Last Thursday, I got sick.

I don’t know if it was a late reaction to all the holiday food, travel, family stress, or whatever. But waking up Thursday morning, I felt so miserable, that I was convinced my co-workers would be off much better without me kvetching at the office.

So I stayed home. After some sleep, hot soup and lunch, I was feeling a bit better, and decided to see what the TiVo in the bedroom could play from the TiVo in the living room. Well, apparently not the free content that I subscribed to, and could download off the Internet without any problems.

I subscribe to two shows on  TivoCast, CNet and Cranky Geeks. Both of these shows are available to anyone without paying a penny. Granted, the only source for the TiVo version is TivoCast, but otherwise, it seems to me that these shows are freely available. But when I was browsing the other TiVo, I could not transfer these shows between TiVos.

The reason that was given is that the copyright holder has requested that this content cannot be transferred. Although this is possible with the CNet (I couldn’t find a download link for their content), but it seems strange for Cranky Geeks, which on the front page has download links for several formats.

So what could be the real reason? Is TiVo tracking to see who downloaded the content? So why block me from transferring the content from one TiVo to another, within the same house? Are they tracking to see how often it is watched? By whom? Or is this some kind of default that the “copyright owners” haven’t thought about, because their content is freely shareable??

Anyways, it seemed kind of fishy to me. If anyone knows why this is setup this way, I would love to hear it.