FCC PONDERING MANDATORY DEADLINE ON BROADCAST FLAG COMPLIANCE
The FCC is giving serious consideration to imposing a mandatory deadline date on the marketing of DTV sets and other CE devices compliant with broadcast flag copy protection rules, but it hasn’t reached a consensus on what that date should be, sources at the Commission told us.
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We're told the Commissioners still are debating the 2 predominant proposals on the table. One is an accelerated schedule being promoted by the MPAA that would require products to be made broadcast flag-compliant if sold after July 1, 2004, the first date on which the FCC’s DTV tuner mandate takes effect. If the Commission chooses to go the route of imposing a mandatory deadline, the CEA and its supporters are arguing, it wouldn’t be feasible to commercialize broadcast flag-compliant products before mid- 2005 at the earliest, given the necessary and traditional 18- 24-month design cycle required for most new CE technology to reach store shelves.
It’s presumed that the debate within the FCC between the more aggressive and more conservative implementation timetables has followed the same lines as those between the CEA and the MPAA. The motion picture industry believes the July 1, 2004, target “can be readily met by manufacturers, as the flag rules will simply require plug-&-play devices to behave as already required by their licenses regarding subscription content,” the MPAA said in an ex parte filing at the FCC. “No additional protection will be required under the broadcast flag scheme than is required for subscription content under the Commission’s plug-&-play order,” the MPAA said. Moreover, it said, if Thomson and others have told the Commission that the introduction of plug-&-play devices was “reasonably attainable” by July 1 of next year, so, too, should broadcast flag-compliant products.
The failure to require such compliance by July 1, 2004, “will create an immediate, substantial and enduring legacy of devices that do not exist today and would not exist otherwise,” the MPAA said. “An entire generation of consumer products, and perhaps even some later variations, will be enabled to process digital television and encouraged by the Commission’s orders to enter the marketplace, but without providing a single iota of protection against unauthorized redistribution of those digital signals.”
But the CEA, in an ex parte filing that preceded the MPAA’s by about a week, told the FCC that it wasn’t feasible to shorten the traditional 18-24-month design cycle for CE devices, and “the Commission has consistently recognized these design and manufacturing realities” in other proceedings, including the DTV tuner mandate and the V-chip. Unlike the technical standards at issue in the broadcast flag proceeding, the CEA said, CE makers negotiated plug-&-play with the cable industry “and therefore were fully conversant of the details” of that standard when it was recommended to the FCC last Dec. “Manufacturers therefore were able to perform substantial design and other work in contemplation” of the Commission’s adoption of plug-&-play rules in Sept. this year, the CEA said.
“By contrast,” the CEA said, under the possible broadcast flag rules, “the technologies that DTV receivers and other digital products may be required to employ and how that equipment might have to respond are not and cannot be known until the Commission releases a decision.” It said there had been no industrywide design or preproduction activity comparable with that of the plug-&-play rules. As such, the CEA said, if the FCC adopts and publishes broadcast flag rules “this autumn,” it believes a deadline one year later than that being proposed by the MPAA “would be tight but achievable by most manufacturers.”