BROADCAST FLAG WILL ‘SUPPRESS’ DTV INNOVATION, MPAA FOES SAY
A proposed broadcast flag “scheme” won’t “significantly protect” against unauthorized redistribution of DTV content, but would “suppress innovation, create massive enforcement problems” and stifle the DTV transition, consumer and public interest groups told the FCC. Consumers Union and Public Knowledge in a joint ex parte filing this week at the FCC -- submitted, they said, at the request of the Commission staff -- which sought the groups’ “critique” of MPAA-proposed broadcast flag rules in the wake of the agency’s recent adoption of a plug-&-play agreement on cable-DTV interoperability.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Any widespread redistribution of content by consumers wasn’t “at the heart of any problem associated with digital broadcasting,” the groups said. Movies aren’t “threatened” by over-the-air DTV, nor are original TV series, they said: “We are now 2 decades into the era in which TV viewers have been able to record, archive and share episodes of popular original television series.” The filing suggested there were ulterior motives “behind the push” for broadcast flag provisions, and they had less to do with the content industry’s fear of unauthorized retransmission than “the hope that the Commission may be persuaded to regulate in ways that alter consumer behavior and the economic playing field itself.” The filing included a copy of a paper presented Sept. 21 at a Telecom Policy Research Conference in Washington by 4 researchers from Harvard U. and MIT that argued that the broadcast flag might help MPAA achieve its “smaller, more incidental” goals, including “expanding a content owner’s control of content.”
Cost-benefit analyses of the broadcast flag suggest the burdens of implementing it would “fall unevenly” on consumer electronics companies and consumers, the filing said. For consumers, hardships would be particularly tough, it said, because they not only would have to replace existing equipment to receive HDTV content, but they also would be “restricted in their uses of recordings of such content.” Even in the “doubtful” possibility it was found that broadcast DTV programming needed additional protection, “there are other, better ways to protect content,” the filing said, such as “the DVD model” of scrambling content at the source and releasing it into a “secure software environment.” The groups said the best measure to assure additional DTV content protection was to “accelerate the transition to HDTV, because larger file sizes are orders of magnitude more difficult to copy.”
The enforcement challenges and antitrust provisions of the broadcast flag “are fundamentally different” from those of the plug-&-play rules, and any attempt to integrate both therefore “may be extremely problematic,” the filing said. The groups said they didn’t “actually know what the rules themselves will look like” on plug-&-play, yet they were being asked by the FCC “to explain how broadcast flag will fit.” They said what was known about the broadcast flag was that it might “admit platforms that are inherently inconsistent with plug-&-play.” The broadcast flag “doesn’t even allow for the breadth and growth” of “the ultimate plug- &-play regime” anticipated by the FCC, the filing said. It said the Commission relied on the assumption that the fragile flag or watermark could “be preserved and obeyed throughout transmission because of control of all architectures that might receive a broadcast. But it is the nature of broadcast that it is transmitted between architectures.”
The groups urged the FCC to “consult a true standards body” such as IEEE rather than adopt recommendations of the Bcst. Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), which “as the Commission knows,” drafted the broadcast flag proposal with no votes taken or “formal procedures” followed.