That's all history, and for much of the past five years the Recording Industry Association of America has been trying to put the technological genie back in the bottle. They shut down the original Napster, they recently raided the offices of Kazaa in Sydney, Australia and they've started filing lawsuits against small-time users of file-sharing software. It's a messy and expensive business, but the RIAA doesn't see any other choice.

The MPAA would like to avoid repeating the RIAA's contentious experience with digital media. But the MPAA's first attempt didn't go so well. Realizing that DVDs were sure to be popular, the major studios got together and designed an encryption scheme for DVDs that was supposed to prevent movies copied onto a hard drive or burned onto a recordable DVD from ever being played. But just a few years after the technology hit the market, the DVD encryption scheme was cracked. Free software that you can download from the Internet lets you take a DVD, decrypt it, and then crunch it down so that it will fit on a single 700 megabyte CD. You can make copies for your friends or, if you want, take that brand new Cat In the Hat DVD and upload the files to the Internet so that everybody in Sri Lanka can mock its production values.

"And that is not all!" said the Cat. "Oh no, that is not all!"

Within a few years, all of the TV signals moving over the airwaves will be digital. And unprotected digital content moving unrestricted over the airwaves is the MPAA's nightmare scenario. The industry's great fear is that high-quality digital broadcasts would be scooped up by techno-geeks with digital television cards wedged in to the back of their PCs. These merry pranksters would presumably then leak Hollywood's precious bits onto one of those high-speed international broadband circuits-perhaps one that goes from California to Hong Kong.

And that, says Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's executive vice president for government relations and Washington general counsel, is the flag's real purpose. Speaking to Wired News last month, Attaway explained that the purpose is to protect the industry's lucrative overseas syndication market. Why would people in Malaysia, Singapore, or Hong Kong want to watch American television shows months or even years after they are aired in the United States-as they do now-when instead they could see the shows the following day?

Of course, the broadcast flag will do more than stop such international retransmission: it will keep you from sharing your high-quality digital recordings with anyone-like those annoying people who are always sending out e-mail messages asking if anybody in the office remembered to tape last week's episode of Buffy, because they didn't have their own VCR set up properly. As if! Once the broadcast flag is operational, we'll all be spared from these requests.

Even though I don't watch much broadcast TV, I am still strongly opposed to the broadcast flag. The first reason is "mission creep." Having successfully lobbied a regulatory agency to put anti-consumer copy protection technology into the television set, what's to stop a greedy content industry from asking for more? The broadcast flag could be expanded into a whole family of little flaglets, and together giving the system a much more expressive repertoire. One flag might say, "you may not time-shift this program." Another flag might tell your TiVO "you may not fast-forward or skip this program's commercials." A very special flag might disable your TV's channel changer and "off" buttons. There might even be a Mission Impossible flag that makes your digital video recorder self-destruct in five seconds (or at least erase every movie owned by Universal Studios.) Who knows what Hollywood will dream up next!