Update: Missdona has provided a couple of useful links in the comments below. If you experience similar issues with select programs being incorrectly DRMed, check out these threads for advice on how to resolve the situation.

Here's what Dean experienced:

"This morning, my kids and I decided to watch a TiVo HD recording we made last night of The Making of John Adams. This is the new upcoming mini-series by Tom Hanks and others about the lives and accomplishments of John Adams. When we started watching it, I first found that the TiVo had flagged it for mandatory auto-deletion within a few hours of being deleted, due to 'copyright policies.' Hmm - never saw that one before.
 
After about 5 minutes watching, my oldest son came into the room, and we decided to start it over so he could enjoy it. What I found was something I've never seen before and has me pretty frosted. When I backed up to the beginning and attempted to watch it again, TiVo would not allow me to - again stating that it had violated copyright policies. After countless attempts at forward and reverse moves, we found that we could now not watch any portion of the show! I rebooted the TiVo, and found the same thing. No can do - the TiVo/HBO/Comcast programming had locked it from being viewed again! Then as promised at 11:29am EST, it deleted from my hard drive and there was nothing I could do about it.

In this Wired interview from November 2004, Tivo's general counsel assured the public that it was unlikely (ha!) that content providers would take advantage of the Macrovision technology to restrict recording of regular programming:

What if the higher-value content is just the beginning? This could be a Trojan horse.
That would be a violent blow to consumer flexibility. You could end up in a situation where different products by different manufacturers would have different rules. I don't think we would go along with it.
 
With the cable companies in bed with the studios, TiVo could be the last line of defense for the DVR as we know it.
Sometimes I feel that way. We're aware of the danger, and the slippery slope. The danger is that DRM can tilt the balance of copyright so that ultimately there's no concept of fair use, because the content owners dictate what the rules are. But I think content owners are beginning to recognize that if you make things too restrictive, then consumers will find nonlegal ways to achieve what they want.

"UPDATED: HBO's new miniseries IS locked down for TiVo recording" [The Culture of Ownership] (Thanks to Missdona!)

RELATED
"Has TiVo Forsaken Us?" [Wired]
(Photo: Culture of Ownership)

From Salon's Machinist blog:

In the past, Rowling has offered high praise for the HPL. "This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing)," she says on her site. She calls the HPL "a website for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home."

Thanks to such acclaim, Vander Ark recently landed a publishing contract with RDR Books to put out a printed version of the online lexicon. His book was to have gone on sale this fall.

You might suppose that given her appreciation of the online HPL, Rowling would have encouraged the book's publication and sale. But you'd be wrong. On Halloween, Rowling and Warner Bros., which produces the Potter movies, filed suit to stop Vander Ark and RDR from selling the book. Late last week, RDR agreed to halt publication of Vander Ark's Potter lexicon pending a federal judge's review.

In her suit, Rowling, arguably the most well-remunerated writer in history, asserts complete and total control over the Harry Potter creative universe — a stance that, if affirmed by the court, would strike a deep blow to the legions of fans who have added immeasurably to her work online. Her attorneys claim that Vander Ark's book will compete with Rowling's own planned Potter encyclopedia; the lexicon, they say, is thus nothing more than an attempt to "make millions of dollars off the back of Ms. Rowling's creativity."

In a statement, Rowling added: "It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author's hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

Has J.K. Rowling ever been to a library? Seriously, I truly wonder. Because if she had, she might have seen many examples of exactly the sort of books she describes as "not reasonable." For instance, a list of the allusions in "Ulysses"; or a complete guide to all of the characters in William Faulkner's fiction; or a compilation and detailed analysis of Bob Dylan's lyrics; or a book containing the complete chronology of the events in David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest."

Hey, J.K. — can I call you J.K.? — these are known as "reference books," and, like the HPL, they are not mere "reorganizations" of characters and plots.

J.K. Rowling's Crucio curse on fan's Harry Potter book [Machinist]
(Photo:Getty)

But they did.

Now we're hearing rumblings a boycott of Regal Cinemas until they drop the charges against Ms. Sejas. From Free Culture @ NYU:

We demand that Regal Cinemas drop all charges against Jhannet Sejas, and that the entertainment group issue a full apology to the teen.
While the question of whether or not Jhannet's Transformers clip counts as fair use (it is our opinion that it does, as it is private, non-commercial use of an unsubstantial portion of the original), there is another question we should be asking, and that is whether or not we should be patronizing a corporation that insists on pressing charges against someone who is clearly not the intended target of anti-piracy laws. Regal Cinemas should be ashamed of itself and its silly zero-tolerance policy.

Boycott Regal Cinemas [Free Culture @ NYU]
Boycott Regal Cinemas: Teen Arrested for Recording 20 Second Movie Clip [Slashfilm]
(Photo:Andrew Ruess)

The site is fairly entertaining and contains the sentence:

"Try as it might, the NFL does not have complete control over any pictures, descriptions, or "accounts" of football games. Despite what they tell you, your "account" of the game over the workplace watercooler is not a felony."

The site also contains the full FTC complaint, which we plan on reading later over tea and cookies.
(PDF)

Defend Fair Use
(Photo:Paul Keleher)

From the Wall Street Journal:

The group wants the FTC to investigate and order copyright holders to stop wording warnings in what it sees as a misrepresentative way.

"We look forward to receiving their complaint and reviewing it," said an FTC spokeswoman.

Many warnings "materially misrepresent U.S. copyright law, particularly the fundamental built-in First Amendment accommodations which serve to safeguard the public interest," the complaint alleges. CCIA President Ed Black said the warnings create a "chilling effect," dissuading consumers from using portions of the content in ways that are lawful.

The CCIA said copyright holders should let audiences know they may have a right to reproduce some of the work. They even provide examples of how it can be done, as in this warning in the John Wiley & Son's 2007 book "Hotel California." The warning says, "No part of this publication may be reproduced...except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act," referring to the sections that deal with fair use and reproduction by libraries and archives.

Google, Others Contest Copyright Warnings [Wall Street Journal] (Thanks, Roger!)
CCIA

"GW Bush's iPod contains "illegal" (according to RIAA) music In the video linked below, we see that President Bush's iPod contains songs by the Beatles; since no Beatles songs have been licensed for the iTunes Music Store yet, these must have come from ripped CDs. Remember last February, when the RIAA told a federal agency that ripping CDs is illegal? I wonder if they'll bring charges."

Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.

Link

From E-commerce News:

"The British Phonographic Industry insists that the bootleg concert footage on YouTube breaches copyright law and says they will "rigorously" seek to have them removed from Web sites with the threat of legal action against service providers who refuse.

A spokesperson said: "Our policy is to prosecute in cases of file-sharing of music and that would be the case where bootleg videos of concerts were also being illegally distributed. Record companies own the copyright of any filming done at concerts, and it is illegal to post such footage on the Internet."

The evolution of human culture depends on man's ability to use previously created material in order to create new ones. In today's society, Homer would've been sued to the very olive stains on his toga for creating the Odyssey from bits of old legends. The recording industry gearing up for an attack on YouTube represents a threat to the ecosystem of human culture, marking out the space on the bedpost for the next notch ongoing raping of the public domain into nothingness.

In fact, we don't (although our bosses would) mind if you lift articles from The Consumerist and pass them off as your own. You're spreading our ideas. You're paving the way into people's minds, creating an avenue for more of our ideas to penetrate. We can always lay more golden eggs. In our eyes, you would not be a fox, but a camel.

It's the middlemen, the leaches and interlopers, the grafters, cheats and agents, the parasites capitalizing on the creativity of others who fear more feet around their succor-hole.

Everyone has a right to protect their income, but doing so doesn't make them in the right. We don't care if this position is contrary to existing case law. If it prevents the creation of new works, intellectual property is theft.

Anyhow, they should be seeking ways to enable this flood of authentic fan interaction instead of stemming it. YouTube is an overflowing trough of opportunity for content providers, and their pimps.

Industry Uneasy With YouTube Craze [E-Commerce News via Digg]

That s the substance of a filing submitted by the RIAA during the ongoing digital copyright wrangling in Washington.

This maneuver reneges on their statement made during MGM v Grokster that, it s perfectly lawful to take a CD, upload it to your computer, put it on your iPod.

Similarly, the same filing said, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use.

We re just going to strap on a phonograph and only listen to honky-tonk cartridges.

RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use [Electronic Frontier Foundation]