As a judicial panel heard arguments this week on a scheme to fight the piracy of digital television broadcasts, a civil libertarian group in San Francisco launched a guerrilla program to undermine the plan.
The scheme is the so-called "broadcast flag," a digital rights management (DRM) system for controlling what consumers can do with digital television (DTV) content. The approach, already embraced by the satellite and cable-TV industries, prevents people from copying content and redistributing it on the Internet.
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has adopted rules requiring consumer electronic manufacturers to include broadcast flag technology in their products starting on July 1. A legal challenge to the FCC's authority to adopt those rules was heard this week before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals.
Fear of Hollywood
The FCC has been charged by Congress to move the nation to all-digital broadcasting by the end of 2006. To do that, the FCC has argued, the broadcast flag is needed so the entertainment industry will allow its content to be broadcast over the new digital networks.
"One of the reasons that the broadcasters have pushed so hard for this flag is that they felt that Hollywood would not provide them with first-run movies if they didn't have some way to protect it from Internet redistribution as it is on closed systems like cable and satellite," said Jeff Joseph, vice president for communications for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in Arlington, Virginia.
Broadcast flag critics, though, argue that the program may harm consumers and stifle innovation. "This is a bad thing for consumers because in the long run, interesting, new things they might like to do will be barred by the flag and other tech mandates that will follow," Susan Crawford, an assistant professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City, told TechNewsWorld.
"The risk is not so much what the broadcast flag regime is today, although that's pretty bad in my view," she added. "It's more that it's a first step toward a very limited future for consumers."
Home Brew Cookbook
Until the rules take effect, consumers can still obtain equipment
that will allow them to capture and make unrestricted copies of DTV
programming -- a practice the Electronic Frontier Foundation 
is encouraging
with the release on its Web site of the "HD PVR Cookbook."
According to a statement from the group, the cookbook "teaches people how to build a high-definition digital television (HDTV) recorder unaffected by the technological constraints of the broadcast flag."
The organization is also encouraging people to hold "build-ins" across the country to help each other construct flag-free devices.
The cookbook recommends that would-be hardware hackers have a
Pentium 4 PC running at 3 GHz, an ATSC capture card, a 100 GB hard drive, a
video card with accelerated video support 
, a sound card, an appropriate
antenna, a display with inputs that match your video card's outputs, a CD-ROM drive and a reliable Internet connection.
"This takes a computer, a TV tuner card and open-source, freely available software and makes the PC into a TV recorder and home media center," explained EFF staff attorney Wendy Seltzer.
She told TechNewsWorld that EFF has already received several inquiries for guidance on holding build-ins.
Judges Skeptical
While the EFF is encouraging consumers to build DTV recorders before July 1, it hasn't lost confidence that broadcast flag opponents can win their court case against the FCC. "It seems as though the judges are skeptical of the FCC's authority," Seltzer said.
Art Brodsky, communications director for Washington, D.C.-based Public Knowledge, one of the plaintiffs in the case, explained that in the past, the FCC has imposed hardware requirements through its rules only when ordered to do so by Congress. That was done for building TV sets with UHF receivers, the V-chip and closed caption capabilities.
"Other than that, this has been, as the judges recognized, farther than anything that the commission has done before in terms of directing how consumer electronics devices should be designed and engineered," Brodsky told TechNewsWorld.
FCC Fiddles, Consumers Burned
Given the amount of time it takes to design and manufacturer hardware, it's almost certain that products with the broadcast flag in them will be filtering into the market regardless of how courts rule.
"If this gets tossed out by the courts, from a functionality perspective, it won't matter," the CEA's Joseph said.
"It will be disappointing from an investment perspective," he added. "And consumers will be paying for a feature that may no longer be needed."
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