A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow wrote an article noting that a) computer applications are converging to the point where every form of media people interact with will soon be entirely digital, creating all sorts of opportunities for interesting new applications (what Doctorow calls the digital hub) and b) that Hollywood is actively trying to kill this sort of digital hub before it becomes widespread and unstoppable.
This effort is led by the Broadcast Production Discussion Group (BPDG) which has a proposal to build copy protection in at the hardware level in all new digital devices that is very likely to be adopted as an FCC regulation soon. As Doctorow notes,
Hollywood wants to be sure that you can’t do anything with video form TV or cable without the film studios’ permission. So while you may want to be able to stick a DVD full of home movies into your Mac and edit a five minute short for your distant relatives to download from you iDisk, Hollywood wants to be sure you won’t be able to do the same with that episode of Buffy you recorded from the TV. When your distant relatives download your home movies to their computers and burn them to DVD, Hollywood wants to be sure that what they’re burning is really a home movie and not a Law & Order episode that slipped through the cracks and made it onto a Web site.
. . .
How can this be accomplished? . . . absent any way to achieve Hollywood-grade perfect control over the technology’s use, the BPDG simply won’t let it come into being. It will be illegal to manufacture this device.
I suspect that what will ultimately kill BPDG is that it will result in devices that consumers hate to use. Doctorow notes that there was literally no opposition to the BPDG proposal from computer manufacturers. But when people refuse to buy their digital hub-style products because of all the limitations, that will all change.
CNET’s Joe Wilcox looks at digital entertainment computers that Microsoft and HP are working on — computers which have restriction after restriction to accommodate Hollywood. For example, these machines include a digital video recorder, but they encode the recorded video such that it can be played only the machine that created it.
Wilcox quotes analyst Toni Duboise saying,
You have to applaud their efforts (on copyright protection). But this is not a mainstream product, particularly if you’re going to limit it where consumers are not going to be able to share that digital media between their DVD players and other devices. To take that (copying) flexibility away from consumers is a big mistake. There’s no way consumers are going to like this proprietary way of doing business.
People will expect their computers to give them exactly the sort of experience they’ve come to expect with analog devices such as VCRs and cassette recorders. When they find out that Hollywood has dictated otherwise, they will abandon the market for such digital convergence devices in droves. When that happens, I don’t think you’ll have technology companies or Members of Congress as positive about the bounty of hardware-level copy protection anymore.
Sources:
New ‘entertainment’ PCs restrict copying . Joe Wilcox, CNet, September 3, 2002.
Can the digital hub survive Hollywood? Cory Doctorow, TidBITS#642, August 12, 2002.