Cory Doctorow has the goods on the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group’s upcoming proposals to neuter all future home entertainment technology in order to preserve analog-era business models in a digital age.
Never heard of the BPDG? Not surprising since it’s a semi-secretive collaboration of various studios, broadcasters and technology groups. It’s primary mission? To seek out new copy protection schemes to make sure your digital television set is in perpetual lockdown to entertainment companies.
The BPDG is horrified at the way people use entertainment devices. I worked with a couple people who were Buffy fanatics. One woman would videotape the show so if her coworker missed it, she could watch it on tape. Somtimes this same woman would bring in her tapes and watch them on a TV monitor during lunch.
That sort of thing will be a thing of the past if the BPDG has its way. Digital VCRs will have encoding mechanism so that a home-recorded tape on one machine will not play on any other machine (if they let you record it at all — that VCR will examine the datastream of the show and if it says no copying allowed, forget it).
And much like personal video recorders already have today, many of the features will be “revocable.” What happens if some kid on the Internet finds a way to modify a Digital VCR so that it can record such programs? No problem, Hollywood will be able to reprogram the VCR on the fly up to and including simply removing the recording capabilities (sound farfetched that they would do that? But isn’t that exactly what they’ve done by saying they won’t support existing HDTV’s at high resolution because of their weak copy protection schemes? Welcome to the future.)
As Doctorow points out, the real problem here is that unlike other thing such as the DMCA or the SSCA, these standards will be adopted or rejected not by Congress but by the FCC (still number two after the IRS on my list of government agencies that should have been abolished years ago).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a weblog covering this important issue.