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More on TiVo's Red Flagged Recordings

If you haven't already, please read our recent post about restricted shows on TiVo. As you may have noticed, a lot of people are upset about the ability for the TV industry and TiVo to control a box people thought they owned.

Many were quick to point out that restricting two year old reruns of King of the Hill wasn't the intended use for the DRM. Jim Denney, TiVo's Director of Product Marketing, told TechBlog that these were probably just "false positives."

Denney said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing happened to be at an DRM standards meeting and asked the experts what they thought about random noise triggering the restrictions:

When I asked them if they believed that noise could be "misinterpreted" as a DRM flag, they burst into positive howls of disbelief. One present talked about Macrovision's checksums and said that that must have been "incredible noise if it completed the checksum." A semiconductor expert laughed out loud.

Charitably, an operating system vendor's rep suggested that TiVo might not be lying: rather, he said that perhaps they've just done an "incredibly bad" implementation of Macrovision.

OK, it probably wasn't bad reception that caused it, so the next link in the chain is the local TV station. Is it possible that someone at the station accidentally turned content protection on? Marc Hedlund over at O'Reilly Radar (while mistakenly assuming that the content protection comes from guide data instead of the video signal) argues that it doesn't matter: If the broadcaster … can turn the flag on whenever they want, the power of this feature is in the wrong hands altogether.

It was likely a local broadcaster that made the mistake, but what's to prevent this from happening in the future? How can I protect my TiVo from the mistakes my local TV station makes? The next time someone freaks out on live TV, will the broadcaster flip the "Copy Never" bit to control the damage?

This was probably a mistake, but that doesn't negate the fact that this bug feature is built into every TiVo (and other PVRs).

by George Hotelling September 15, 2005 in TiVo

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