As the dreaded digital broadcast flag July enforcement date draws closer, the FCC will be challenged this week with arguments before the District of Columbia for the US Court of Appeals. This lawsuit aims to determine whether the FCC can effectively start controlling manufacturers to ensure their equipment recognises and enforces the broadcast flags as well as only pass on flagged content to other devices that also support the broadcast flag.
The MPAA claim that without broadcast flag restrictions, content creators would not be interested in providing their content in digital form over the airwaves in fear Internet piracy would move viewers to watch it over the Internet instead of on TV. At the moment, Digital encrypted satellite and cable broadcasts are encrypted and thus protected, however the MPAA claim that if no protection is offered for terrestrial digital broadcasts, the MPAA will not air its content by terrestrial digital.
On the other hand, the federal government would be interested in digital replacing the bandwidth hogging analogue spectrum as the government could reclaim the freed up portion and have it auctioned off, generating $15 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. However under 5% of households are capable of receiving terrestrial digital broadcasts, despite end of 2006 supposedly being the deadline for complete digital broadcasting and analogue closure.
While devices must recognise and enforce the broadcast flag, the FCC is not mandating any given piece of technology to enforcement and has so far approved of 13 methods submitted to them from various companies such as Sony, Philips, Real Networks and so on. On the other hand the opponents mention the broadcast flag would affect fair use such as recording and sharing short samples, for example "Name that show" quizzes. Also unlike movie piracy, piracy of shows is current not a major problem and is unlikely ever to be for the foreseeable future. Development of new devices would be affected as developers may have to change their ideas and specifications just to allow for the broadcast flag.
|
"This is about whether the FCC is going to become the Federal Computer Commission and the Federal Copyright Commission," said Gigi B. Sohn, the co-founder and president of Public Knowledge. "The FCC does not have the power to tell technology manufacturers how to build their machines." All sides agree that the new rule would do just that in attempting to limit unauthorized sharing of digital broadcast content over the Internet. The rule would require that as of July 1, all new consumer electronics equipment capable of receiving over-the-air digital signals--from digital televisions to computers equipped with TV tuner cards--must include technology that will recognize a "broadcast flag." That flag is simply a marker of sorts, a packet of bits embedded in a digital television broadcast stream that essentially carries the message "this stream is to be protected." In addition to recognizing that message, new equipment must include technology that will prevent the content from being distributed to other devices unless they, too, are flag-compliant. Read the full article here. |
Anyway as this broadcast flag does not affect legacy equipment that does not recognise the flag, this effectively results in a flawed system even to start with. Casual consumers would likely be most affected, where as those who would be interested in getting around the flag would simply have to purchase 2nd hand equipment that does not recognise the broadcast flag.
Finally I do not see how TV show piracy would be a problem anyway. By the time a pirate manages to record a soap off of TV, other viewers would have to watch on TV anyway. It is not like this broadcast flag would preventing content from being made available before the show is officially aired on TV (well with the exception of content delivered to other countries). Finally even if viewers are unable to watch their favorite TV shows as their scheduled time, the consumers would sooner schedule their VCR (or PVR) to record their shows than to try grabbing their missed episodes off the net.
Source: c|net News - Entertainment
