Despite 20 months of trying by DTLA, CableLabs refuses to approve...

FCC in a much-expected petition (CD Feb 26 p11). DTLA -- founded by Hitachi, Intel, Sony, Matsushita and Toshiba -- urged the FCC to reverse CableLabs’ “wrongful refusal” and order CableLabs to “approve DTCP-IP as an effective digital output protection technology for audiovisual content.” The refusal “has nothing to do with content protection, theft of service, or harm to the cable network,” DTLA said. The decision arose from “extraneous considerations that impermissibly leverage its power to approve content protection technologies into virtual control over every device capable of receiving video content over the entire home network,” DTLA said. CableLabs conditions approval of DTCP-IP on license terms “that require every device that touches cable-received content, regardless of how far downstream that device resides on the home network, to permanently mark and segregate that content as ‘Cable Content,'” it said. This would force DTLA to re-engineer DTCP-IP “to restrict delivery of Cable Content only to devices that CableLabs considers part of its ‘cable ecosystem,'” DTLA said. “But what CableLabs benignly terms its ‘cable ecosystem’ is what a consumer calls ‘my home network’ -- the products a consumer buys for home personal entertainment. These CableLabs requirements constitute a rejection of DTCP-IP.” CableLabs said it stood by earlier statements that it keeps talking with DTLA and its member companies “to resolve outstanding business and licensing issues in an attempt to come to a marketplace solution similar to those CableLabs has reached with Microsoft, Real and Motorola for IP-based outputs.”