Sneaky UK Attempt To DRM Television

from the not-this-again dept

Danny O'Brien over at the EFF has the details on how the entertainment industry is attempting to push through an attempt to DRM TV in the UK. It's not quite a "broadcast flag," but close enough. In the last few years, since the original fight over the "broadcast flag" ended in "failure" for Hollywood, they keep attempting to sneak it through in other ways. In the US, it's been via "selectable output control," or SOC. Over in the UK, it's a bit different, but no less ridiculous. Basically, there would be some encoded metadata with all digital TV channels, and the algorithm would be kept "secret." As Danny notes, this has nothing to do with preventing copying, and everything to do with giving the entertainment industry yet another "veto" on innovation (similar to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA):

In Britain, as in the United States, this proposal isn't about piracy. It's about creating a rightsholder veto over new consumer technologies in DTV.

No British commercial digital TV manufacturer would risk any innovation that might invalidate their "metadata compression parameter" license, and leave them open to litigation. And competition between devices would be limited by the byzantine requirements that DRM requires (it's notable that the BBC says the rightsholders demands came via the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA), a DRM consortium who would clearly benefit from mandatory adoption of its own system.)

But, of course, in an era of copyright moral panics, we'll hear over and over again about how this is all about stopping "piracy" -- even though it actually does nothing to prevent unauthorized copying.

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US Switches To Digital TV And The World Doesn't End -- Nor Does Hollywood

from the phew dept

We were quite surprised to find no further calls for delays on the switchover to digital over the air TV from analog -- but we're not at all surprised to find out that the actual switchover happened with relatively few problems. Sure there are some people who are confused or who are having difficulty getting their new converter boxes working properly, but there's been no catastrophic failure or problems, and most of the issues seem to have been resolved pretty quickly. Perhaps the gov't really did need a few extra months, but my guess is that the same thing likely would have happened back in February... or if we had done the switchover years ago. So, now can we put the old spectrum to good use, finally?

Separately, the EFF is noting that (once again) it appears that Hollywood lied and exaggerated its claim that it needed a broadcast flag that would stop DVR copying of digital TV or it would start pulling content off the air. Funny thing... that didn't happen. As the EFF notes:

Entertainment industries like to argue that they "need" DRM to make works available. And policymakers have eagerly adopted this argument. But when the bluff is called, it turns out that the DRM wasn't so necessary after all.

So will our politicians recognize this? Or will they continue to believe Hollywood, everytime it insists it needs some new kind of DRM with legal backing from the gov't?

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Microsoft: It's Not The Broadcast Flag, It's A Different Flag

from the well,-that-makes...-um...-no-difference-at-all dept

After certain NBC TV shows wouldn't record on Microsoft's Vista Media Center a few weeks ago, Microsoft admitted that Media Center includes broadcast flag technology, while NBC Universal admitted that it accidentally set the flag. However, now Microsoft is trying to clarify, claiming that it's not actually the broadcast flag that it included, but an entirely different flag, called CGMS-A. NBC Universal concurs, saying that the mistake it made was in setting the CGMS-A flag. Of course... the real question is why does this matter at all? If the impact is identical (Microsoft willing to let TV networks declare a show un-recordable), then what does it matter which annoying copy protection scheme is used?

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Microsoft Confirms That Windows Media Centers Use The Broadcast Flag

from the reasons-not-to-buy dept

While NBC Universal still won't say if it set the flags on certain shows recently that would prevent them from being recorded, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Media Centers do abide by the "broadcast flag." You may recall that the broadcast flag was widely debated for a few years, as the entertainment industry tried to legally force consumer electronics makers to include technology that wouldn't allow certain content to be recorded (at the content producers' discretion). Eventually, the courts wouldn't let the FCC mandate the broadcast flag, and Congress hasn't been willing to put it into any serious legislation. However, apparently Microsoft decided to implement it anyway. Nice of them to implement a "feature" that customers don't want. Update: It took them a week, but folks at NBC Universal are finally claiming that it was an accident that they set the broadcast flag triggers on shows last week. It's not clear why it took them a week to get back to News.com's Greg Sandoval on this.

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