Losing Control of Your TV

Continued from page 2

By Simson Garfinkel

March 3, 2004

And yet, the broadcast flag is not some poor ghost created to walk the airwaves until the foul crimes done against the recording industry by the likes of Napster are burnt and purged away. No, it is instead just another step in Hollywood's ongoing project to remake both consumer electronics and desktop computers so that they are more to the industry's liking.

After all, the flag won't achieve its goal of eliminating off-the-air piracy. For starters, it applies only to equipment that will be sold after July 2005; naturally, the hacker weblogs are advising people to stock up now on unencumbered digital TV cards for PCs-cards that don't implement the broadcast flag. After July 2005, every new digital TV card will be encumbered with this spiffy new technology.

Another lurking problem with the broadcast flag proposal is that it only applies to material that's broadcast-not material that's sent through cable or beamed down from a satellite. Those systems have their own copyright protection technology. But the more standards that industry deploys, the greater the chance for something to go wrong. Not only will compatibility be difficult, but it's likely that some pieces of equipment won't properly honor the copyright control technologies and some of Hollywood's valuable content will sneak out.

So what happens when the broadcast flag has obviously failed? The MPAA will be back, this time demanding that even stronger anti-consumer technology be bundled into consumer electronics and desktop computers. Ultimately, Hollywood will settle for nothing less than the elimination of any consumer technology that can make high-quality recordings.

After all, we've been down this road before-just a little more than 25 years ago, in fact.

Many consumer groups like to point out that Universal Studios filed suit against Sony in 1978, arguing that Sony's Betamax VCR could be used to illegally pirate movies transmitted over the airwaves. Universal wanted to kill home video recording. But the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1984 that the primary use of the Betamax was not piracy but rather time-shifting-a practice that the court said was a permissible fair use under the copyright laws. Had Universal been successful, the argument goes, consumers wouldn't have bought VCRs and the whole videotape rental industry would never have been born. Blockbuster never would have happened, say these groups, noting ironically that Hollywood has made a tremendous amount of money off the very technology that it tried so hard to kill.

I don't believe this argument. If home VCRs had been deemed illegal, it's quite likely that the movie rental revolution would have been delivered instead on videodiscs. We had videodisc players in the early 1980s, and their phonograph-sized discs delivered truly excellent image quality far superior, in fact, to that on videotape. It might have taken a few years longer, but videodiscs would almost certainly have become the media of movie rentals. Blockbuster still would have happened, just not with those tiny bags.

Indeed, Hollywood was always set up to be one of the winners of the home technology revolution. What would have been different if the movie industry had won in its lawsuit against Sony is that the revolution in camcorders, amateur video productions, and independent moviemakers never would have happened. Steven Soderbergh would never have created Sex, Lies and Videotape. Rodney King's beating by the police wouldn't have been filmed. Perhaps a generation of creativity and political change would have been lost. And Hollywood would have been happy.

This is why I'm so passionately opposed to letting the movie industry dictate design specifications for consumer electronics and home PCs. Hollywood's moguls want consumers to purchase one-way devices that jack-in to today's business models. They're terrified of creativity that they can't harness and monetize. Instead of sharing the golden eggs with the world, they'd rather kill the magic goose. The broadcast flag's ability to stamp out the recording of high-quality digital signals is probably the largest step in this direction since Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act back in 1998-a piece of legislation that has had astoundingly negative impacts throughout the high-tech world.

As citizens of a democracy living in a technological society, we must take away Hollywood's seat from the table where our future is being designed.