The film industry can block outputs on home television equipment so studios can offer first-run movies while preventing viewers from making illicit copies, U.S. regulators said.
Temporarily disabling the outputs will “enable a new business model” that wouldn’t develop in the absence of such anti-piracy protection, the Federal Communications Commission said today in an order.
So…. They want to block outputs on set top boxes and TVs so they can distribute first run level content directly to the home while preventing piracy.
I’m sure there’s something more to this but the details here are a bit sketchy as to how exactly this is going to work. On one hand, they could send a movie to your television directly via cable, presumably on a television with the cable box built into it, so you could watch it but not play it out and record it with an external DVR. This makes sense, and it fairly easy to follow. It’ll piss off anyone who likes to pipe the sound from their TV out to their surround system off enough that no one will want to rent/buy/whatever these movies in the first place but hey, it could be done.
What I don’t understand is where they think this will work on a set top box. Firstly, the box NEEDS outputs of some kind in order to view the movie. You have to hook it to your TV via coax or RGB or HDMI or whatever. Limiting it only to say, HDMI which would be slightly more difficult to casually record on a VCR than coax wouldn’t work since not everyone uses HDMI and you can buy an HDMI converter pretty cheaply online.
So somehow, this block will disable the outputs, while still outputting to your television.
Or perhaps there is some sort of encryption involved, which would put anyone with an older television out of luck since the Television wouldn’t have these controls built in to handle the encryption. Also, the encryption would have to be standard to work with any combination of television and box, so presumably once it’s broken, which it will be, anyone who cares could buy a descrambler box online easily. Sort of like how you can use a line blocker to disable the copy protection on VHS tapes.
Then there is the fact that anyone who really cares is going to go out to limewire or emule or bittorrent or whatever is convenient and simply download the movie anyway. Unlike pirated programs, pirated television generally doesn’t contain spyware, though occasionally you’ll end up with some porn clip instead of the latest Toy Story flick so it’s a good idea to pre screen your downloads before firing them up with the family floating around.
