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

mathematically impossible

[tps12]

It's sad to see powerful corporations sinking billions of dollars and trillions of man-hours into a project that is literally a wild goose chase.

It has been demonstrated by mathematicians at Princeton that this kind of copy protection or digital watermarking is mathematically impossible. While "where there's a will, there's a way" sounds flippant and trite, the mathematical principle of seperability essentially states that content can always be extracted from its protected form.

These guys are chasing the elusive pot o' gold that's over the rainbow. Best of luck to them, but oh, what a waste of effort.