
Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane - mbell
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/
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noonespecial
_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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
<http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html>

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

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johrn
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.

~~~
majormajor
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.

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nameuserc
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.

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chime
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
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.

~~~
chime
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."

~~~
simcop2387
If the house has been previously hooked up for cable (or still is for
internet) you can try hooking up anyway. A lot of them will usually have those
channels come through anyway because it costs them less in filters and things
to do so. However some of them still encrypt them so it's a bit of a crap-
shoot as to what you'll find.

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ChuckMcM
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.

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tomjen3
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
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?

~~~
DanBC
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.)

~~~
weel
"Crimes for which someone wronged can sue" are actually not crimes but torts.

Copyright infringement is always a tort, but the conditions under which it
becomes a criminal offense vary by jurisdiction.

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frankus
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
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>

~~~
frankus
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.

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e1ven
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.

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aero142
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.

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nameuserc
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.

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DanBC
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.

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sushantsharma
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>

