[Rants]
Piracy: The Big Lie

Why is a content protection system necessary for digital over-the-air television?

Hollywood representatives have, from the beginning, given one answer: a protection system is needed to prevent "Internet piracy," or even "Napster-ization."

There's one problem with this rationale: it's not true.

Don't be fooled. The BPDG standard is not about stopping "piracy." It's about Hollywood regaining some measure of control over what you can and can't do with television. It's about cramming the VCR genie back in the bottle, and giving Hollywood the power to bring new technologies to heel before they can deliver new capabilities to consumers.

The proposed BPDG standard will have no meaningful impact on unauthorized copying or distribution of televised content. Here's why.

Right now, there's a plentitude of unauthorized video content sloshing around the Internet. Virtually all of it has been digitized from DVDs and analog television broadcasts. What's more, almost all of it has been compressed in order to cram it into the relatively skimpy "broadband" connections used by most DSL and cable modem subscribers (if you're using a 56k modem, video is probably beyond your patience). This means that the quality has already been compromised.

Now consider DTV broadcasts. Compared to analog broadcasts, receiving a DTV signal is like drinking from a firehose of data (2.2 Gb/sec 19.4Mb/sec (thanks Wes!)). Consumers (at least outside of the high-speed university setting) don't have the bandwidth to swap uncompressed DV files, and they won't be getting it any time soon. Of course, enterprising members of the public could compress DTV signals in order shrink them for Internet distribution. If they did so, however, the resulting files would be no better than those currently culled from DVD and analog broadcasts.

So locking down DTV devices with BPDG's content protections will do nothing to stem unauthorized Internet distribution, at least not so long as there are DVDs and unprotected analog television broadcasts anywhere in the world. But it will finally give Hollywood some control over the development of new technologies, a power that copyright law alone has never afforded them.

But claiming it's about piracy is an easier sell than admitting it's about installing a panel of movies studio executives to reign over our nation's technology innovators.