[News]
Proposals for Table A

In the past two weeks, we've seen a stream of proposals for Table A technologies. There is still some debate about whether the BPDG itself ought to be recommending these technologies (rather than leaving them for approval by some future entity). This discussion conceals in the background the much more significant debate about whether the Hollywood studios should decide which technologies the public may use for home recording, which is of far greater consequence than the fight over any particular technology. Technologies may come and go, but legal precedents, cultural habits, and political patterns long outlive them.

Six entities, acquiescing at least provisionally in the suggestion that the BPDG's approval or disapproval means something, have so far submitted proposals for Table A technologies with corresponding Associated Obligations. They are the licensors of HDCP, DTCP, CPRM, D-VHS, Microsoft Windows DRM, and a new DRM system from Philips.

Philips has also challenged the submission of DTCP by DTCP's licensor, which is called the "Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator", or DTLA. (DTLA's name seems particularly unfortunate, because it implies that digital transmissions need to be licensed by somebody. It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, perhaps John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, which gave us the classic line "This has been an unauthorized cybernetic announcement.")

Philips argues that the DTLA's submission of DTCP is deficient in various ways, and DTLA replies that it is not. This argument is particularly strange because there is no apparent consensus on how to decide whether a particular proposal is deficient or acceptible. Clearly DTLA's submission is acceptible to its member companies and many of its licensees, and unacceptible to other companies. The result is an apparent impasse.

What seems particularly interesting to us is that earlier drafts of the BPDG rules included four technologies on Table A: HDCP, DTCP, CPRM, and D-VHS. These technologies were listed as "approved" long before anyone had even begun to discuss what would be necessary to qualify a technology as "approved", suggesting that their approval was a foregone conclusion. Philips has subsequently asked -- and we're wondering, too -- just how and why those four technologies were chosen.

If a legislative mandate does result from BPDG's work, inclusion of a technology on Table A will be a tremendous boon to that technology's licensor -- a government license potentially worth millions of dollars, and a tremendous competitive advantage over those technologies which don't appear on Table A and are consequently left in a legal limbo. This alone seems like an excellent reason to look very closely at how such decisions are made.