Ctrl Movies

I talked previously about the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) efforts to control how you buy and listen to music. They are not alone. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) would like to tell you just how you can view television and movies. There is no big new news on this, but I thought it was worth discussing.

The first impetus for this new desire to seize control is digital television. The FCC wants to start broadcasting digitally which will free up parts of the radio spectrum which it can then auction off. They want to cease analog broadcasts in 2006, but in a strange bout of common sense, they wanted to make sure 85% of all households had a digital capable TV first. This is clearly not going to be met; not even close. Part of the reason is that manufactures, hollywood, and the FCC can’t agree on how to implement DTV. Hollywood wants make it restrictive and difficult to copy; manufactures don’t really want to add a new component to their TVs which would cost money to make, and the FCC just wants to get this out the door.

The second impetus is HDTV. Hollywood thinks that it can put even more restrictions on your media if it gives you a plum like higher definition. This is similar to the situations with DVDs, which are much harder to copy than videotape, but offer better quality and more features.

The third impetus is Napster the file trading phenomenon. The movie and television industry could plainly see what happened to the music industry and is desperate to avoid it. Of course the movie industry has a lot less to fear. While movies and TV shows are traded now, they are much larger files of very low quality – usually worse than VHS tape. We have the technology to make these now and it isn’t going away. However people watch movies in a very different way than they listen to music. Movies require your full attention and are usually watched only a few times. Music, on the other hand is often listened to over and over again. Most people find it easier to walk down the street and pay three dollars to rent a tape or DVD than spending hours online for a huge, low quality video file. Few people also have the patience and know-how to encode a movie either, while almost everyone can easily convert a CD to mp3s quickly and easily.

One of the things hollywood wants to do is institute a “broadcast flag” which attaches to all shows broadcast telling you exactly what you can do with it. For example you may be able to copy one show and hold onto it for 14 days, another you can copy, but only once, and a third you wouldn’t be able to copy at all. The “no-copy” flags would probably start out on one-time, heavily copied programming such as a boxing match on HBO or the world series. However it would likely migrate to a finale or “special episode” of a sitcom, and probably eventually to nearly everything.

Of course in order to enforce such restrictions they have to gain control of the equipment we use to watch their content. They are trying to do just that through legislation. For example they got Sen Fritz Hollings (D-SC) to propose the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which is thankfully now dead. It would have mandated how any TV, VCR or even computer could be built to appease hollywood.

They are, of course, still trying to gain that sort of control. One of the reasons DTV is being so held up is because of hollywood’s insistence that they have enough control over people’s viewing habits. Hollywood insisted that any device follow the instructions given by the broadcast flags and other DRM (digital rights management) technology, and be tamper proof to normal consumers (a near impossibility given the availability of cheap tools).

The manufactures tried to establish some sort of standards that hollywood would like, and formed the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG). The movie studios insisted that they pre-approve every product before release, but that clearly isn’t going to happen. It is currently being worked out. Luckily the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) in getting involved and chronicling it on behalf of consumers.

The new focus seems to be on the “analog hole,” which the EFF talks about here. The basic idea is anything that I can see and hear I can re-digitize and do anything I want with, which is heresy to hollywood. They are trying to have people own as few uncontrolled analog devices as possible, difficult with all the TVs and VCRs out there that no one wants to give up. They also want to create restrictive watermarks on analog material and enforce their use through laws, coercion and other restrictions.

I can’t believe with all this potential for this great technology, we have to wait for hollywood to cripple it severely before we see any of it. This is the same group that tried to get VCRs outlawed and now makes more money from them than they do from theaters. They want to create a closed system that caters to their paranoid delusions. Any system will be defeated by determined pirates, but regular consumers will be treated like criminals with severely restricted equipment.

A good, if somewhat dated article, is here. These issues are also constantly discussed on slashdot.