is this possible?

[bb]

Yesterday ( Wed ) in the paper here there was a story about how some music companies may in the future install some kind of code on cds and such to prevent people from making copies, even for personal use.

Purpose: The music companies claim they loose mega money each year thanks to people making copies of music off the internet and from making copies with cd burners using their friend's CD/mini disc.

I had a friend a few years back rented a movie at Blockbuster. He liked it so much that he tried to make a copy of it. Watching the playback of the copy it the picture quality was very very poor. Very unwatchable though he taped it on a high quality tape.

In the past I have heard that some movie studios do have some kind of thing installed on the tape to prevent people from making good quality copies.

With all that said, makes me wonder. Is it possible for a tv channel/ network to transmit some kind of signal that makes it impossible to tape a show?

Say one wants to tape Cheers off Nick. Could Nick@Nite transmit a signal that will prevent your VCR from taping it?

After you tape it all you get is a either/ or both poor picture and sound.

Back in the early 80s when Disney and some of the other movie companies tried to outlaw VCRS I remember hearing that the tv nets will start sending 2 singals. One for the tv set so you can watch and the other a scrambled signal to the VCR to prevent the taping of the tv show by the viewer. As a matter of fact I remember when Disney Channel first went on the air and announced that they will be doing just that on nights they would show Disney classics like Bambi and Snow While. But all that talk came to an end. But in this age of Napster and such I wonder if this will come about soone or later?

Funny looking back but in my collection somewhere I have a yellowed news story that appeared in my hometown newspaper from Septemeber 1981 that said that VCRS will be outlawed to the private comsumer and that only schools, tv stations, cable companies, colleges , local governments and hospitals will be allowed to tape off televsion.

[TV Guy]

These media companies never seem to learn that the best thing to do is to work with the techology to make a profit from it, rather than trying to block it. Look how much money Disney has made from selling their classics on home video? When it comes down to it, if someone wants a movie or TV show for a permanent collection, they'd much rather have a pristine copy purchased on VHS or DVD, rather than a fuzzy copy taped off the air or cable. But with the advent of digital TV and music, the media companies are concerned with people making flawless copies of their own copies.

The CD protection is already being tested in Europe and even on a small percentage of US CDs by certain labels. This technology essentially "scrambles" the encoding a bit, and relies on the playback devices for correction. Supposedly, the CD drives on computers can't correct this since they are more precise. Unfortunately, some non-computer CD players are having problems playing these CDs as well. There's been a small uproar from people buying CDs that can't be played on all machines.

If Disney, Viacom et. al. were smart, they'd start a major effort to make their music and video libraries available online. I'm probably oversimplifying, but I do believe that most people would rather purchase directly from them than receive pirated copies. They'd be much better off doing this than keeping their libraries offline, because pirated copies will dominate otherwise.

I think that over the next 10 years, we're going to see a major change with how television programs, movies, and music are distributed.

[Brian]

I sure hope they don't do the same thing to TV shows. I think it would be stupid if they made it so that shows cannot be recorded. Besides, nobody would want to get up in the middle of the night to watch a show because they are unable to record it on the VCR.
It is bad enough that CDs are probably going to be programmed not to be copied, but would be absolutely infuriating and unfair if they did the same thing to VCR's.
I apologize for sounding so upset, but the thought of preventing shows from being recorded just makes me sick.