Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Senate SSSCA hearing on "the digital television transition"

[Seth David Schoen]

John Gilmore writes:

> This is the guy who is going to try to outlaw VCRs for HDTV.  Receivers
> that can listen to over-the-air broadcast HDTV and record it without copy
> protection crap would become illegal to own, make, or distribute.

They keep saying that everyone agrees it isn't retroactive, so
probably just "make or distribute".  The MPAA representatives keep
saying that people who have unrestricted ATSC (HDTV) TVs or VCRs or
PVRs or whatever may keep them, and only new products will be
affected.  (They've also said that they need to act quickly, before
too many consumers get used to having HDTV recorders without DRM.)

> He and his buddies in Hollywood are trying to outlaw the GNU Radio
> software, among other things that the copy-prevention mafia doesn't
> like -- such as open PC architectures.

We have some documents about that at

http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/

I've gotten some other documents since then, and I'm hoping to produce
good HTML versions of them.  In particular, we have the BPDG's "Draft
Compliance and Robustness Rules" which explain what BPDG expects will
be required of devices which can do ATSC demodulation.  (They don't,
thus far, address the issue of how those requirements would be
enforced.)  Currently, the section about DRM requirements is
unfinished (and there was a long discussion at the BPDG meeting today
about the difficulty in completing that section), but there was a
consensus of BPDG members that ATSC-demodulating devices would be
required to output certain content only by "protected digital outputs"
and "approved recording mechanisms".

Some of the BPDG membership just today began a "parallel enforcement
group" separate from BPDG to discuss legislative and regulatory
agendas.  You can join that group's mailing list by writing to
reflector at lmicp.com (which is a person) and asking to be subscribed
to the new "bpdg-policy" mailing list.  The main BPDG list is called
"bpdg-tech", and GNU Radio has been discussed there (by me and by some
people who claimed to be skeptical about its feasibility).

So there is some discussion about how these requirements apply to
software.  The short, rough summary of that discussion is that none of
the BPDG drafting committee members actually contemplated that ATSC
would ever be done _purely_ in software, but they did consider the
possibility that some unspecified portion of it would be done in
software.  In that case, they prescribed that the portions of the
software which processed "marked" content (broadcast video with a
"no redistribution" bit) or "unscreened" content (broadcast video or
RF data for which you haven't determined whether or not the "no
redistribution" bit is asserted) would have to be "tamper-resistant".
There's some language in the draft explaining what this means, but
it's clear that it excludes free software, so that free software
ATSC implementations -- considered as products subject to these
draft rules -- are all "non-compliant".

I'm leaving out a lot of details, but many of them are boring.

BPDG is mentioned specifically by Jack Valenti in a recent op-ed (and
a recent speech), by computer industry CEOs in a letter to major movie
studios (released today), and one of the three co-chairs of BPDG is on
the witness list for the Senate SSSCA hearing tomorrow.  Finally, an
FCC Commissioner has already endorsed BPDG (not by name) and expressed
a concern that it isn't moving quickly enough!  This proposal is
getting a lot of attention, and should be taken seriously.

Eric Blossom gave a great technical presentation at CPTWG in conjunction
with BPDG; maybe he'd like to talk about that.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <address@hidden> | Reading is a right, not a feature!
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   |                 -- Kathryn Myronuk
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |