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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The MPAA has been calling for a broadcast flag mandate for at least two years, and last December, in a 90-page filing to the FCC, it spelled out the broad scope of the rule it says it needs. The document is a classic example of Hollywood's vivid powers of imagination. File trading, it says, poses a mortal threat to the billion-dollar TV industry; in the absence of the broadcast flag, people will trade television shows as easily as they trade recipes, and when this happens, the MPAA argues, Americans can say goodbye to free TV. (A PDF of the MPAA's filing is available here.)
In a world without the broadcast flag, "all a person has to do is to select 'Record' while watching TV on his or her computer using a TV tuner card, and then save the file to a publicly accessible folder on his or her hard drive, where it can be illegally redistributed to anonymous users via peer-to-peer file trafficking," the document says. "The capability of the Internet to allow distribution worldwide, instantly, to millions of recipients, distinguishes the looming threat of digital piracy from previous technologies, such as the VCR, that rely on the creation and distribution of physical copies. With worldwide unauthorized redistribution of digital content so easy to accomplish, the threat of widespread piracy is enormous, even if the number of pirates is low. Any recipient of digital broadcast television, not just the professional pirate or amateur hacker, would have it within his or her power to illegally redistribute digital broadcast television content almost at will, everywhere on Earth."
American television -- which the MPAA extols as "a unique resource, justly cherished by millions of Americans," and "a major United States export that is tremendously important ... to our prestige in the world," a characterization that might give you new, patriotic appreciation for something like "Joe Millionaire" -- would be at grave risk in a world where everyone is a potential pirate. So, in order to save TV from its viewers, the MPAA wants to lock it down. Under the MPAA's ideal rule, high-definition signals broadcast over the air would not be encrypted, meaning that any digital TV could access them; but if a signal is tagged with the broadcast flag, the device receiving the signal would be required to secure the content by implementing a copy-protection technology approved by the FCC.
The MPAA proposed a complex process for the FCC to use to determine which copy-protection technologies would be approved for securing digital TV, and -- rather than the question of whether to institute the broadcast flag in the first place -- it's this copy-protection approval process that has become, in recent weeks, the most controversial issue at the commission. Fritz Attaway, a lobbyist for the MPAA, says that his group wants a "market-based" test for determining the approved ways of handling digital content in a machine. Rather than putting forward a detailed specification that spells out to computer makers how their computers should secure TV shows, the trade group prefers a list -- it calls this list "Table A" -- of protection systems computer makers could install in their digital-TV machines. The list currently has only a handful of technologies -- the main one being DTLA, a protection algorithm developed by Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba -- but Attaway says that "there are several different technologies that we believe would meet the test."
Technology firms find the idea of adhering to a list of government-approved technologies abhorrent. Emery Simon, an attorney at the Business Software Alliance, the computer industry's anti-piracy arm, says that computer companies would prefer "an objective process for determining what is a good technology." If they're required to implement the broadcast flag, hardware and software companies would like the government to set down specific goals their systems should meet in order to comply with the rule, and then to work toward that goal in any manner that pleases them.
"The tradition in the tech industry is self-certification," Simon says. "You look at the specification, you build your system to the specification, and you declare your product to be in compliance." Self-certification, says Mike Godwin, is the key to innovation in the technology world. Because no one technology has been arbitrarily blessed by an outside authority, firms are always free to use the best or the cheapest operating systems or hard drives or DVD-burning systems they can find -- or, if they want, to build their own.
The MPAA, critics say, would like to end all that. "Under the original proposal, no [copy-protection] technology could be approved without at least two motion picture companies approving it," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He adds that under the MPAA's scheme, open-source digital television systems would be "banned outright," because "under this regulation not only do you have to embrace protection technologies, you must implement them in a tamper-resistant fashion, which means you've got to weld the hood shut. Open-source and free software are premised on not welding the hood shut -- it's not open source if it can't be modified by the users."
As an example, von Lohmann pointed to GNU Radio, the innovative free-software application that interprets broadcast signals on Linux PCs. GNU Radio can be configured to work like an HDTV tuner (here are some HDTV images captured by the software), but under the broadcast flag regulation, using it would be illegal, von Lohmann says.
The MPAA argues that predictions of the broadcast flag curbing computer innovation are greatly exaggerated. Because the list of approved technologies will be conditionally amended in response to demands of the marketplace, "innovation is ... certain to continue unabated under the Broadcast Flag solution," the group said in its proposal to the FCC. The MPAA also noted that "the Broadcast Flag solution will not, in itself, interfere in any way with continued innovation in the development of open-source software. While building a secure open-source protection technology will no doubt be a challenge, it is a challenge faced by open-source programmers in developing any secure application ... We welcome the efforts of open-source programmers to meet this challenge and develop secure digital output protection technologies and recording methods for submission for inclusion on Table A."
