broadcast-flag
DRM’s tentacles snare British HDTV
DRM watchers are sounding the alarm about a proposal to bring what they fear amounts to a “broadcast flag” to the UK’s over-the-air digital
Continue reading »Broadcast flag rears vile head, bars viewer from recording
Irony alert: Sons of Anarchy gets broadcast flag. Well, FX may broadcast a show about wild, anarchistic motorcycle guys and gals, but that’s where the freewheeling spirit stops. An Ars reader tells us that he was unable to record the program for personal use, perhaps due to the infamous “broadcast flag”—those malicious bits injected into a datastream that allow distributors to shut down your ability to record content.
Continue reading »FTC forces Sears, Kmart out of the spyware business
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has busted a strange set of spyware purveyors—US retailing giants Sears and Kmart. The FTC this week approved its final consent order against the companies (which share the same owner) over an episode that can only be chalked up to incompetence of a truly epic scope. Sears Holding Management Company decided that it could really use a lot more marketing data to fuel its decision-making process, so it began offering visitors to sears.com and kmart.com a special invite—sign up for “My SHC Community,” download a piece of “research” software, and earn 10 American dollars.
Continue reading »TV’s broadcast flag has its DRM moment
The broadcast flag, a signal that would be embedded in digital broadcasts and inform consumer devices that the content was not to be recorded, may appear as a footnote in studies of the US’ transition to digital television broadcasts, which largely went off without significant disruptions . Where it won’t appear, however, is in any of the digital content that’s now freely streaming across the airways. If this doesn’t surprise you, then you weren’t paying careful attention to media news about five years ago, when content owners were predicting dire consequences for Hollywood if digital copies of its productions could be made unmolested.
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