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April 06, 2002

[FAQs]
Misconceptions about BPDG

An article by John Dvorak seems to contain a misconception: that the result of BPDG's work will be the obsolescence of current digital TV receivers. Dvorak writes that

[i]t appears that the new copy-protection schemes being dreamed up by Hollywood will make every single HDTV set sold to date obsolete. And buyers of new sets are not being told about this situation in a dubious attempt to dump very expensive inventory. I'm sure those of you who spent $5,000 to $10,000 for what may become an albatross are going to love reading this.

What happened was that the Hollywood folks, who are just freaked over the possibility that we'll be copying HDTV movies, have promoted copy protection that requires the decode circuit to be built into the display, not into the set-top box. This requires the set-top box to send a signal to a connector that new HDTV sets will have. If you're thinking of buying an HDTV, don't, unless it has this connector and circuit-whenever they are finalized.

Our impression is that Dvorak has got the situation backwards. Old equipment will continue to work. This is because BPDG isn't planning to encrypt broadcasts at all -- merely to cause them to include a "broadcast flag", and to obtain legislation forcing all manufacturers to comply with its rules.

The result of this would be that old equipment would be better and more useful than new equipment. Not only would it work properly, but it wouldn't have been crippled by having to comply with the Compliance and Robustness Rules. This is to say that old equipment would be more functional, not less functional, than new equipment.

Posted by Seth Schoen at 11:40 AM