TiVo Goes After Sites Hosting Image Backups 423
TiVo User writes "TiVo has apparently decided to come down on sites that hosted 'image backups,' essentially tarballs of the OS for the machine, which just happens to be Linux. TiVo owners use the images to install on new, larger hard drives (increasing the recording capacity of the unit) or to recover a dead system. Why TiVo has a problem with this, but allows others to sell the same images for profit is beyond me." Read on for the rest of TiVo User's comments.
"The images are not used to create pirate TiVos (as a subscription service, TiVo justifiably controls access to their database tightly), so there wouldn't appear to be much harm in allowing them to be hosted. TiVo has always walked a fine line in allowing the user community to mod their units, perhaps they have finally stepped over that line, considering there are free alternatives that are less restrictive. To their credit, the legal mumbo jumbo in their cease letter is non-threatening compared to most other of this type, but it's interesting the letter draws no distinction between the portions of the software that are Linux, and therefore expressly distributable, and those that are proprietary to TiVo."
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
But if they've added drivers for TiVo specific hardware (don't know if there is any, don't have a TiVo) then it's down to the old binary modules argument, and if they've modified the kernel in any way then they need to release those modifications.
Re:I smell FSF lawyers... (Score:4, Informative)
DMCA? DMCA. (Score:4, Informative)
Is it fair? No.
But it's the law -- an asinine and relatively untested law -- but the law nevertheless.
Get used to it. Your property is no longer your property. You merely own the license for its use.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TiVo (Score:2, Informative)
TiVo themselves actually have a very good reputation for customer service (if you bought a standalone TiVo and purchased service directly rather than through DirecTV, of course).
Re:Hardware requirements for free alternatives? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I smell FSF lawyers... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TiVo (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hardware requirements for free alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
A GHz processor should do timeshifting - Freevo lists 400MHz as minimum for operation (not including simultaneous enc/dec for timeshifting), and I seem to recall 1GHz being bandied about as recommended for that.
Re:DMCA? DMCA. (Score:5, Informative)
Even in this case it's not against the DMCA until Tivo puts controls in place to specifically prevent it from happening. If Tivo had put weak encryption in place and someone found a way around it, the hacker couldn't post it to the web how to do it; but also they could not be taken to jail for just doing it.
Re:Hardware requirements for free alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
Some useful links:
MythTV requirements [mythtv.org]
And for Freevo [sourceforge.net]
PVR Database [goldfish.org]
Hope that helps.
More informative link. (Score:5, Informative)
Double check that warranty! (Score:2, Informative)
However, this is what you need to check on - with HP anyway, my warranty expired from purchase of first unit, but any replacement under warranteed had an additional 30 day warranty. So when they sent me a bad unit that arrived just after the original 6 months or whatever was up, they still had to take care of the issue. It's a minor loophole, really, but could possibly allow you to get what you paid for.
Give 'em a call and run it by someone, "hypothetically" at first.
Some people don't do any research (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html
Concerning point 1 (Score:5, Informative)
Your website (ftp.abs.net) has recently come to our attention. We appreciate your enthusiasm for the TiVo(R) DVR and we have some specific requests regarding your website.
We request that you cease hosting backup images of TiVo's proprietary software. The software represents valuable intellectual property of TiVo's, and making it available for copying and distribution is a violation of TiVo's copyrights. Such use is without our consent and is illegal under US federal copyright law. In particular, we are requesting that all of the files and directories located at ftp://ftp.abs.net/tivo/Backups/ be removed.
If they are correct in their statements, then this does indeed suggest that there is some proprietary code in addition to the GPL'd kernel in there. I suppose the best thing to do here is verify what can be distributed (under the GPL) and what can't, from the TiVo package.. (But I don't own a TiVo, so that may not be possible)
Re:ReplayTv (Score:2, Informative)
Re:TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
Try this [mythtv.org] -- you need a standard computer, and a couple of TV cards.
Commercial skip? WRONG! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
So, a link the the mirror is only acceptable if you're re-distirbuting binaries without modification, and then only if you're doing it non-commercially.
Do you all freaking work for Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember way back in the day, when Tivo hacking was overly encouraged by the company, the president of Tivo posted on the boards pissed off that people were imaging. Evidently, several people had imaged a Philips image on a Sony system or vice-versa, and it was screwing up the company's update system. That may be why they're cracking down on the sites.
Then I come here and read stuff like "Since they use linux, they're required to send an engineer over to my house to explain how their data structures work." Great! Some microsoft exec is already planning a happy hour for their marketing group. Maybe you'll get invited.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
The clause still makes sense in the Internet world though. Suppose I include a link to a third party site to get GPL code I distribute. They go out of business or change their domain name, or even take down the version I used because it became obselete. I'm now in violation of the GPL.
Re:TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
You'd probably get the best luck at the community forums over at http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/ they've heard just about anything and everything.
Re:ReplayTv (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously aren't a true geek...
The true geeks custom-built their recording system from pieced together shell-scripts, perl code, and a little C. And carefully control every step of the process, to get the absolute highest performance from their setup.
ReplayTV, with it's inability to crop off black borders, hence requiring MUCH higher bitrates, and it's regular tendency to drop frames, and no way to get around that, is not functional enough to be very useful at this point. I hope it improves, but I'm not holding my breath.
Those of us who put a little more work into it, can easily have a system with much higher quality, needing less CPU time, less disk space, less memory, and overall-getting much more functionality out of the system. But I guess I'm just ranting at this point. I hope the two projects quickly get to a point that they are good options, but they certainly aren't right now, and nobody seems to be in a hurry to integrate the most important features.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
The GPL DOES specify how the code must be made available, either by using a or b:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Re:Three points (Score:5, Informative)
a) Tivo does distribute their kernel changes. See http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html . There's enough there to build a Tivo kernel with a lot of effort on the user's part. In the case of later Tivo's you can't build your own *working* kernel because you can't sign the code, but there's ways around that.
b) Most of their code runs in userland, not in the kernel. This includes the MFS filesystem stuffs, AFAIK.
The reason they're starting to do this now. (Score:5, Informative)
It also caused problems with DirecTV's over-the-phone software update, as every night the machine would attempt to get new software but fail after applying the patch, tying up lines for several hours.
Re:Three points (Score:5, Informative)
TiVo's filesystem is proprietary and closed source.
Kernel modules need to be GPL, although there are some grey areas that Linus acknowledges. It's unlikely that a new filsystem would have fallen into one of those grey areas.
So, TiVo solved the problem in a novel way. They hacked the NFS client code in the kernel so that instead of communicating with an NFS server over TCP/IP, it communicates with a local userland process. They released this code under the GPL.
Then they wrote the filesystem code to run in userland, and kept that closed source, as is their right.
Of course you can... (Score:5, Informative)
It was well known (or should have been) that distributing these was illegal, and this was in fact why I didn't allow posting links to these sites on the Tivo Community forums, back when I was running the Underground forum there. But they were well known nonetheless, and I myself sent links to abs.net to users in need.
Tivo is well within their rights to not have these images distributed, but it's a pretty sad thing that they now feel the need to exert those rights. I guess it's finally happened and Tivo is no longer "hacker" friendly. Oh well. It was a joyous time while it lasted, I guess.
Re:It's just nuts and bolts, and software (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure this used to be on the Freevo roadmap, but it seems to have disappeared.
Re:A question (Score:5, Informative)
Already done, but easily detected on their end, more or less.
or steal DirecTV service
Also already done, and not easily detectable either. But it's no easier than stealing DTV on any other DTV box.
or eventually manage to run the whole image on "stock" hardware.
Not bloody likely, and considering that this particular site has been in operation *at least* three years to my explicit knowledge, nobody is really interested.
I know a lot about Tivo and the hacking community and such, and I'm at a loss to satisfactorily explain why Tivo would do this. I suspect a Tivo lawyer found out about it. Most of the Tivo engineering people have no real issue with this sort of thing.
Tivo is well within their rights here, but to my absolute and certain knowledge, several key people at Tivo have known about ftp.abs.net for at least 2 years. I'm just not sure why this is happening now.
Re: Is GPL in law? (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean by "recognized"? It is a license, which is essentially a contract. IANAL, but I do know that all licenses/contracts that do not explicitly violate laws and are by definition legal, hence "recognized" by law.
Now it hasn't been tested in court. It's possible that it violates some provision of contract law, which differ by country, but I've never heard anybody ever suggest any violation of law in the GPL, other than SCO's hallucinogenic diatribe about it being unconsititution, which doesn't pass the laugh test.
But AFAIK, my licenses to use just about any software on my computer (MS Windows, Office, Matlab, CorelDraw, etc.) have not been tested in court either. That doesn't make them "pipedreams". There really is no such thing as "recognized by law", only valid or invalid licenses & contracts, and you need an explicit violation to be invalid.
Tivo's userland code is the issue (Score:5, Informative)
There is and they have. http://www.tivo.com/linux
The objection to distribution of images is that image necessarily contain their proprietary userland code, which is decidely not GPL.
Re:TiVo (Score:5, Informative)
Now once you have a working TiVo, they may be able to say to hell with you, but until then they are still bound by the original warranty, no matter how much time has passed.
Re:TiVo (Score:2, Informative)
Now, they may be made by some third party company. I'm sure this is the case, but it doesn't really matter. If you buy a Dell Axim, does that mean you go blame it on the Taiwanese manufacturer that made it? You could, but it won't get you anywhere. YOu need to go to Dell and complain about it. Just because they don't put it together doesn't mean it's not their product.
If the user bought a "Refurbished Tivo", he probably got it directly from Tivo. Every few months they put "remanufactured Tivos" on sale. Tivo's customer service reputation has taken a big hit lately, from the nature of the posts on the Tivo forums. Luckily, I haven't had any first hand experience with it, but I've seen/heard plenty of those who have had trouble just as the poster above had.
-chris
Re:TiVo != NVidia (Score:4, Informative)
You'd probably be wrong there. I haven't seen the actual userland code either, but I have messed about on the Tivo extensively, and it's not "tightly" tied by any means. They do have modules for the hardware which they have released, I think, but these provide more or less normal interfaces to it for the most part, and there's little need to compile their headers and such into the userland code and so forth. The kernel modules mostly just provide
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here's a clue (Score:3, Informative)
Copyright, like patents, are ironclad for their term, no matter what you do (or don' do).
Re:This is BS (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, it doesn't record shows sometimes. A had a period of time where every show was recorded for only 1 second. I had to delete and re-create all of my manual timers.
Re:This is BS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Question for Mr. Cowboy (Score:3, Informative)
DVD rips against the IMDB display cover art, title, etc.
The ones displaying filepaths are the ones MythTV cannot determine any other information for, i.e. the ones without proper tagging. Nothing MythTV can do about that, it tries to make a match and falls back on displaying the file path/name.
I use MythTV as a pure media viewing interface, and once configured (which can take a bit of work) it is a beautiful interface in it's simplicity. But it does depend on the original setup being done correctly, and the files being properly tagged.
YMMV
Re:One good reason they may have (Score:2, Informative)
TiVo alternatives not viable (Score:3, Informative)
The service providers hold thier hardware close to the chest, as long as all I can do with a PC card is standard broadcast or remote IR control I am locked out. The service with a single integrated unit it too good.
I don't even dump video to disc or anything, I don't care about TV enough to do it, but the cable/satellite people don't release PC based decoders because they are afraid of what may happen (I am not really sure why, the ones that aren't content providers shouldn't even care what we do with the feed)
Maybe the "broadcast flag" will give them an excuse to make computer peripherals that work with satellite and digital cable ? (slim chance I know but I can hope
Re:This is BS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:There is another...... (Score:2, Informative)
I use Myth with my Sky Digital box very happilly - my LIRC configuration and channel changer script is on my website [nexusuk.org]. The hardware required is just an IR LED across the serial port (as described on the LIRC website [lirc.org]). I also have an IR receiver plugged into the same serial port so I can control Myth with my original Sky remote control.
Re:This is BS (Score:5, Informative)
See also: My usenet post regarding Hughes fans from 2002. [google.com]
Facts beat conspiracy theories any day of the week.
Re:It's just nuts and bolts, and software (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad no one offers a subscription-based xmltv feed.
Re:Tivo's userland code is the issue (Score:5, Informative)
As well as certain video content which is also copyrighted by TiVo, such as the menu background video loops.
It has been made clear to the people at the AVS Forum website [tivocommunity.com] that offering drive images for download would be infringing and that no postings there would entertain such action. In not-so-recent history this appeared to become more lax. Apparently the hammer has come down.
Another issue is people installing Series2 standalone images on their USB-enabled DirecTiVo combination boxes so that they could run 4.0 on that platform. The installation apparently works. Any discussion of this is now forbidden on the aformentioned forum. Shutting down image providers will shut down people's ability to make the installation.
This may also however make it impossible to do the kernel monte hack to regain access to the software in face of the lockdowns in the firmware. Though it should be possible to hack together a monte-able image without including TiVo-proprietary code.
Re:This is BS (Score:3, Informative)
Granted, Not Tivo's fault in my case. And I have had no other problems since replacing the fan.
The world isn't ending (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, TiVo has had issues with some of the hacking done, especially wrt video extraction. Overall, however, they have been very laid back about the tinkering with the internals of a consumer electronics box. They appear to be scared stiff about running afoul of content distribtuion laws, but they don't want their business model (and hard work) to go up in smoke because of over zealous users to whomo they provided assistance. The assistance of TiVo is what has given it the core of it's cult following.
Perhaps if abs.net opened a dialog, a solution might be found which keeps some or all of the images online. And of course, as mentioned in other posts, if the host goes down the folks who are smart enough to use the images are also smart enough to know where to find 'em without an ftp site.
Cracking/theft of service...now that's just not nice, and TiVo has every right to pound 'em into the ground.
I know why (Score:4, Informative)
Just my $0.02.
Re:Here's a clue (Score:3, Informative)
Man, that's hilarious.
The word you were looking for, however, is 'diluted.' And that's not really the result of failing to actively defend a mark.
A mark must inform consumers as to the source of goods or services. E.g. everything with 'Slurm' on it must be coming from the same basic source, regardless of what (or who) that source is. If it doesn't, THEN there's no mark at all.
Infringement is basically when someone else uses your mark on his own goods, therefore causing customer confusion as to whether he or you is the source of marked goods.
Dilution is only available for very famous marks, basically so that people can't make 'Slurm' brand internal combustion engines (which no one would confuse with Slurm, the beverage, so couldn't be infringing) in an attempt to somehow profit off of the great effort Slurm has made in making its name known. You don't lose your mark if it's been diluted, however.
In the case of copyright there is no such provisions which is how thing like the
There sort of are.
Three year statute of limitations on civil copyright actions. If you don't act on a SPECIFIC infringement fast enough, you'll never get to at all.
More recent infringements of course might still be within the time limit. And some jurisdictions might have a discovery rule such that the clock doesn't start running until the copyright holder knew or reasonably should have known, about the infringement.
Also the thing with LZW compression and GIFs had to do with a patent -- not a copyright.
Re:The reason they're starting to do this now. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is BS (Score:2, Informative)
Now, as a disclaimer, I currently receive a pay check from Echostar Dish Networks. This is probably going to sound like an advertisement... but what can I do
We were recently informed that DirecTv no longer -=has=- TIVO units to distribute and that this shortfall should continue into February of next year. Paralized by fits of convulsive laughter, Dish Network has released the 522 recently and should release the 921 later this year. You can get a rundown on those systems here [dishonline.com]
The sweet thing on the 522 is actualy still vapor ware. It's a dual tuner receiver currently designed to serve two rooms (with DVR functions). It's also got a single user mode (not yet implemented) to allow you to use it on one TV.
And now... the shameless plug.
The 522 is available to new customers with the Digital Home Plan promotion right now. The 921 isn't available yet. When it does debut it will the first Dish Network receiver running Linux.
GPL and non-GPL code. How Tivo works underneath. (Score:5, Informative)
From some of the posts online, you'd think some people have no idea how the law works and/or how a Tivo works.
Tivos) The images for series1 and series 2 tivos are essentially the same, allowing for differences in the hardware. The capabilities each Tivo has is dependant on what they are "allowed" for. Ie, home media option and such is enabled when the Tivo connects to the server and determines that it should be enabled.
Along that note, the things which a downloader of a Tivo image would be potentially "stealing":
The GPL states that if you modify the kernel itself and distribute it, you will need to distribute the modified source code as well. Tivo HAS done this. They have placed the GPL related portions along with their own direct modifications to the kernel for download on their web site.
Kernel modules and other object linked source code is still being hotly debated, for better or for worse. The stance most companies take is to distribute binary modules.
The application which runs on top of Linux, however, is NOT gpl'd. Nor are all of the other control mechanisms which Tivo has written. Nor are the images and other creative works put into the Tivo system.
By offering an image of the drive for download, that Tivo user is offering both GPL'd(which is ok) and Copyrighted(which is not okay) works. And since just backing up the GPL portions of the Tivo system will not restore the system, the image that user is offering is in violation of Copyright laws and Tivo has the right to and needs to tell them to stop.
Just because you use a GPL base for an OS does NOT make your application GPL as well. Graphical libraries are another matter and hence the LGPL, the BSD license, and a few others.
People need to understand that it isn't about being against GPL. It is about protected the portion which ISN'T GPL. And people aren't seeing that distinction when they should.
I've been a user of a Series2 Tivo for 2 years now and love it. One of the first appliances I bought when I moved into my current place. I upgraded mine and have had no problems with it. Though I'm thinking I'll be doing some routine maintenance myself to make sure the drives are okay, but otherwise, I have no complaints about image quality or any other problem with the system. (Except maybe the USB1.1 port which limits me to 11mbps when I really want 100mbps... :)
Tivo has been a great company and has always been courteous when I had problems or questions of them. They see something wrong happening and they are doing what needs to be done to rectify the problem.
They should not be dinged when they try to protect something legitimately, unlike another company which comes to mind.
Re:Concerning point 1 (Score:3, Informative)
TiVo releases their kernel mods, but they have tons of userland apps that provide all the functionality that makes a Tivo what it is.
These images that were asked to be taken down were not simply kernel images, but images of the entire Tivo disk.
Re:It's just nuts and bolts, and software (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's not the *complete* source code (Score:3, Informative)
Mmmm... decisions, decisions...