EFF Begins Digital Television Liberation Project

Dozix007 writes "One year from today, on July 1, 2005, an FCC regulation known as the Broadcast Flag will lock up your digital television signals. But EFF's "DTV Liberation Project" aims to help the public keep over-the-air programming free. The Broadcast Flag, which places copy controls on DTV signals, attempts to stop people from making digitally-perfect copies of television shows and redistributing them. It also stops people from making perfectly legitimate personal copies of broadcasts. More disturbing, the Broadcast Flag will outlaw the import and manufacture of a whole host of personal video recorders (PVRs), TiVo-like devices that send DTV signals into a computer for backup, editing and playback. After the Broadcast Flag regulations go into effect, all PVR technologies must be Flag-compliant and 'robust' against user modification -- and that means, once again, that the entertainment industry is trying to tell you what you can do with your own machines."

Comments

EFF lies about the Broadcast Flag

[SiliconEntity]

The EFF page lies about the broadcast flag in one important way:

Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" or in degraded form: through analog outputs or digital outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels or less--less than 1/4 of HDTV's capability.

There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only. You will still be able to use your analog outputs to record signals at the full resolution possible.

I will quote from page 41 of the FCC Broadcast Flag ruling straight from the EFF site:

73.9004 Compliance Requirements for Covered Demodulator Products: Marked Content. (a) A Covered Demodulator Product shall not pass, or direct to be passed, Marked Content to any output except (1) to an analog output; ...

In other words, you can't pass Marked Content (ie. content marked with the Broadcast Flag) to anything except analog output (and some other things). That is, analog output is perfectly permissible for flagged content.

The part about downrating the video quality only applies to digital outputs, and is discussed later on that page:

(6) where such Covered Demodulator Product is incorporated into a Computer ct and passes, or directs to be passed, such content to an unprotected output operating in a mode compatible with the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) Rev. 1.0 Specification as an image having the visual equivalent of no more than 350,000 pixels per frame (e.g., an image with resolution of 720 x 480 pixels for a 4:3 (nonsquare pixel) aspect ratio), and 30 frames per second. Such an image may be attained by reducing resolution, such as by discarding, dithering or averaging pixels to obtain the specified value, and can be displayed using video processing techniques such as line doubling or sharpening to improve the perceived quality of the image.

That's a little complicated but it amounts to saying that they have to downgrade the resolution if they produce unencrypted digital output in DVI format.

As you can see, the EFF has misrepresented this part of the Broadcast Flag requirement in order to make it seem worse than it is. They make it sound like there is no way to record flagged HDTV content without DRM restrictions. But actually, analog recording will still be possible, just as it is today, under the currently proposed regulations.

The Broadcast Flag is bad law, but we should be honest in our claims about what it does and doesn't do. Exaggerating it to make it seem worse than it is does a disservce to everyone who relies on the EFF as a source of honest and unbiased information.