Microsoft Licenses Analog Anti-rip Technology

photojournaliste writes "CD copy-protection specialist Macrovision is to work with Microsoft to ensure their respective DRM and anti-rip technologies are interoperable, the two companies said this week. Sounds straightforward enough, but the deal runs deeper. Microsoft agreed to license a number of Macrovision's patents, in particular those relating to analogue copy protection technology and more recent extensions to that system that cover video-on-demand, pay-per-view content and support for the US 'broadcast flag', which determines whether consumers will be able to record digital TV broadcasts."

Comments

Re:Buy now, only legal until July 1

[gatzke]

From http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/

The Broadcast Flag:

The essence of the FCC's rule is in 47 CFR 73.9002(b) and the following sections: "No party shall sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered Demodulator Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements."

The Demodulator Compliance Requirements insist that all HDTV demodulators must listen for the flag (or assume it to be present in all signals). 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. Flagged content may be recorded only by "Authorized" methods, which may include tethering of recordings to a single device.

The Demodulator Robustness Requirements are particularly troubling for open-source developers. In order to prevent users from gaining access to the full digital signal, the FCC ties the hands of even sophisticated users and developers. Devices must be "robust" against user access or modifications that permit access to the full digital stream. Since open-source drivers are by design user-modifiable, a PC tuner card with open-source drivers would not be "robust." It's not even clear that binary-only drivers would qualify.

Together, these rules mean that future PVR developers will have to get permission from the FCC and/or Hollywood before building high-definition versions of the TiVo. The products that they do build will be epoxied against user experimentation and future improvement. The rules mean that open-source developers and hobbyists will be shut out of the HDTV loop altogether.