Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/

by mbell • 14 years ago

170 48 14 years ago

chime2• 14 years ago

I hope Aereo continues to win. Another company doing the same thing is: http://www.skittertv.com/ - unfortunately neither of them support my local area. Due to my house's construction/location, I can't pick up DTV signals easily and would gladly pay $10-$15/mo to get those channels instead of the minimum $30/mo that my cable company charges for basic package.

gergles• 14 years ago

You should call the cable company back and ask for the "lifeline" package, by that specific name. It only includes the local channels, but it exists in basically every franchise area and is generally $10 or less.

chime2• 14 years ago

I did. I called three different times and not one of the sales people for Bright House Networks here in Florida knew about it. I said it is the lowest package with just the bare minimum channels like ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS and they said "No, the lowest plan we offer is $25+tax. There is nothing called lifeline."

amalcon• 14 years ago

If your house is wired for cable, have you tried just connecting your TV to that? A lot of cable companies push local channels unencrypted. That's how I get my local channels.

johrn• 14 years ago

So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues.

I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.

The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

Seems like a nice hack, assuming nobody made an argument that it constituted "public performance" or something similarly crazy.

Plus, you get automatic coverage of damaged disks: the company will buy back undamaged disks for what you paid minus the rental fee, or for full price in the case of an all-you-can-watch service.

narrator• 14 years ago

Except anything with a low/bid ask spread becomes money and that comes with its own set of problems. What would happen if the DVD was sold back for more than it was bought for? It's the intersection of Banking + Copyright + Tax Law. The trifecta of screwball legal areas.

danielweber4• 14 years ago

Courts aren't stupid. Judges in particular get really annoyed if you think they'll fall for it. "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

nollidge2• 14 years ago

> "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

Except... this is exactly what has happened.

majormajor• 14 years ago

I doubt this particular solution would end up being looked kindly on. This is one of those places where the edge cases get weird. Netflix, for instance, is well entrenched as legal. And Zediva was basically Netflix with the latency removed. But because of the streaming nature, the one-copy-to-many-eventual-viewers thing was able to be labeled a "public performance." When really the difference in a "spirit-of-the-law" way is that the lack of latency would require the service to need far fewer DVDs than Netflix, which would result in less payments to the content creators for the same amount of people watching their stuff. Which gets back to the mess that copyright law has evolved into -- in terms of compensation for content, is there any reason that a Netflix service should be worth more to a content creator than a Zediva service? It creates a really perverse incentive in terms of creating more useful services.

So going back to why I think this would most likely be struck down: I think the most likely way it would be shut down would be by calling the "purchase" system (while a clever hack) not legally meaningful. Especially since the only person this hack enriches is the service provider: now if someone wants to watch more movies, they have to "buy" and then "sell back" more "discs", losing some small amount of money on each of those transactions.

username3• 14 years ago

I think that would work. That would be like renting. Do renters have to pay a different license? Zediva would have to deal with people that buy and not sell back.

Someone should start an Airbnb/Zediva mashup and make software to automatically buy/stream/sell DVDs from other people.

dkarl• 14 years ago

That reminds me of my very first programming job, using a source control system (Rational ClearCase, I think) at a company that had licenses for a certain number of concurrent users. When you tried to check your code in, the client had to check out one of the license keys to use during the interaction with the SCM server. If they were all in use, the check-in would fail: "no license available, try again later."

I think that was a licensing scheme offered by Rational and not a clever hack we devised for screwing Rational out of license fees, but I wasn't sure and wasn't brave enough to ask.

dullcrisp• 14 years ago

I don't really understand the restriction that was used against Zediva. Is the key point that the same company that's renting out the DVDs is also renting out the means to perform them?

Hypothetically, a company could set up a datacenter where you rent DVD players by the hour, provide your own disc, and stream the output to your computer over the internet. It seems that this would be allowed based on the Cablevision ruling. Then, I could rent one of these players for three hours, look up someone who lives near it, and pay them to go to a Redbox, pick up a DVD for me, and pop it into the DVD player, so that I can stream it at home. It seems this would be legal and not even completely impractical.

Does it only become an issue when the player, the courier, and the Redbox are all provided by the same company?

frankus2• 14 years ago

There's really the exact same copyright-induced inefficiency in traditional video rental places. It always struck me as bizarre that a video rental place could "run out" of copies of a particular film, when at trivial expense they could manufacture (on site) additional copies on demand.

Intuitively it seems like this would result in more money for the rightsholders as well, although maybe the need for video rental shops to vastly overprovision copies of some films made them more money than the alternative.

nl• 14 years ago

Isn't video rental (in the US) done under first sale doctrine[1]? That means copyright holders only receive money from selling each physical copy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

frankus2• 14 years ago

That's right, but they wouldn't necessarily have to (strictly speaking) sell copies. They could instead license the right to make copies for a fee.

My suspicion is that that fee would be set to extract as much money as possible from the rental stores (cf. Netflix) and that they are/were better off with the status quo.

aero142• 14 years ago

I wonder if any of the companies that require unique uploads to the cloud service play fast and loose with compression. There is a large spectrum between running a hash over a file to see if it already exists on the server, and doing the same thing over pieces of a file. Full file deduplication might be clearly against the rules, but what about running a totally generic upload cache that only looked at parts of a file to see if it already had been uploaded as a chunk of data and then copying from the server side cache instead of retransmitting from the user. Seems like there is a lot of grey area between deduplication and simple optimized compression.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Meanwhile millions just illegally download the movies and tv shows of various sites, completely ignoring copyright law.

And there isn't anything these people can do about it.

But hey, lets do a lot more suits against companies and at least force them to do crazy things.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

Technically, the letter of the law only highlights transmission (uploading) as illegal in most copyright issues. Downloading most any material seems completely legal.

That'd be neat to see: a bittorrent case which the user turned the upload to 0.0 . Are they infringing?

ljf• 14 years ago

I think not. No-one has ever been sued for downloading material from Rapidshare etc - they have all be bit torrent users who have been sharing as they downloaded.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Most downloading is illegal. But there is a difference between crimes that the police will arrest people over, and crimes for which someone 'wronged' can sue. For downloading the 'wronged' party can sue for damages, which would be loss of earnings for that one sale. Plus, I guess, costs.

Uploading is easier to sue, because there the damages (the number of files made available) is much larger and it makes things more cost effective. It also (possibly?) acts as a deterrent to other uploaders.

Criminal charges tend to come in when money is being made from copyright infringement. Selling burnt DVDs, for example.

I'm being a bit vague because of the international audience. (I'm in the UK.)

pbhjpbhj4• 14 years ago

>Downloading most any material seems completely legal. //

You're making a single copy without a license. Fair use doctrine may apply depending what you're doing with that copy. There is a general exclusion against the right to copy works that are protected under the Berne Convention for example see Article 9 (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#...):

"Authors of literary and artistic works [...] have the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of these works, in any manner or form."

Distributors however can be more easily stung for punitive damages so until they run out of people who're 'distributing' some bits then they're unlikely to bother [as much] with mere* downloaders.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

Storing a permanent copy rather than a buffer just large enough for streaming is a pessimization, not an optimization.

And there's my word of the day. Can't wait to go pessimize me some software systems. Heh. Theses days, it's practically my job description.

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

> Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the “most pessimum”.

sushantsharma• 14 years ago

I think this is an innovative solution and I wish aereo all the best. However, unless they can somehow include some more (premium) channels, it may be a little hard to sign up too many people. Currently available channels: https://aereo.com/channels

e1ven• 14 years ago

One of the problems with all of this is that location gets very tricksy. They say you need to be in NYC for Aereo to work.

The problem is, there's no good way to verify that.. Aero seems to be using HTML5 location, which can be bypassed by setting geo.wifi.uri in Firefox pretty trivially. (I know they ask for Safari, but you can also change user-agent)

Even if they used IP (which is a huge mess!), you could bounce through a proxy.

The problem is the internet does NOT have a reliably way to determine where someone is.

This goes all the way back to the Yahoo/France Nazi memorabilia issues back in 2000.

We have hints, and suggestions at where people are, but not hard and fast proof. For technical and social reasons, this is unlikely to change- So having laws based around restricting things to certain geographic areas is never going to be a long-term solution.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

This is a great in depth look at the dysfunctional way copyright has evolved. One of the more interesting things will be when we all have 'Google fiber' which is to say the majority of the Internet has really high speed connectivity and we can stream back from our houses to our devices. Today that is highly constrained by 'uplink' bandwidth but that will change. And when it does we'll get a full court press to make things like the SLingbox illegal.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

The Ars article misses out the third opportunity - a subscription based service with easy to use existing networks and protocols and software; where some of the sub fee goes to content creators.

That's never happened. Even though the content creator would be getting paid for their content there would have been many court cases shutting anyone providing that service down.

nameuserc2• 14 years ago

So if I do this:

wget http://example.com/file.flv; sleep 5; mplayer -cache 8092 file.flv

am I "streaming"?

In answering that question, does it matter what I do, or only what the guys at example.com are doing?

What if my system is diskless and file.flv is downloaded to a RAM disk? What if I turn off the system after watching? What if I don't? What if I save file.flv to a USB stick and watch it later? What if I loan the stick to a friend?

What if I do this:

ffmpeg -i file.flv file.mp3; mplayer -vo null file.mp3

Can the guys at example.com prohibit me from doing that? Based on intellectual property law? What if some user owns the IP rights to file.flv and uploaded it to example.com and the guys at example.com do not have any IP rights in file.mp3? What if the user did not give them any of her IP rights?

What if I never put file.mp3 into "iTunes"? What if I never put it into "Dropbox"? What if I never send it to "the cloud"? What if I just leave it on a USB stick? What if I play it back from the stick? What if I move it from the stick to my RAM disk and then play it back?

OK, enough.

Enjoy your media.

To get the most from the experience, it may be necessary to stear clear of people who willingly conceal the truth or, in the worst case, lie to you in order to suit their business model.

nameuserc2• 14 years ago

Maybe Johnny doesn't want to "stream". Maybe Johnny just wants video that play backs immediately/without delay, and smoothly. And Johnny thinks that's what "streaming" means. Maybe Johnny thinks that "downloading" means he has to wait.

Does Johnny know that when he watches YouTube he's downloading? Or does he think he's "streaming"? As long as Johnny does not have to wait for playback, and playback is smooth, does Johnny really care about whether he's "streaming" or "downloading?

All else being equal (i.e. speed to fill a buffer or a disk block is the same and in neither case does Johnny have to wait for playback longer than in the other), I'd bet Johnny would prefer "downloading" over "streaming", since then he can watch the video again later. Just like a VHS or DVD rental.

Assuming you have the storage space, all else being equal, "streaming" video when you can "download" it seems "insane" to use the Professor's term.

Unless of course your business model is traditional "broadcasting" of the pre-digital, pre-internet variety.

Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

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