FCC Considers Mandating HDTV Copy Protection

HeavenlyWhistler writes "The Washington Post reports that the FCC will make a ruling this month on whether or not to mandate that all HDTV receivers implement copy protection when a 'broadcast flag' is detected in the received television signal. Movie and TV studios are pushing for this in an attempt to limit consumers' home-recording rights. An October 8 article states that CBS, under orders from Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin, has threatened to stop all HDTV broadcasts unless the broadcast flag is approved. While the comment period on the proposal (Docket 02-230) is over, the FCC web site will still let you submit comments. The EFF also discusses this issue."

Comments

Wont change a thing

[DaHat]

I've spent the last 6 months working with professional and broadcast level digital tv encoders and decoders, even writing a fair amount of software on both sides. This flag is pretty pointless, and is often a laugh when discussed at work.

With the hardware we build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by our systems if implemented. Besides, if you end up modifying the ATSC standard, in order to prevent breaking all previous encoders/decoders on the market, you would need to make such modifications to portions of the stream which are unused, and existing off the shelf parts would ignore such a modification. Thus, the protection starts off ineffective.

Even after the existing non compliant decoders/recorders/etc on the market are retired to due age or death, newer hardware which ignores such protections would still be available, you'd just have to pay a fair amount.

What's on my Christmas list this year? A DTV decoder as well as a recorder/player unit, cost for both? About 15k. As sad is it is to ask, how important is your right to copy to you? Is it work 15 thousand dollars?