Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Braun /forum/post/14276926
First, I am under the understanding that you can't purchase a stand alone HD recorders that can off load non copy protected copies because of US copy protection laws and agreements between all of the major electronics manufacturers to honor them. It has nothing to do with penny pinching American buying habits. You can buy these type of recorders in every other country for reasonable prices, because those other countries do not have the stringent copy protection laws. However I am not certain the above is an accurate assesment of the situation.
The legal issues are a little different from what you've outlined, per my understanding.
The applicable US law is the DMCA -- Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Amongst other things, it makes it illegal to sell equipment that circumvents copy protection technologies.
Over-the-air digital broadcasts in the US are not copy protected, which means that the DMCA doesn't apply to digital tuners and recorders that are capable of receiving only broadcast signals. That's why you can buy digital OTA tuner cards for your computer that allow you to make non-copy protected recordings of HD broadcasts. Some of these tuner cards will also work with non-encrypted digital cable signals.
However, if a digital tuner/recorder is designed to work with encrypted digital signals from cable, the situation changes. Some of these channels are copy protected, which means that a cable tuner/recorder must honor the restrictions that go with the level of copy protection for those channels. But I suspect that the biggest restrictions don't come from the law, but rather from the licensing agreements that manufacturers must sign with Cable Labs in order to make and sell a cable card compatible device. The licensing restrictions can (and almost certainly do) go past the restrictions imposed by DMCA.
Aside from the above, manufacturers can (of course) choose to go beyond the requirements of the DMCA and any applicable licensing agreements. In essence, they can voluntarily choose to further cripple the products that they sell in order to make content producers happy and avoid even the possibility of lawsuits.
Then, finally, comes the issues surrounding the potential market for any HD recording devices.
The consumer electronics companies are largely locked out of making any products that would be compatible with HD satellite services, because the satellite services have chosen to control the market themselves -- and they're not offering products that let you offload non-copy protected recordings. The (sort of) workaround that exists here is a device like the new Hauppage component HD recorder, which can redigitize and recompress the HD analog outputs of a satellite receiver.
With a license from Cable Labs, CE companies could offer HD recorders that are compatible with most cable systems -- and with whatever restrictions on the outputs are mandated by the Cable Labs license. TiVo is doing just this, but they're pretty much alone right now. Because, in the end, not many people seem to be willing to pay a bunch of money for a product that they can "rent" from their cable company with no upfront expense.
So that leaves the prospect of making a flexible and fully-functional HD recorders that is designed to work with off-air digital broadcasts. It could be rendered more flexible by adding HD analog component video inputs. I'll happily pay good money for such a product, as would a number of folks on AVS Forum. But we're a sufficiently small market that no one really sees it as much of an opportunity to make money. Personally, I think that there is some decent money to made with such a product -- but it is probably of a scale that would be suitable for one of the smaller CE companies. In other words, I'm not holding my breath waiting to see anything released by Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, et al.
