Protection management, copy control

Found on The Inquirer on Friday, 04 March 2005
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This week, in Dublin, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project held its annual meeting to discuss progress on its latest set of specifications for digital television. Much of its work has to do with technical details such as codecs and data formats, but a key section called Content Protection/Copy Management (CPCM) is about controlling how high-definition digital broadcasts may be recorded, copied, or redistributed.

It was a week of culture clashes. My favorite was when one of the Disney people asked two Flemish public TV broadcasters whether having their content redistributed online wasn't a problem for them. Most surreal was the man from the MPAA talking about "social justice" with respect to pay TV subscriptions.

CPCM is intended to create a trusted system analogous to Microsoft's trusted computing platform – now known as Next Generation Secure Computing Base. Commercial content is acquired from a broadcast, data stream, or shrink-wrapped medium. It comes wrapped in metadata known as USI (for Usage State Information) that specifies how the content may be used: for example, how many times it might be viewed, how long it can be kept available, whether it can be copied, how it may be output, and so on.

So, because the entertainment industry doesn't want to accept media sharing (it's not like they don't make money anyway), the end user has to suffer. It is perfectly legal to record TV/radio shows for personal use. But with CPCM, people get restricted. Broadcasters might decide that you can watch your recorded show just 3 times. This will of course lead to the development of workarounds.