Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost.
They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials.
Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s!
So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal.
Democracy has spoken.
In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model.
Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade.
All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly.
This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.
I think you're wrong. I'm a big advocate of open computing, but I think that endpoint autonomy is in as much danger as it ever was, if not more. You're describing that legal challenges to market-based or grassroots ad skipping etc. have failed, but consider that the legal route is out of fashion. What companies do now is sell a locked device. See windows on ARM, safetynet, [whatever apple is doing]. I love this click-to-root hack, but it's really a "play 2009 games, win 2009 prizes" situation. Good luck trying this on a game console or an Amazon echo.
Don't know about Echo, but I just jailbroke and wiped an Amazon Fire Stick and installed TWRP and LineageOS on it. The exploit to unlock the bootloader has been patched in the latest firmware, but I don't see the arms race ending any time soon.
That's awesome. I have some old kindle fires with lineage. I mentioned the echo because they have been iterating the hardware to make it harder and harder to gain access. For example, I have one[0] where they removed the USB port.
Universal Studios sued Sony over BetaMax not because it was worried about skipping commercials, it wanted to be able to sell movies instead of people being able to record it.
The first lawsuit about programmatically being able to skip commercials which is more akin to the crowdsourced YouTube skipping creator embedded sponsorship was in 2001 when 28 studios sued ReplayTV out of existence.
> Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost.
In spirit, you're right. But legally, the DMCA was specifically intended to give the media companies what they had always wanted but been denied by the courts.
They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials.
Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s!
So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal.
Democracy has spoken.
In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model.
Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade.
All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly.
This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.