Question-about Music and copyrights via music-choice.....ANSWERS NEEDED..... (1 Viewer)

[Corbin Stirn]

Hello. I had DirecTV before and was able to record songs onto my minidisc via the optical digital out on my RCA receiver. I just moved and just hooked up via digital cable. I called the company to ask about the hookup(they have coaxial digital out on this box I have) and was told that the digital signal is blocked(analog out is fine though). What gives? Last time I looked....I was paying for the music channels....I'm not going to be selling and/or distributing the music I MIGHT record.......it's for my own personal use. My cable company says that musicchoice.com(might be spelled wrong) stipulated in their agreement with this cablesystem that there could be no digital output from the music channels! Is this right? Are they allowed to do this? I'm a little aggravated.....especially since I've been able to do this before with NO PROBLEM. Any advice would be appreciated.....

 

[Thomas Newton]

The premise of the law that forced SCMS copy protection, machine tax, and tape tax on DAT recorders (and other standalone consumer digital audio recorders) was that the crippled machines would still permit you to do a single generation of digital copying.

Seems that when it comes to some (many?) DVD soundtracks and to this cable box you mention, the vendors have decided to ignore that.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

The DirecTV receiver with TiVo can't record the music channels to its own hard disk for later playback and the people at TiVo say that it's because Music Choice demands it. The digital output works but I don't know if you can record it, the SCMS probably says it can't be recorded.

 

[Rachael B]

Corbin, what's wrong with analog recording? It'll stille come out purr-dy good. You can't coplain, tooo much, it's free. This is one of the reasons why "they" don't want us owning our own cableboxes, as we were once promised. Mod, mod, mod... Corbin, sorry I didn't answer your now not so recent e-mail. I accidentally deleted it. Best wishes!