[opendtv] Re: its a wifi world - Re: Re: Twang's
- From: "John Willkie" <jmwillkie@xxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 08:36:13 -0700
What's to keep you? Well, content. Aside from legalese, you need access to
the content. You can't lawfully retransmit ota DTV content EVEN WITH
PERMISSION. If you try to transmit ATV content, you will in short order be
sued by multiple parties, including, but not limited, to the Motion Picture
Association of America.
What are you going to show? Home movies? I sure hope you have model
releases. If you're showing professional content, you'll get sued for
copyright infringement, and -- it is likely -- you and your customers will
be INDICTED criminally for conspiracy to violate copyrights.
If you know of a way, in your legalese, to make somebody else pay your
criminal fines and to serve time in jail for you, I'd love to see it.
(Hint: a contract to violate public policy is null and void.) And, the
moment a judgement is entered against one of your co-conspirators, they end
up losing their house because homeowner's insurance (all insurance) does not
cover deliberate acts by the policyholder. You end up being settlement
bait, and you end up being made an example.
Your technical arguments are beyond my ken.
However, is it unlawful to "steal" service from an unlocked access point?
I'd say that the law is currently vague on that point: there's no entering
per se, there's no breaking per se, and there's no DMCA circumvention since
the service was not protected by password or encryption. Sui generis: new
law.
Amoral, sure. Civil or criminal offense: time will tell.
John Willkie
-----Original Message-----
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Venki S. Iyer
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:08 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: its a wifi world - Re: Re: Twang's
Um, Kon, you need to take a look at the mesh activities going on around
wifi. From a service provider perspective,
if I am installing meshed wifi APs in each customer home, what's to stop me
from using some protion of the available bandwidth
for multicast ("broadcast") purposes? Sure, I'd need the right legalese
within my customer contracts, etc, but that's all (apart
from actually getting content to re-broadcast).
The UDP/TCP issue is a dead herring - there's probably 1/2 dozen ways of
getting around TCP's greedy behavior.
Meshed environments and associating applications with virtual IP addresses
rather than the IP of a physical interface let you roam
across APs without TCP connections being dropped.
Meshed environments allow you to extend the "service radius" of a wifi in a
symmetric manner (OK, symmetric if it is a full mesh,
not just a mesh between the infrastructure elements - APs, in this case).
Finally, however, Craig probably was "stealing service" by using his
neighbor's WiFi.
Cheers,
-Venki
-----Original Message-----
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Kon
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:26 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] its a wifi world - Re: Re: Twang's
Did you get permission to use that WiFi link from the house next door?
If not, you're breaking privacy laws, and they could sue you. You fall
into the same category as a hacker.
See, this is one of the small sticking points that none of the 'WiFi
can be used for broadcast' clowns latch on to.
What defines that WiFi is not relevant for broadcast is:
1. WiFi access points are *private*. Its not a free for all.
2. WiFi access points are unicast. Nearly all vendor AP hardware is
configured to squelch UDP traffic in favor of TCP traffic of any sort.
3. There is no TV on the internet.
4. You cannot roam transparently without service interruption between
APs.
5. IF you increase the service radius of a wifi network, your clients
won't be able to connect back to it if they are out of their own
operating range.
The model is about as different from a television broadcast station
model as you can get. Just because they both use RF doesn't make them
equal in any way. But then again when I listen to some of the people
spouting nonsense when comparing the two, its easy to conclude that
they don't know what the heck they are talking about anyway.
Just because someone broadcasts their SSID, doesn't give you any rights
at all to use their link - even to the point of just grabbing a DHCP IP
address.
WiFi APs might be littered all over the place, but almost all of those
are not for free public use. So its a moot point, really.
So my response to Powell's comment would be - what are you smoking, and
where can I get some of that?
BTW In a keynote speech at the PBS Tech Conference, APTS suggested we
change the name 'DTV' to 'WiFiTV', since WiFi is the 'in thing'. How
does one even begin to address such a comment? Mind boggling.
Cheers
Kon
> During his breakfast chat with Sam Donaldson, Chariman Powell asked
> broadcasters to consider what might happen if there are pervasive
> WiFi networks that equal the coverage of DTV. Every time I woke up
> my notebook in Las Vegas it saw one or more WiFi networks. We stayed
> in a house about twenty minutes from the Convention Center. The house
> had a DSL modem, but we has some problems with it assigning DHCP
> addresses. Fortunately, when I arrived I was able to use a WiFi link
> from a neighboring house. The next day we bought a 802.11b WiFi link
> with 4 port router at Fryes - net cost $19.95 after rebate.
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