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FCC mandates built-in copy controls. MPAA rejoices

Quick summary: The FCC has mandated that digital products (HDTV and DVD players) have to look for a special protection flag that prevents users from digitizing the video and distributing it over the Internet. This has to be done by 2005. Older equipment would be unaffected.

Thoughts?

Thank god i already have a dvd player?

The FCC is not requiring consumers to dump their existing devices, but some say the rule will make some equipment obsolete. All recordings made on compliant devices will be encrypted, which means they must be played back on compliant devices.

Better keep them old PC's then!

"More than 40 million DVD players in consumers' homes today will not be able to play content they record on new 'flagged' devices," says Chris Murray, legislative counsel of the Consumers Union.

So the flag is just a bit that the machines look for....so what prevents the burned copy to carry the flag over?

Cyaround,
Jason

Soontir C'boath wrote:

The FCC is not requiring consumers to dump their existing devices, but some say the rule will make some equipment obsolete. All recordings made on compliant devices will be encrypted, which means they must be played back on compliant devices.

Better keep them old PC's then!

Presumably, older PCs will suffer from the same incompatibility problem that older DVD players would.

Soontir C'boath wrote:

"More than 40 million DVD players in consumers' homes today will not be able to play content they record on new 'flagged' devices," says Chris Murray, legislative counsel of the Consumers Union.

So the flag is just a bit that the machines look for....so what prevents the burned copy to carry the flag over?

Presumably a DVD burner or a PC would, upon finding that this flag is asserted, refuse to copy the media stream in question.

Wow, another worthless piece of mandative garbage that hackers will be able to circumvent.

No way, no how is this actually going to happen. Oh, the next-gen HD-DVD's will have a nice, exotic encryption scheme (that will take someone in the hacker community about five minutes to break) but they are never going to lock out current gen DVD players. The install base is just much too high.

The thing that they MIGHT do with this is lock out older HDTV's without HDCP from displaying digital HD content. Also, DVD's built in the future will likely lock themselves from outputing digital content without HDCP. Neither of these is as big a loss as it seems because most people DON'T OUTPUT IN DIGITAL. That's right, the fancy component video out is analog (a very good one, but it ain't digital) and with so few digital DVD players/TV's on the market that don't support DVI-HDCP, this isn't much of a loss. The big loss was not inculding digital connections in HDTV's until now because of a ridiculous standards war.

Already posted.

Pu-239 wrote:Already posted.

Mind telling us where instead of not saying anything?

Take it to the other thread folks.