Consensus at Lawyerpoint: CNET: RIAA proposes "broadcast flag" for music

July 17, 2002

[News]
CNET: RIAA proposes "broadcast flag" for music

Declan McCullagh, now at CNET, reports that RIAA today suggested a broadcast flag mandate for digital audio (similar to the MPAA's proposal for digital video).

EFF's Robin Gross attended the meeting at which RIAA revealed this proposal, so we'll try to have a more detailed report in the near future.

Note that the BPDG broadcast flag is only applicable to ATSC and can't be used for any other purpose. However, creating new broadcast flag standards is easy enough. Requiring manufacturers to cripple their equipment, and programmers their software, is the difficult part.

Posted by Seth Schoen at 06:03 PM

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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. MORE...