The contention that there’s a looming ‘Napster effect’ waiting fo...

to HDTV, which is difficult to transmit over the Internet. Responding to a filing by MPAA Pres. Jack Valenti on the broadcast flag, Public Knowledge said part of his letter was “deeply misleading from a technical standpoint.” PK said Napster relied on the fact that people could download a song in minutes, rather than the hours or days it would take to download an hour of DTV programming. Even with reduced resolution, downloading still would take ages, it said. “Since HDTV files are particularly large, they are therefore particularly difficult to trade over the Internet (or, for that matter, to store in large numbers on one’s computer’s hard disk),” PK wrote. The broadcast flag doesn’t lend itself to nuanced encoding rules for home use and it would make for difficult enforcement, especially when demodulation of ATSC becomes routine, the group said. Another solution would be encryption at the source, PK said. Meanwhile, in a separate filing, broadcasters dismissed claims that the FCC didn’t have the authority to adopt the broadcast flag. MSTV, NAB, News Corp., Disney and others said in an ex parte filing that the FCC previously had set rules for TV reception equipment without an express statutory mandate, citing the color TV transition, and “there is no reason it should not do so here.” It said Congress authorized implementation of DTV in 1996, but intended that the FCC work out the details. Waiting to see whether programming redistribution becomes a problem before acting is “precisely backwards,” they said.