From: Dewayne Hendricks <address@hidden>
Date: August 2, 2004 8:09:09 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <address@hidden>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
Reply-To: address@hidden
TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page F06
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29428-2004Jul31.html>
TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire
such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It's asking
the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature
-- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the
Internet to nine other people.
Huh? Permission? Doesn't the government's involvement in consumer
electronics stop with making sure that a gadget doesn't jam your neighbor's
reception or electrocute you? Since when do the feds get to vote on product
designs?
The answer is, since last November, when the FCC voted to require
manufacturers to support the "broadcast flag" system by July 1 of next
year. This convoluted mechanism aims to stop full-quality copies of digital
broadcasts from circulating on the Internet.
The FCC didn't mandate any one anti-file-sharing scheme and instead invited
companies to submit their own proposals, which brings us to TiVo's vaguely
Soviet predicament. Among the schemes a handful of firms have proposed,
only TiVo's would allow tightly controlled online transfers of recorded
programs.
For this, the company has drawn the ire of the National Football League and
the Motion Picture Association of America, which have asked the FCC to deny
TiVo's proposal.
The NFL says that TiVo's Internet-sharing feature will allow people to send
game broadcasts to blacked-out viewers in real time (a team's home game can
be aired locally only if it sells out beforehand).
"It's a question of pure ability to sell tickets," said Frank Hawkins, the
NFL's senior vice president for business affairs. "Buffalo typically sells
out September and October, but they've got an open-air stadium. They'll
never sell out those December games if they are unable to enforce the
blackout rule."
This is an important point: The NFL is not asking the FCC to protect its
television business -- never mind that the flag exists only to stop
indiscriminate file sharing, not cure every copyright-infringement issue.
No, the NFL is asking for help with a stadium business, one that already
benefits from massive government welfare. (A December 2002 Buffalo News
story calculated that the taxpayers of Erie County, N.Y., had anted up
about $148 million for the Bills and their stadium over the previous
decade.)
In other words, the league is asking manufacturers and viewers to further
subsidize team owners who are already gorging themselves at the public
trough.
There's also the slight problem that the NFL's nightmare -- blacked-out
viewers watching a game live on the Internet -- is all but impossible. With
almost every broadband connection available today, it would take hours to
upload a game. A recipient would be lucky to finish watching a Sunday
afternoon game before Monday, and sending a high-definition copy would take
most of the week.
Jim Burger, a lawyer for TiVo, fumed about the NFL's complaint: "Maybe
their engineers understand how to inflate a football, but I don't think
they understand encoded, encrypted MPEG-2," TiVo's tightly secured format.
Whenever full-quality, real-time video on the Internet does become
commonplace, I expect to see the NFL capitalizing on it instead of
complaining, just as it has profited from such earlier advances as
satellite TV.
The MPAA, meanwhile, says that the way TiVo would allow customers to share
recordings online with people who may not be friends or family members
amounts to indiscriminate redistribution.
The Washington-based group wants TiVo to impose an "affinity requirement,"
said Fritz Attaway, its executive vice president for government relations.
But how can TiVo tell if the people to whom you've sent a program are
really friends and family without launching its own Total Information
Awareness program? Attaway called that "a good question." Until that can be
answered, his lobby contends that the safest course is to block Internet
sharing -- after all, he noted, you can just pop a DVD in the mail.
What the MPAA and the NFL overlook is that every TiVo box includes analog
video outputs that can't enforce copy controls. These allow these devices
to work with the millions of TV sets lacking digital inputs, but they also
let anybody plug a TiVo into a computer to upload video at will.
The FCC has already ruled out proposals to eliminate or deactivate analog
outputs. ("We'll probably have to go to Congress to enact legislation to
deal with that," Attaway said.) If the problem the MPAA and the NFL
describe is real, the remedy they seek won't solve it.
Understand that TiVo itself is no hero. Its proposed system is thoroughly
hobbled. The people to whom you'd send recordings online would need you to
add them to a "secure viewing group" by ordering special security keys for
their Windows computers, associated with your TiVo bill. Each viewer would
need to plug one such key into a PC to receive, watch or edit your
recordings.
Left on its own, the market could give TiVo's system its appropriate
reward. Except we don't have a free market in digital television -- the FCC
guaranteed that by approving the broadcast flag.
The MPAA and the NFL phrase their objections as reasonable attempts to err
on the side of caution. "We're asking them to just wait awhile, let's think
it out more thoroughly," Attaway said.
But if a programmer or an engineer with a bright idea has to go to
Washington, hat in hand and lawyers in tow, to request permission to sell a
better product -- and is then told "just wait awhile" -- we are on our way
to suffocating innovation in this country.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at address@hidden
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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