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Hollywood Tastes New Copyright Victory - Act NOW

Posted by timothy on from the strange-embedded-fellows dept.

Geekwannabe writes "The FCC is about to pass regulations requiring all television manufacturers to include copy-protection in any television receiver or recorder. The 'broadcast flag' regulation is intended to allow TV networks and broadcasters to determine which of their shows you can record (essentially giving control of your VCR, TV and Computer back to the broadcasters.) In order for the new, copy-restrictions to succeed the FCC will make it illegal to manufacture or sell non-copy-protected devices in the U.S."

1 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. This has a big impact on curent HDTV sets by cs668 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since the current crop of HDTV sets do not have built in tuners they use external set-top boxes.

    The RGB outputs of the set-top box are then hooked up to the HDTV set which is basically a monitor.

    The problem is that since the RGB ouputs can be copied they will use the broadcast flag to determine when you can really get a 1080i signal from your set-top box. Anything with the broadcast flag set will come out in 480i.

    That will make the current round of HDTV sets junk since most good programming will only show up as 480i. To bad for all of the early adopters.