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cory doctorow
Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for
inclusion on the list would be the approval of one of its member-
companies, or a quorum of broadcasters. In other words, the
Broadcast Flag wouldn’t be an “objective standard,” describing the
technical means by which video would be locked away — it would
be purely subjective, up to the whim of the studios. You could
have the best product in the world, and they wouldn’t approve it
if your business-development guys hadn’t bought enough drinks
for their business-development guys at a CES party.
To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA
were willing to consider for initial inclusion as “approved” were
the two that Intel was involved with. The Intel co-chairman had
a hard time hiding his grin. He’d acted as Judas goat, luring in
Apple, Microsoft, and the rest, to legitimize a process that would
force them to license Intel’s patents for every TV technology they
shipped until the end of time.
Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the
time, I figured that this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hanni-
bal said to Clarice. But over the years, I started to see a larger pat-
tern: Hollywood likes DRM consortia, and they hate individual
DRM vendors. (I’ve written an entire article about this, but here’s
the gist: a single vendor who succeeds can name their price and
terms — think of Apple or Macrovision — while a consortium is a
more easily divided rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to
produce ever-worsening technologies — think of Blu-ray and HD-
DVD.) Intel’s technologies were held through two consortia, the
5C and 4C groups.
The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked
out of the digital TV market. The final report of the consortium
reflected this — a few sheets written by the chairmen describing
the “consensus” and hundreds of pages of angry invective from
manufacturers and consumer groups decrying it as a sham.
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