Digital Trends

I trust the top headline got your attention. For the record, I wouldn't dream of doing violence to the stars and stripes. However another flag, the broadcast flag, is in the news again with the Federal Communications Commission's announcement that it has approved 13 different ways of implementing the copy protection technology.

Actually, isn't the term "copy protection" a bit vague? Whom does it protect? Not the consumer. The term "copyright protection" comes a bit closer to the truth though the term "digital rights management"—copyright protection for the era of zeroes and ones—is becoming trendier. Perhaps we should just call a spade a spade and call it "anti-copying" technology.

Anyhow, the broadcast flag got started as a way of preventing broadcast television programming from finding its way into the file-sharing moshpit. The assumption is that what flies through the airwaves must not be allowed to fly through the Internet. The controversial solution is to embed a code, or flag, in digital TV programming to prevent unauthorized use.

Of course this doesn't make a bit of sense. Broadcast television programming, digital or otherwise, is free and it's delivered over the public airwaves—which, as I've pointed out in a past column, are owned by you and me. Under the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax Decision, broadcast TV programs may be recorded for time-shifting purposes and personal use in general. File sharing of these programs seems a logical extension of that court-sanctioned right.

Nonetheless the entertainment industry is waging an indiscriminate war against file sharing in all its forms and has jawboned the government and the consumer electronics industry into accepting the broadcast flag. That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's some wiggle room here. Each of these 13 FCC-approved "digital output technologies and recording methods" is designed to fit a specific type of product or technology—something the electronics industry would like you to buy—so various players have opened up various loopholes for various products.

For instance, JVC, the developer of the D-VHS VCR, lets you hook up two of these digital-recording products and dub flagged programming from one to the other. The kinds of programming you might legally dub would include broadcast TV or something you shot with your camcorder. To protect movie copyrights, JVC has built various kinds of anti-copying technology into D-VHS, but they won't be triggered unless you try to do something you know you shouldn't do, like dub a commercial copy of a movie.