Digital TV technology should not be restricted

This week let’s talk Digital TV, a technology hideously
overdue and potentially wonderful for the entertainment industry
and consumers alike. According to current plans, the entirety of
over-the-air television broadcasts will be digital/high definition
by 2006.

Has anyone else noticed that your average television broadcast
looks like crap, for lack of a less technical word? I’m not
talking about DirecTV, but about regular TV broadcasts. In a world
where we have freakin’ laser beams shooting missiles out of
the sky (I saw it on CNN tonight) and digital cell phones selling
for a dollar at Cingular, you’d think we’d have
implemented a solution to fuzzy, pathetic television
broadcasts.

“Not so fast,” says Hollywood. Before high
definition television can be fully implemented, they are requiring
the technology industry to negotiate a “consensus” in
order to protect new high quality broadcasts from piracy. The
consensus board has been named the Broadcast Protection Discussion
Group.

Out of the consensus has come the “Tauzin Broadcast Flag
Legislation Draft,” named after its author Representative
Billy Tauzin. The draft calls for a standard set of physical
restrictions placed on every intermediary between digital
television, and your eyes and ears including HDTV, computers, set
top boxes, DVD players and more.

This draft would effectively prevent free competition and
invention in the electronics industry and allow Hollywood to decide
which features and capabilities to allow into final products. Under
the draft, every piece of hardware built after 2005 must comply
with these restrictions, and uncertified hardware will be
nonfunctional with other possibly supplementary components.

Not only is this an unprecedented atrocity, but it will hurt the
entertainment industry in the long run. Hollywood’s perceived
threat is by all reasonable accounts a phantom. New technologies
always require a period of adjustment, but letting the techies
achieve equilibrium is what has worked in the past.

When we buy a computer, a DVD player or a high definition
television for that matter, we should be able to do anything we
want with that technology as long as it is for personal use.
After all, we make recordings of shows to watch later or copy them
onto other devices such as portables to watch on the go, etc. If
anything, the industry benefits from this flexibility.

Under the new scheme, our digital televisions will only have
digital outputs, so that encryption and digital restrictions can be
built right into the television. With analog outputs, one could at
least make an analog copy of source material. But digital copy
protection will foil everyone’s attempts to exercise their
rights of fair use except the very pirates that the technology is
meant to block. 

And what would happen to the more than two million digital
televisions that have already been sold in the United States
without any of these copy protection schemes? The current proposal
is to intentionally degrade the picture and sound that these sets
receive to prevent any temptation to make copies.

History has proven two things: leaving the industry to find its
own equilibrium fuels invention, and trying to limit technology to
prevent piracy only causes more piracy. There have been countless
television-related inventions that have increased our enjoyment of
media, earned money for technology companies, and given Hollywood
more opportunities to sell its product. And if it were inexpensive
to have Kazaa-like access to our favorite shows and songs but with
HDTV quality, people would pay the money for the added
enjoyment.

Wake up and smell the mother freaking steaming pile of dung that
you’re trying to lay on us, Hollywood! If you don’t
snap out of it, I’ll just keep laughing all the way to
Kazaa.