Hi, all. Bit Player has changed locations. Since Aug. 18, I've been writing for the Times' Technology blog. Sign up for the RSS feed -- http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/rss.xml -- and get the work of seven great news reporters in addition to my lame posts. Such a deal! Alternatively, if you're interested only my windy commentaries about copyright law, DRM, secure pathways to the TV set and the like, you can check the index of new Bit Player posts periodically.

I've really enjoyed running this blog for two years (thanks again, Michael, for making it happen), but have known for some time that it worked best when it wasn't a solo gig. So although there are things I'll miss about this particular corner of latimes.com, such as the Now Playing picks and the eviscerating put-downs of commenter Dwayne Hoobler, I think everybody wins with the Times' having one unified blog covering this stuff instead of two separate ones. (Granted, there's still Web Scout....) Unlike erstwhile copyright-law blogger extraordinaire Bill Patry, I won't have to be talked into leaving my archives in place. They'll all remain here, at least until Sam sells the building.

It's conventional wisdom that copyright law doesn't keep up with technology. How could it? And yet the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, in its decision Monday in the Cablevision DVR case, somehow made the leap into the Web 2.0 world without tripping over 32-year-old provisions of the main federal copyright statute. It's an important ruling that has intriguing implications for products and services with recording features, potentially extending to Web-based companies the protection that the Supreme Court gave to home recorders.

Friday's post about the FCC ordering Comcast to stop surreptitiously interfering with BitTorrent uploads drew a number of thought-provoking comments. I'll concede the point made by some readers that it's too early to tell exactly what the FCC did, given that the detailed order has yet to be released. But in light of the concerns raised about ISPs' ability to manage their networks, I wanted to ask a pointed hypothetical.

Suppose a Web-based business comes up with a compelling way to stream movies in high def. Studios love it, so they agree to provide licenses to the content. The site's popularity skyrockets. But it consumes a crazy amount of bandwidth because it uses a delivery method that saturates customers' download and upload capacities. How should ISPs respond? Should they throttle access to the site or its delivery protocol, which might make it impossible for the streams to be delivered in high-def? Should they institute bandwidth caps that effectively force customers who regularly use the site to pay more than folks who do so rarely, if at all? Or is there some other approach that would be more desirable? And does the answer change if the ISP also happens to offer a pay-TV service that competes with this online VOD venture? Resist the urge to quibble with the premise, and post your answers below.

Lovely fiber-optic array courtesy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has taken a lot of flak since he announced last week that the commission was ready to rule that Comcast improperly interfered with BitTorrent traffic. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board groused that Martin, a Republican, was "poised to expand government regulation of the Internet." Fellow Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate accused Martin and the commission's two Democrats, Jonathan Adelstein and Michael J. Copps, of "issuing broad mandates to protect the few" instead of looking out for average Internet users and intellectual property owners. ("By requiring ISPs to `carefully tailor' their network management practices, I am concerned that we will potentially be stripping them of the important tools they use—and we need-- to purge their platforms of illegal content which negatively impacts every type of intellectual property, from software to pharmaceuticals to of course, songwriters and motion pictures." Who knew that counterfeit medicines were made through file sharing?) And the third Republican on the FCC, Robert McDowell, complained, "For the first time, today our government is choosing regulation over collaboration when it comes to Internet governance. The majority has thrust politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions."

But it's worth remembering the difference between what Comcast actually did and what its defenders seem to think it did.

Here's a value proposition for you: a subscription music service that lets you download 88 MP3s a month for a little less than $3. And you thought eMusic was a good deal.... The catch is, you have to be in China to subscribe. And in China, music fans aren't used to paying anything for MP3s.

One week after notifying customers that it would soon stop supporting the DRM-wrapped songs they had purchased, Yahoo has offered to make whole anyone concerned about a loss of tunage. That's quite a concession, yet it's not a huge surprise -- shortly after Microsoft made a similar decision to shut down MSN Music's DRM servers, it reversed course and said it would keep the servers plugged in for at least three more years. Could it be that two of the world's most powerful Internet companies actually listen to the EFF?

Here are the details, according to the Associated Press: customers who bought downloadable tracks from Yahoo's defunct music service can obtain coupons that they can redeem for replacement MP3 files at Rhapsody, the RealNetworks-MTV joint venture that took over Yahoo's subscription music service. If a coupon doesn't cut it for you, Yahoo may be willing to cough up an actual refund.

My previous post on this issue has provoked an often hilarious exchange between DRM critics and advocates, one of whom dismembers my arguments in unusually vivid terms. Not that it takes a surgeon's skill to do so, but it's still pretty entertaining.

UPDATE: Carrie Davis at Yahoo provided these nuggets of detail: if you're looking for a coupon or a refund, contact Yahoo's Customer Care department. There's no need for proof of purchase. The offer expires at the end of the year. By the way, coupons can be redeemed for any track at Rhapsody, not just the ones the customer purchased from Yahoo. Sounds like a chance to trade in all those disappointing Jimmy Eat World tracks for some Deastro!

DivX announced another ally today: the downloadable movie site CinemaNow. On some unspecified date in the future, the latter will offer customers the option of downloading movies in the DivX format (using the DivX DRM) instead of CinemaNow's usual Windows Media files. DivX's codec is impressive, but the main improvement the deal offers consumers is an easier way to play the movies they rent or buy on their TV set. The DivX DRM enables people to play the files on every DivX-certified device in their personal domains. For most people, that would be a DVD player. And unlike other DRM approaches in the market, DivX enables rented movies to be burned onto disc, not just download-to-own files. In other words, it's a practical living-room solution for online movie rental sites.

Apple, Netflix and Amazon.com have a different strategy for delivering rented movies to TV sets: they stream the flicks to specialized set-top devices (such as the Apple TV, Roku's Netflix box and Sony's back-of-the-TV Bravia Internet Video Link). DivX plays in that arena, too, with its DivX Connected boxes (currently available only from D-Link). The D-Link set-top is a solid entry into the field, although it suffers from the same limitations as everybody else's "media extenders": it's compatible with only a portion of the vast online universe of video. The challenge for DivX and CinemaNow will be to persuade more studios to embrace the DivX format and DRM; so far, the only announced taker in Hollywood is Sony Pictures. They'll need a much more comprehensive lineup than that to make the DivX option a meaningful addition to CinemaNow's service.

My colleague Meg James reported Saturday that the NFL will be going online this year with its Sunday night games -- not exactly its most valuable product, but not a bad place to conduct an experiment in online distribution. Although this is close to a no-brainer, it represents something of a leap forward in advertiser-supported sports programming online. All told, 17 games will be shown live on NFL.com and NBCSports.com (NBC has the TV rights to the game), starting with a Giants-Redskins game on, umm, Thursday Sept. 4.

The most significant thing about this one-year test is that, unlike what NBC and other networks do with their prime-time schedules, the free online football games will compete directly with the versions on TV.

This is so meta, I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it. Sofia's Diary is an "interactive Web drama" that's produced by Sony Pictures Television International. Its episodes and related programming -- e.g., the main character's blog -- are on Bebo.com. Sofia's Diary is branded entertainment, which means that its characters and plot twists are designed to advance an advertiser's message. Anyway, today Bebo announced the integration of a new advertiser into the program: Paramount Pictures UK. Characters and other elements from a new Paramount teen movie,  "Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging," were inserted into the world of Sofia's Diary for a two-episode run, timed to the movie's opening weekend. In other words, Sofia's faux reality was tuned to promote a faux reality from a different medium (film).