tivo protect themselves with clauses in the service contracts that give them the right to change the service at any time.

And there are other examples.

Dlink’s medialounge media player is a fairly capable digital media player , it was getting better with each firmware upgrade, but recently they made changes to make the product compatible with Microsoft’s media connect technology. Users have reported issues with playing VOB files and divx format video after the device was auto upgraded to firmware 1.03 or 1.04. Either intentionally or unintentionally the devices were rendered less useful to many users and there is no easy way to revert back to a previous version. Short of spoofing the ftp server and uploading the firmware from a pc on your local network.

Another example, Windows xp update sp2 interferes with cyberlink’s power director and other similar programs ability to open videos in windows media center’s dvr-ms format. There was an update to sp1 which provided this capability but after installing sp2 you can no longer install the update. Again no one is pointing to anything deliberate on Microsoft’s part, but there is nothing that prevents a manufacturer from changing a product to render features unusable because of some new DRM.

The best advice is to either keep your media server pc at an upgrade level that supports everything you want, isolate it from the internet and not allow auto updates or at least make a backup at that level that you can restore to. OR at least keep the manufactures restore disk available. Be very careful of rom updates.

Enter the Public action Blogs…

The analysis isn’t complete yet, but there is little doubt that the internet had an affect on the outcome of the past election. After exit poll results were leaked to the blogging community the stock market negatively responded and the general tone of election coverage changed. News services were already anticipating a Kerry/Edwards victory and the Republican campaign was experiencing anxiety. We now know that their were problems with the data  but there is no question of  some  impact.

I refer to PABS or public action blogs as web blogs that are organized quickly in response to some political event or consumer concern (Consumer action Blogs?) . Defeating the induce act, organizing a political campaign or alerting to and mobilizing knowledgeable consumers to take action against a company that isn’t playing fairly. Such as encouraging TIVO not to remove features from existing products, and encouraging consumers not to buy the products.

Imagine a hypothetical campaign aimed at the RIAA, which would encourage consumers to gather together copy protected cd; s and dumb them on the RIAA headquarter’s lawn in a Boston tea party style protest.

There is indeed some precedence for assuming such consumer mobilization works to an extent, consider recent rulings to require copy protected cd’s to include warning labels.

Something else that the manufacturer’s and service providers need to realize is that several generations have grown up with the common VCR. VCR’s have little restrictions on what they can record, consumers expect their high priced dvr’s to provide at least a similar functionality. If not they will get what they want any way they can. It may be as simple as abandoning the DVR’s and DVD-recorders for the VCR’s they can pick up at local garage sales. Or applying one of the widely available hacks to today’s dvr’s. The series 1 Tivos have been so widely hacked that TIVO might as well give up on trying to force changes on them and the series 2 may be in that same category. Future DMR technologies which rely on encrypted content are going to require chips that are more specialized and faster than the low end chips in these devices.

Only time will tell if it’s the consumer  wins this battle or the content providers and their lawyers.