BPDG Not Much Of A Threat?

Captn Pepe writes: "According to this article in the NY Times, the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group could be less dangerous to consumer freedoms than has been suggested, because they apparently can't agree on anything. As happened with SDMI and similar efforts by the content industry to cram restrictions into digital devices, 'the central stumbling block to arriving at a broad agreement on the proposal may simply have been a bid by the studios for too much control over carrying it out.'" Read below for a related but very different take on the state of the BPDG.

DigForFiles writes "It seems that the media companies and the tech companies may be near an agreement concerning fair use of digital broadcasts. Apparently the basic plan is FOX's and is to have broadcast programs be digitally flagged by the media guys and the tech guys are responsible for building all home digital recorders so that they recognize the flags. Consumers would be able to record the broadcasts for home use and data transfers within their local LAN but the flags would prohibit the transfer of recorded data outside the household. Thus they hope to prevent P2P networks from trading the broadcasts online while allowing fair use within the household. Some of the presentation material can be found here. The guys in charge, Copy Protection Technical Working Group, meet on 5 June for further discussions. A list of attendees can be found here (it's in Excel format)."

Comments

Re:Interesting, but huh?

[delta407]

Once on VCD, what then? It melts if it wanders out of my home, like a holodeck character walking out of the holodeck?

No, you simply get hauled off to jail. Video capture cards will watch for a watermark, CD-burners will ensure they are used by only authorized software, and so forth.

Actually, what's kind of amusing is that I have been able to dub DVDs flawlessly by piping them through an old VCR; no need for the illegal Macrovision bypasser things.

NIC cards

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

Looks like NIC cards are going to basically have full packet filtering & application level firewalls built in. "Hmmm, does this stream of packets have a broadcast flag when I attempt to assemble them thusly? Yes? Hmmm, what's the destination IP? 204.*? Yikes, start dropping packets on this connection!" It'll have to know TCP/IP, UDP, and whatever network & transport level protocols anyone dreams up. The race for protocols is on. Anyone see IPX coming back in style quickly?

Boy, I bet those babys will be a joy to design. And market. And dirt cheap, to boot!

Of course, it's possible that we'll all be mandated by law to switch to TCP-DRM/IP-DRM and UDP-DRM/IP-DRM and all other protocols will be outlawed. Patent lawyers, start your engines!

Meanwhile, I'll be programming in the Cayman Islands.

Misinterpretation?

[Masem]

When I read the NYTimes articles, I get the feeling that it's not that the studios want to block the sending of the recorded programs, but to make sure that the digitial content is strongly encrypted as possible to even require a hidden unique device ID as part of the key for decoding. Thus, while you could send the encrypted programs left and right, the receivers couldn't do anything with the data. This is a much more technologically feasible way to doing things, and would take the question out of how to avoid problems of blocking older computer hardware. However, as the article does point out, this would mean that if/when DVD-R are used as a recording medium for digital TVs, current DVD models won't be able to play them due to strong encryption.

Re:Give them enough rope...

[tsg]

Radio has already done this for me and a lot of people I know. The last good radio station in my area got corporatized about a year ago so now they all suck. I stopped listening.

For some reason the content industry is under the impression that we're all going to stand in line to pay $30 to buy "Weekend with Bernie V" or $20 for Brittan'Sync's latest claptrap regardless of how crippled it is.

They can legislate our fair use rights away all they want, but they can't make us buy it. Most people aren't music or movie fanatics. It's only entertainment, after all, and people will find other ways to amuse themselves if DVDs and CDs become more hassle than they're worth.