AfterDawn: News

While rest of the world is way ahead in digital TV revolution, American consumers are still waiting. And will wait, if its up to Hollywood to decide. Well, now Hollywood and group of consumer electronics companies have finalized a proposal which would eventually cause DeCSS-like situations in States.

Proposal, made by Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (or BPDG.. Does anyone else have this weird feeling about these acronyms and how all the most complicated ones involve some satanic Hollywood/music industry plans to take over the world?-), suggests that government should force all electronics manufacturers to include a feature in their products that would store digital TV transmission in encrypted form once it hits consumers' TV receivers.



Hollywood hopes that this -- pretty insane, IMHO -- idea will prevent people from posting movies and TV series to Internet. The idea is to watermark all the content that is received from digital TV broadcast on-the-fly. This content would then be stored in encrypted format wherever consumer wants to move the content to -- TiVo, PC, etc. But it would be opened only by the TV set/digital receiver that received the original signal (at least that's how I understood the idea).

Fair enough, maybe this means that American consumers actually can start waiting for a real digital TV services within next 5 years or so. And obviously Hollywood / MPAA haven't learned anything from the past -- everything that's encrypted can be decrypted, it's just matter of time when we see first decrypters for this encryption technology as well. And obviously consumer privacy groups aren't exactly happy with the proposal either, as it violates traditional fair-use legislation totally -- the proposal doesn't allow digital TV content to be stored on DVD-R discs which can be watched with regular DVD players, etc.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 4 Jun 2002 14:27