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the drm sausaGe factory
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CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in
the DRM world. It was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was
hammered out. CPTWG meetings open with a “benediction,” de-
livered by a lawyer, who reminds everyone there that what they
say might be quoted “on the front page of the
New York Times”
(though journalists are barred from attending CPTWG meetings
and no minutes are published by the organization), and remind-
ing all present not to do anything that would raise eyebrows at
the FTC’s anti-trust division (I could swear I’ve seen the Micro-
soft people giggling during this part, though that may have been
my imagination).
The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with admin-
istrative business and presentations from DRM vendors, who
promise that this time they’ve really, really figured out how to
make computers worse at copying. The real meat comes after the
lunch, when the group splits into a series of smaller meetings,
many of them closed-door and private (the representatives of the
organizations responsible for managing DRM on DVDs splinter
off at this point).
Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The
BPDG was nominally set up to create the rules for the Broadcast
Flag. Under the Flag, manufacturers would be required to limit
their “outputs and recording methods” to a set of “approved tech-
nologies.” Naturally, every manufacturer in the room showed
up with a technology to add to the list of approved technologies
— and the sneakier ones showed up with reasons why their com-
petitors’ technologies
shouldn’t
be approved. If the Broadcast Flag
became law, a spot on the “approved technologies” list would be a
license to print money: everyone who built a next-gen digital TV
would be required, by law, to buy only approved technologies for
their gear.
The CPTWG determined that there would be three “chairmen”
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