IP: Valenti, Tauzin and the b'cast flag

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 21:40:41 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Valenti, Tauzin and the b'cast flag

For Dave Farber.

PLEASE NOTE:  As usual, if you choose to recirculate this, please keep me
ANONYMOUS, due to my professional status.  Thanks.

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Billy Tauzin, the U.S. Representative from Louisiana, has set a deadline of
July 15, 2002 -- a month from now -- for finalization of a plan led by
entertainment industry and information technology industry leaders to
control digital video recording via the "broadcast flag," also known as the
"never copy" flag, in digital broadcasting.  This is a set of bits in a
program stream that would inhibit digital video recorders (TiVos, ReplayTVs
and future devices) and personal computers from recording movies and other
flagged content.  Last week, a hasty announcement by Jack Valenti implied
that there was cross-industry consensus on this issue, after preliminary
meetings with Intel and others.  (The extent of this agreement now appears
to
have been overstated by the MPAA.)  Tauzin says if an agreement can't be
reached, the government will step in and make the new rules.  Those rules,
no
doubt, will be written with the able help of the MPAA and the studios.

The MPAA's strategy is to use the b'cast flag as the means by which to get
new
legislation -- similar in effect to the Hollings bill -- to require all
digital devices to search for this marker in content, and not store such
data. This would require sweeping laws to prohibit some of the basic
functionality
of personal computers, and possibly render current digital recorders and
televisions obsolete.  The MPAA desperately wants some kind of legislation
to protect the Hollywood studios *this year* and this is its latest attempt.
It sets the stage for Valenti and the studios to shift the blame for all
this to an impatient Congress, and to those information technology people
who dissent from his earlier-announced "consensus."  The MPAA didn't
envision the firestorm of public reaction against the Hollings bill, and has
chosen to pursue this strategy as an alternative.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/variety/20020612/tv_variety/t
elevision_digital_dc_1  (All one URL.)






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