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of the meetings: a representative from the broadcasters, a rep-
resentative from the studios, and a representative from the IT
industry (note that no “consumer rights” chair was contemplated
— we proposed one and got laughed off the agenda). The IT chair
was filled by an Intel representative, who seemed pleased that the
MPAA chair, Fox Studios’s Andy Setos, began the process by pro-
posing that the approved technologies should include only two
technologies, both of which Intel partially owned.
Intel’s presence on the committee was both reassurance and
threat: Reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental rea-
sonableness of the MPAA’s requirements — why would a company
with a bigger turnover than the whole movie industry show up if
the negotiations weren’t worth having? Threat because Intel was
poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competi-
tors.
We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were
drawn out and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told
us that we were wasting time — if we didn’t hurry things along,
the world would move on and consumers would grow accustomed
to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Representative Billy Tauzin,
the lawmaker who’d evidently promised to enact the Broadcast
Flag into law, was growing impatient. The warnings were deliv-
ered in quackspeak, urgent and crackling, whenever the discus-
sions dragged, like the crack of the commissars’ pistols, urging
us forward.
You’d think that a “technology working group” would concern
itself with technology, but there was precious little discussion
of bits and bytes, ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what
amounted to contractual terms: If your technology got approved
as a DTV “output,” what obligations would you have to assume?
If a TiVo could serve as an “output” for a receiver, what outputs
would the TiVo be allowed to have?
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