Lessig

er… excuse me: what's a broadcast flag?

The broadcast flag doesn't kill Tivo and Replay any more than Macrovision copy protection does today - the device renders Macrovision correctly and then makes sure that the shows you try to dump to video tape are scrambled if that's the way they were to begin with; so they act just like TV sets with respect to Macrovision (this varies a bit among models).

But the point is that Lessig and the other critics are saying the Broadcast flag will kill the Internet, and I just don't see how that's possible.

So what, Stewart? If a broadcaster choose to stream digital TV over the Internet with the broadcast flag set or cleared, it doesn't affect the Internet - it's just an "end-to-end" thing.

Ah, but stewart, you need to realize that Richard has no problem with handing over control of his life and his culture to the MPAA. It gives him a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling to know that the Company is looking out for his best interests and keeping him safe from all those nasty pirates and their indie movies.

The broadcast flag doesn?t kill Tivo and Replay any more than Macrovision copy protection does today - the device renders Macrovision correctly and then makes sure that the shows you try to dump to video tape are scrambled if that?s the way they were to begin with; so they act just like TV sets with respect to Macrovision (this varies a bit among models).

Is this not bad enough? Suppose you need to be somewhere Thursday night and decide that you don't want to miss "Friends" - So you'll just fire up your DVR, right? Well, not if Hollywood decides they'd rather make you buy the season DVD collection for 60 bucks. Perhaps they would allow you to record it. You'd have to do so on an approved device, surely not one you already paid $300 for along with lifetime service for another $300. Maybe you have a ReplayTV unit set up so it is connected to your computer for the extra HD storage (there is a java app that makes replay TV think your PC is another replay unit). Forget ever doing that again, replay units with this functionality would never be approved. Maybe you prefer to use your desktop computer and open-source "freevo" as a DVR solution. Well, you can't anymore.

This is certainly not the death of the internet, but it can affect a number of open source applications and home networking.

You're right, it is unlikely to affect people who care enough to "steal" TV shows. That's not the problem. The problem is the removal of fair uses from everyone not looking to "steal" anything. Most people don't have any home network scheme, some people have "lame" schemes, and far fewer have sophisticated schemes.

Why must something affect a network protocol to affect home networking? Its the devices that would use the protocol that get crippled, not the protocol itself.

It seems to me that one of the problems with the broadcast flag from a computing perspective is that approved methods of "protection" will have to be approved by studios.

This guarantees that they will become increasingly draconian, as in "lock up yuur PC until you pay", or "Reformat your Hard Drive".

They are already looking to be legally indemnified to hack into people's systems and do damage with file sharing.

Richard -- Please point out to me where Lessig believes that the broadcast flag will "kill the Internet".

So we should leave it up to the 'market' ?

The market has not brought me fiber to my house, but in Japan, over 20 million people have fiber approaching 100mbps, and to a much larger extent than in the US.

Speculating on what the 'market' will do for consumers with regards to the Internet might be fun for you, but come and join us in real life. The market will only go by what people will pay for, and if people aren't made aware of issues, then they won't be asking for it.

The market didn't get us airbags in cars until Chrysler made effort to push it as a selling point. Until then, consumers knew nothing about the advantages of them.

Note that you have yet to argue that the broadcast flag is a good thing....only that you think that it doesn't matter.

No, it would not be the end of the Internet as we know it today. Instead it would be a restriction of the Internet as it could be. It's all about control. If all you want to do is play Quake and read blogs then the broadcast flag will have no direct impact on you. If you want to watch streaming movies from a central server and not be restricted to using the studio's approved software to do it, software which will probably only run on Windows XP and will possibly incorporate ad/spyware, if you want to download those movies and burn them on a DVD so you can watch them on your brand-new projection TV, or if you want to edit clips out of them for your movie review website, you're screwed by the flag.

I don't know about the "middle of the network". I do know
that I was off at ARDG this morning and
that practically every single presenter talked
about the possibility of "leveraging contractual obligations"
on technology developers to get them to build less functional
products. (In the broadcast flag docket, some people described
this as "submarine obligations".)

To be specific, many technology implementers sign private
contracts with DRM licensors. Currently they do this mainly
because the DMCA has been interpreted to suggest that it may
be illegal to interoperate with some DRM technology without
a license. Many of these DRM licenses contain obligations on
the implementers not obviously related to the subject matter
of the DRM license. For example, a licensee might be
required or forbidden to implement another kind of electrical
interface (other than the one the license covers and without
regard to whether data can be passed from one interface to
the other), or might be required to screen for a watermark
or flag even in interfaces not covered by the license, or
refuse to record certain kinds of things, etc.

This is actually quite common, and many ARDG presenters (who
are trying to pitch technologies, mostly patented, to movie
studios) were optimistic that it can be taken much further
as a way of getting a huge proportion of devices to implement
restrictions that the manufacturers would never "voluntarily"
adopt in the absence of DRM licensing.

So let's say I'm a manufacturer of a DVD recorder.
Hypothetically, I want to implement a HyperBus Plus input
because many video sources are sending data over HyperBus
Plus (and my customers won't buy the thing unless I
can do HyperBus Plus). Now HyperBus Plus happens to be
encrypted and my lawyers say I had better sign a license
with the HyperBus Control Cartel Association. That
license says that if I implement, let's say, an analog
input of any sort, I must screen for certain watermarks
and apply certain restrictions. This despite that fact
that, absent the license, my use of analog recording is
totally unrestricted. So I have been induced to take
away other and substantially unrelated features as a
condition of taking this license ... oops! (Note that
the HyperBus Plus and its licensor are totally
hypothetical.)

There are people who really see this as a feature and
a desirable outcome. I heard several presentations
from them. They recommended that DRM licensors add on
new obligations and noted that the large number of
DRM licensees means that a really substantial fraction
of equipment available to consumers is going to end up
complying with those obligations.

Now, you can say that that's all well and good because
in principle markets are competitive enough that nobody
can do too much harm with these "submarine
obligations". But of course in the presence of a
regulation requiring people to take DRM licenses, there
isn't even the semblance of competition between DRM
licensees and non-licensees. Every manufacturer
is now a licensee and potentially subject to a whole
broad range of submarine obligations. Again, these are
in no way necessarily related to the original intention
of the regulation because they are in principle at the
absolute discretion of the DRM licensor.

To put this a slightly different way, currently we have
a structural possibility of market competition between
devices that implement DRM restrictions and devices that
don't. Even though this competition is limited in
important ways, it is conceivable, and so there is some
kind of chance for the more-functional DRM-less devices
to outcompete the less-functional DRM-restricted devices,
even if they have access to different selections of
video programming. If a regulation says that, at least
in certain product categories, the DRM-less device will
become illegal, this competition is no longer possible
even in principle. Now the market is forced by
government to adopt DRM or to disappear. Because DRM
has the power to control interoperability, complementary
or "downstream" markets will also be polluted by this
effect, even though otherwise they might have retained
much more consumer-friendly functionality!

The precedential harm here is deeper. You can
think of it as a form of nationalization -- you spend lots
of time refining the devices that use a particular open
standard, and all of a sudden some entertainment publishers
notice just how desirable that standard looks to users, so
they come along and "nationalize" it so that now nobody can
use it any more without getting designs cleared with them.
(From a different point of view you could imagine that it
was a commons and it had been abruptly privatized, evicting
existing traditional users; the basic point is that
somebody was lawfully making a productive use of an
interface technology in the past, movie studios moved in
and as a matter of law said this use would no longer be
permitted.)

As flawed as the DMCA is, that particular indignity and
that particular uncertainty was what section 1201(c)(3) was
meant to spare us. Now movie studios are saying that we
can't even have that limited protection because they can come
along and erode 1201(c)(3) one technology at a time!

We already know that they don't plan to stop here, because
they told the Senate Judiciary Committee two years ago that
this is just the first of three near-term affirmative technology
regulations they are going to pursue by law to expand this
kind of regulation beyond what the DMCA provides. And there
is no logical stopping place in this game. If the criterion
is that a technology is merely capable of a substantial
infringing use (to invert the Sony Betamax standard), we
stand to lose a lot of freedom and to gain a lot of uncertainty.

That's why I care about this even though I don't watch either
digital TV or analog TV.

Nice to see that Richard is continuously contradicting himself, at least, unless he always sides with the corporation's best interest. On the one hand he doesn't want the government to stop cable companies from modifying their Internet service so that it's no longer a true Internet service, but a medium where they can push you anything they want, any way they want (and by that I mean, try to read slashdot, get CNN instead, with whatever ads they want to push to you). On the other hand, he has absolutley no problem with government regulation forcing EVERYBODY to comply with "the broadcast flag". For someone who's trying to be very libertarian, you don't seem to be doing a very good job on this issue.

Nice to see you're also continuously side-tracking the issue. Encryption has absolutely nothing to do with the proposed broadcast flag. It may or may not be implemented, irregardless of one. Advertisement has absolutely nothing to do with a broadcast flag. It WILL be implemented, irregardless of one. Try to stick with the issue at hand, please.

Richard, apparently you're having the same problem you're accusing me of. I never said you LIKED the broadcast flag. I said you didn't appear to have a problem with it. To me, that means you don't care if the FCC mandates it, not that you want the FCC to mandate it. Also, re-read what Lessig wrote. He didn't say it would kill "the future viability of the Internet". He was talking about open networks. Last time I checked, networks weren't reserved to computers running TCP/IP.

Also, believe what you want, but there has never been any concrete proof that file sharing has had any negative impact on CD sales. There's only been a lot of wolf-crying from RIAA members. File sharing has been used as a very convenient scapegoat. Same goes for movies. Put out a crap movie, push tons of money into marketing, but hey! SMS messaging is now destroying your sales because people are now telling all their friends the movie was crap! The RIAA and MPAA doesn't like to admit that maybe, maybe, the fault lies within themselves. They'd rather blame everybody else.

And your last phrase is typical of the black-and-white thinking I've seen from people like you. You seem to like to think in what will happen, absolutely, without a doubt, with current knowledge. I'd rather look at potential consequences. It's less costly in the end. And I do see a probability of abuse. I see Freevo and MythTV being brought out of existance because they don't comply with the flag, or if they're dependant on hardware that'll decode it, can't afford the license to use the hardware.

Plus, following many of the examples above, I just don't like the idea of somebody else deciding what I can watch and when. And I believe that most people feel the same way I do. After all, that's what killed Circuit City's DivX.

::)