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

When will they learn

[pinkUZI]

Didn't they learn anything from the Sony's mistake? You can spend millions, but someone will always be able to defeat the technology. Ah, well, I guess they have to do something to protect their assets...

Perhaps...

[YanceyAI]

...if they didn't waste so much time and money trying to prevent copyright infringement they'd be so wealthy the could just rely on the honor system.

Re:Interesting, but huh?

[MrMickS]

You'll only be able record digitally if you sign it with your Microsoft Passport (or similar) ID. Playback will require authentication based on the Passport ID.

Of course this will tie down the ability to record to certified devices, but that appears to be the way that it's going.

<dons flame proof suit>
Seriously, some sort of mechanism like this is the way that things are likely to proceed.

The producers need to try and protect their investment in content generation. From a consumer point of view we want to be able to make copies.

If those copies are somehow tied to a personal/family digital key then it makes a good compromise.
</dons flame proof suit>

Re:Interesting, but huh?

[dcavanaugh]

Perhaps the sheer impossibility of this is why the /. article suggests it's less dangerous than originally thought. I can't imagine a scheme like this surviving more than a day before the hackers rip it to pieces. Let the media folks try impossible things as much as they like. Better yet, make a standard from things that don't work.

Do you really think the digital video recorder manufacturers are going to tool up and produce millions of devices that nobody wants because they implement Hollywood's idea of copy control? Not unless the algorithm is flawed and readily defeated by consumers. At that point, sales will skyrocket when the consumers learn how to uncripple the hardware. Example: The easily hackable Apex DVD players. That hidden menu for disabling region codes & Macrovision was a brilliant sales tool.

let the studios do what they want

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

before modinf me down, read further.

the largest producer of movies is India. France AFAIK has restrictions in importing intelectual production from overseas, worlds largest potential consumer market (china) has also restrictions on these subject.

so let the american studios byte theyr own tail. if they start pushing to much control crap over the consumer, the level of rejection against their products will grow in other countries too, then 2 things can happen:

1- media produced in US will end up restricted to a niche market (US itself) OR;

2- The media industry in US (studios, recording companies, etc.) will end up losing money and learning what other industries already know: The consumer is KING. do what the consumer wants. give the consumer liberty and they'll respond buying your products.

Re:NIC cards

[morgajel]

and to think, all you'd have to do is rot-13 the stream...
so much for that. any hardware that is hardcoded to look for something will fail because there will always be at least one person smarter than the machine who can help everyone else outsmart it.
someone needs to hit these people with a clue-by-four.

just remember, one person CAN make a difference.
Ask that kid that's in jail for de-css, or the russian guy who broke the adobe bookreader thing. ...or ask Linus.

point is we're human, we're free to do what we want. there is no way that this will ever work as long as the human spirit is entact.

It'll be known as the Digital Logjam

[Anonymous Coward]

In 20 years we'll look back on this phase and call it the "Digital Logjam." We'll note that the various competing interests tussled to preserve their interests and marvel how it seemed that *none* of them noticed that this fight slowed down the very revolution they were all looking forward to: the adoption of the digital TV and the high bandwidth internet.

A few logs in the jam:

1. The bandwidth providers overbuilt, hoping for lots of video sloshing around the Internet, but it never materialized. Then they all went bankrupt.

2. The copyright holders put the brakes on digitization as they evaluated their options. They alone were on no hurry.

3. The hardware and software companies refused to agree on any standards that the copyright holders liked, instead preferring to compete with their own technologies.

4. The consumer advocacy groups took the opportunity to try to move the bar, which only served to raise the hackles of the copyright holders.

5. The media companies took the opportunity to try to move the bar, which only served to raise the hackles of the copyright holders.

6. And the techies threw gasoline on the fire by gleefully promising to break any system they didn't like on the basis of an ethic that doesn't distinguish between good and bad. (Heck, they had lots of time on their hands because they were unemployed waiting for the logjam to free up.)

Re:It'll be known as the Digital Logjam

[Anonymous Coward]

No, twenty years from now they'll call this phase the domino effect of collapsing monoplolies that led to the second Great Depression and possibly the Third World War.
The media thing isn't the cause although there is a very scarry proposition that certain flavors of politician are going to try and frame it that way because it appeals to simple minded asswipes that like to get violent on their neighbors. No, actually the media issues we're seeing today aren't causes, they're effects.
The cause of all this controversy isn't people sharing information as they have in all great civilizations. No, this one-sided tempertantrum that gets framed as a supposed controversy is actually the effect of the creation of monopoly powers unseen since before the previous depression. It's not just the media companies by any means look at Microsoft and now look at Citigroup. Holy shit. We've set ourselves up for a hell of a fall by voting for generations of conservative asshole politicians who's primary skills were appeasing monopolies and bad mouthing liberals. The only reason the media element of this mess gets so much attention is because it's the freakin' media. However, the problem we're facing with un-American monopoly business practices is a vast cancer on the entire nation.
Investment banking, re-insurance and the largest financial institutions in the nation have grown so large they're totally beyond oversight and are currently riddled with scandals. Indeed, organizations like Citi and BofA are no longer properly considered banks at all, but financial services agencies distributing their risks through derivatives so complex that they require teams of physics PhDs to maintain. If you don't smell a shell game here then god bless your kind heart. I for one am wary.
Did I mention Moore's Law just ended? Mask costs at TSMC, UMC just went up by a factor of 10. Game over.

Re:Not much of a threat? Maybe more of a threat...

[ahfoo]

As a fellow patriotic American I'd like to politely suggest that assuming all the important decisions about media are made by the US Congress might not be accurate.
We've recently seen China and Taiwan discussing a separate DVD standard despite the fact that this appears to be totally illegal to many American observers. Now Taiwan is following in Mainland China's footsteps by insisting on free as in both beer and speech software in the government and schools.
People in the US often talk about controlling the media in ways that might not be practical no matter what kind of rhetoric is used to justify the measures. Fox's plan is fine. They've been putting watermarks on their shows for years now and so do many broadcast affiliates. But so what? Assuming that the US walks the entire digital media world around on a chain is a feel good proposition, but certainly not a realistic description of how things work in this day and age.
And as other posters have mentioned, we --here we being all Americans-- are the government. If restrictive measures are passed that result in higher costs for products that have to be customized to suit the restrictive US market, it's going to be seen as a hidden tax and that's not gonna fly too far.
These companies would be so much better off putting up their archives on the net right now and taking just enough to keep the operation profitable while they've still got the option. Sadly it looks like many of them would rather "kill every motherfucking last one of you." It's too bad they take that approach, but if that's what they want then they get what they deserve.