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dustry for decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to
health), providing a grisly reminder of what happens to compa-
nies that try to pour the entertainment companies’ old wine into
new digital bottles without permission. The tape-recorder was
legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to infringe-
ment, and must be stopped.
The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execu-
tion for non-compliance is enough to lure technology’s biggest
players to the DRM table.
I started attending DRM meetings in March 2002, on behalf
of my former employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My
first meeting was the one where the Broadcast Flag was born. The
Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM standards. Broadcasters
are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without DRM, so
that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The air-
waves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who
have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the
MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV,
and so they proposed that a law should be passed that would
make all manufacturers promise to
pretend
that there was DRM
on broadcast signals, receiving them and immediately squirreling
them away in encrypted form.
The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the
Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), a sub-group
from
the
MPAA’s
“Content
Protection
Technology
Working
Group,” which also included reps from all the big IT companies
(Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer electronics com-
panies (Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies, satellite
companies, and anyone else who wanted to pay $100 to attend
the “public” meetings, held every six weeks or so. (You can attend
these meetings yourself if you find yourself near LAX on one of
the upcoming dates.)
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