Aunty Spam's Net Patrol
Have you heard about the “broadcast flag"? It’s an anti-copying scheme for digital broadcasts which has been mandated by the FCC. The broadcast flag is essentially a two-part scheme: part one is the flag itself - a little bit of data included in the digital broadcast stream which says “hey, I’m copy protected media, you can’t redistribute me!” Part two is the requirements for various digital receiving devices and other systems to honour the broadcast flag in part one. And this is where you, dear PC owner, come in.
Because as things currently stand, effective on July 1st of this year, every, and Aunty does mean every, new device capable of receiving a digital broadcast, and sold in the United States, must also be capable of receiving, recognizing, and honouring the broadcast flag. This includes, among other things, digital television tuners for your PC, along with digital televisions, VCRs, DVRs, and PVRs.
The purpose behind broadcast flags is ostensibly to ensure that digitally broadcast content which the content providers don’t want to be mass-redistributed can’t be mass-redistributed, while still allowing the consumer to record the content with, say, their TiVo or ReplayTV. In theory this sounds reasonable, however many say that it suffers from the same issues as do the current schemes for the digital rights management of audio content, namely that there is no one standard, and the standards don’t play nice with each other. So, for example, you may record this week’s West Wing on your DVR, and find that you can’t actually play it back on your digital HDTV. And of course forget about sharing your copy of West Wing across the Internet with your spouse, or, heck, even yourself.
Almost unbelievably, the FCC has used some amazing contortionist reasoning for enacting the broadcast flag requirements. The reasoning goes something like this: “Hollywood content providers won’t make digital content available without these protections. We want to move the country to a digital broadcast paradigm. If we protect digital broadcast content with broadcast flags, content providers will provide digital content, and consumers will buy (these crippled) digital receivers.”
Or, as it was put during a recent legal challenge to the broadcast flags, in Federal court, without digital rights management protection for digital broadcasts, such as the broadcast flag, the amount of digital content would be limited.
Uh. Ok. But why does the FCC care about the quantity of content available to consumers?
Said one Federal judge on the case, to the FCC, “Congress didn’t direct that you maximize content.”
This particular challenge is ongoing but unlikely to succeed, as the plaintiffs may not actually be properly before the court (you need as a plaintiff someone who has been actually harmed by the broadcast flags, and these plaintiffs - primarily librarians and consumer rights groups - may not be able to show adequate harm).
In the meantime, those who care are advised to purchase their digital receiving devices (such as that PC tuner card) before July 1st.
It’s almost enough to make you long for the good old days of Macrovision, isn’t it?
