[IP] TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 2, 2004 8:09:09 AM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page F06
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29428-2004Jul31.html>
TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that
inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot.
It's asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add
a new feature -- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV
programs via the Internet to nine other people.
Huh? Permission? Doesn't the government's involvement in consumer
electronics stop with making sure that a gadget doesn't jam your
neighbor's reception or electrocute you? Since when do the feds get to
vote on product designs?
The answer is, since last November, when the FCC voted to require
manufacturers to support the "broadcast flag" system by July 1 of next
year. This convoluted mechanism aims to stop full-quality copies of
digital broadcasts from circulating on the Internet.
The FCC didn't mandate any one anti-file-sharing scheme and instead
invited companies to submit their own proposals, which brings us to
TiVo's vaguely Soviet predicament. Among the schemes a handful of firms
have proposed, only TiVo's would allow tightly controlled online
transfers of recorded programs.
For this, the company has drawn the ire of the National Football League
and the Motion Picture Association of America, which have asked the FCC
to deny TiVo's proposal.
The NFL says that TiVo's Internet-sharing feature will allow people to
send game broadcasts to blacked-out viewers in real time (a team's home
game can be aired locally only if it sells out beforehand).
"It's a question of pure ability to sell tickets," said Frank Hawkins,
the NFL's senior vice president for business affairs. "Buffalo
typically sells out September and October, but they've got an open-air
stadium. They'll never sell out those December games if they are unable
to enforce the blackout rule."
This is an important point: The NFL is not asking the FCC to protect
its television business -- never mind that the flag exists only to stop
indiscriminate file sharing, not cure every copyright-infringement
issue.
No, the NFL is asking for help with a stadium business, one that
already benefits from massive government welfare. (A December 2002
Buffalo News story calculated that the taxpayers of Erie County, N.Y.,
had anted up about $148 million for the Bills and their stadium over
the previous decade.)
In other words, the league is asking manufacturers and viewers to
further subsidize team owners who are already gorging themselves at the
public trough.
There's also the slight problem that the NFL's nightmare -- blacked-out
viewers watching a game live on the Internet -- is all but impossible.
With almost every broadband connection available today, it would take
hours to upload a game. A recipient would be lucky to finish watching a
Sunday afternoon game before Monday, and sending a high-definition copy
would take most of the week.
Jim Burger, a lawyer for TiVo, fumed about the NFL's complaint: "Maybe
their engineers understand how to inflate a football, but I don't think
they understand encoded, encrypted MPEG-2," TiVo's tightly secured
format.
Whenever full-quality, real-time video on the Internet does become
commonplace, I expect to see the NFL capitalizing on it instead of
complaining, just as it has profited from such earlier advances as
satellite TV.
The MPAA, meanwhile, says that the way TiVo would allow customers to
share recordings online with people who may not be friends or family
members amounts to indiscriminate redistribution.
The Washington-based group wants TiVo to impose an "affinity
requirement," said Fritz Attaway, its executive vice president for
government relations.
But how can TiVo tell if the people to whom you've sent a program are
really friends and family without launching its own Total Information
Awareness program? Attaway called that "a good question." Until that
can be answered, his lobby contends that the safest course is to block
Internet sharing -- after all, he noted, you can just pop a DVD in the
mail.
What the MPAA and the NFL overlook is that every TiVo box includes
analog video outputs that can't enforce copy controls. These allow
these devices to work with the millions of TV sets lacking digital
inputs, but they also let anybody plug a TiVo into a computer to upload
video at will.
The FCC has already ruled out proposals to eliminate or deactivate
analog outputs. ("We'll probably have to go to Congress to enact
legislation to deal with that," Attaway said.) If the problem the MPAA
and the NFL describe is real, the remedy they seek won't solve it.
Understand that TiVo itself is no hero. Its proposed system is
thoroughly hobbled. The people to whom you'd send recordings online
would need you to add them to a "secure viewing group" by ordering
special security keys for their Windows computers, associated with your
TiVo bill. Each viewer would need to plug one such key into a PC to
receive, watch or edit your recordings.
Left on its own, the market could give TiVo's system its appropriate
reward. Except we don't have a free market in digital television -- the
FCC guaranteed that by approving the broadcast flag.
The MPAA and the NFL phrase their objections as reasonable attempts to
err on the side of caution. "We're asking them to just wait awhile,
let's think it out more thoroughly," Attaway said.
But if a programmer or an engineer with a bright idea has to go to
Washington, hat in hand and lawyers in tow, to request permission to
sell a better product -- and is then told "just wait awhile" -- we are
on our way to suffocating innovation in this country.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at
rob@xxxxxxxx
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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