[Rants]
What is the BPDG?

In the year 2006 all over-the-air television will be digital. This is pretty hot stuff: crystal-clear pictures, ear-popping audio and interactive features for days. But as the technologists give, the studios take away.

The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is an obscure group of Hollywood studios and technology companies that are negotiating a "consensus" for any gadget or code that can touch the studios' product. Once they're done, they want to go to Washington and ask Congress and/or the FCC to give their "standard" the force of law.

So what? Well, this is a radical departure from the way it's usually done. Usually, bright nerds invent something cool and the entertainment industry has a nervous breakdown and runs around telling everyone that the sky is falling (Marconi got sued over the radio, Sony got sued over the VCR, and it took a near miracle to get movies out of the studios' vaults and onto television). People pick up on the tech and all the interesting ways that it can be used as a creative tool, and gradually the entertainment industry realizes that a new day has dawned and gets its act together, starts shipping product for the new media, and takes home yet another squillion dollars.

This time around, the entertainment industry wants to take away all that sloppy, inefficient fooling around where technology companies try out lots of different approaches, where garage inventors go from obscurity to posterity under a hail of customers, where you and I get to invent amazing new uses for our stuff that a bunch of engineers in a board-room never would've thought of in a million years. This time around, everything not forbidden is mandatory.

But wait, there's more! The number of gadgets than can (and will!) touch digital TV signals is larger than you might think. The generic PC under your desk will have more than enough power to tune, demodulate and display TV signals. Neat. Just think of all the stuff you'll do once all that stuff from the TV is sitting inside of your Moore's-Law-miracle, as easy to manipulate as text.

Or not. Whatever measures the studios take to "protect" their product from their customers will have to be applied to PCs, too. The tamper-resistant seal around their devices will have to be wrapped around your software and hardware. Will it become illegal to write tamper-friendly, open-source software for playing with digital video? We think so. Will copy-prevention mechanisms in hard-drives, video cards, and sound-cards be mandatory in your PC, even if those mechanisms break all kinds of legit software? Sounds like it to us. Will your computer be full of anti-privacy unique serial numbers that get transmitted back to some Content Central whenever you touch their stuff? Guess.

So what's all this stuff about "consensus?" Why are technology companies telling Congress that they can't wait to implement all of these misbegotten "features?" Because it beats the alternative. Hollywood's got a big club here. They've been playing the lobbying game long and hard enough that Congress is willing to butcher the $600 billion tech industry to feed the $35 billion entertainment sector -- besides, movie people have better hair and throw better parties and don't correct your math when it comes time to split the check (movie people just pick up the check).

The tech industry believes that if they make a "consensus" with Hollywood that they'll get a better deal than if they wait for Congress to cook up a mandate. The tech industry is negotiating at lawyerpoint, sweating at a table while Hollywood holds a gun with a full magazine of hollow-point associates to their heads.

There's an alternative: no mandates. Let the tech industry invent stuff. Let customers choose from among the stuff they think will make them happy. Let the film and TV industry offer competitive products. Don't put innovation into the hands of what BusinessWeek calls "the most change-resistant companies in the world."