Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Very related to my last entry, I came across this piece on SiliconValley.com (by way of Gizmodo) on new restrictions for DVR’s. Tivo and ReplayTV, the two major DVR players, have agreed on restrictions that would limit recording capability to just 90 minutes. How this would work with movies that are longer is not clear. Another restriction would only let a pay per view movie to be stored for seven days. If you start to watch it, but then get pulled away, you only have the next 24 hours to finish it. These wouldn’t be restricted to just pay per view movies, but could be enforced on anything coming over the air.

This doesn’t mean that all movies or shows would have these strict restrictions, there could be much more moderately restricted options or even ones that have no limits, but the problem here is that there are restrictions at all. Consumers have gotten far too used to being able to record shows at will on their VCR. Tivo and ReplayTV have enhanced this capability enormously by providing scheduling, predictive automation and generally a much more intuitive interface. Unfortunately this new step is a big step backwards because it means less flexibility for the consumer.

Luckily such players will not be coming out till next year and it’s unclear when the actual shows or movies will start encoding their broadcasts to make the players turn on these restrictions. But as with other gadgets and devices that intentionally limit the user from using it in the way he or she would like, there is bound to be a market for modifications or hacks to newer devices that will disable such restrictions. This will of course be illegal, but that hasn’t stopped markets for illegal cable descramblers, satellite card modifiers and the like. Again, the main way to combat such piracy is to open things up. It sounds contradictory, but if you allow people flexibility in how they use the content and you make that content fairly cheap, there’s no big reason to risk illegality when they can buy something legally for a cheap price. Sure, there will be violators of this general principle, but it’s akin to the insurance industry raising rates for everyone because some people are irresponsible.

In any case, you can avoid this mess for at least a while by buying your DVR now while they are still selling ones that don’t have the capability to restrict programming. Who knows, maybe this whole thing is an ingenious marketing scheme cooked up by Tivo and ReplayTV to cause a run on non-restrictive players, then once the restrictive ones come out, it will turn out that few if any programs will actually use the feature. Well, I was planning on getting one anyway, so this is an extremely helpful rationalization!