Next-Gen ""Analog Hole"" Legislation Proposed

17-Nov-05

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself.Although the bill lacks an official author, an executive at the Motion Picture Association of America said that the bill has been jointly developed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the chairman of the committee, as well as by several consumer-electronics and computer companies. The bill has yet to be read or voted upon within the House or Senate.As presented, however, the bill would close the so-called ""analog hole"" on virtually all devices. Although digital streams can be encrypted and encoded with various restrictions and permissions, once converted back into an analog format, the stream can be copied or manipulated freely -- the analog ""hole,"" first referred to by Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America around 2002. The provisions of the act would take place a year after its enactment.Such an analog hole allows a consumer,for example, to tape a televised baseball game on his VCR, even if Major League Baseball expressly forbids him doing so. Under the new legislation, such rights would be enforced through technology.According to the MPAA, the legislation is necessary to help shift the industry toward digital content, with the content restrictions such a format allows.""Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites,"" Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. ""In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward.""The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.Privacy advocates, however, protested the proposed act.""[I]f you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you,"" said Cory Doctorow, EFF's European representative, writing in his blog, BoingBoing.net, on the subject. ""This is not a proposal to protect copyright -- this is a proposal to bootstrap Hollywood's limited monopoly over who can copy its movies into an unlimited monopoly over the design of devices capable of copying its videos.""However, devices sold before the date the proposed legislation would be enacted, such as today's televisions, would be grandfathered in, according to the terms of the legislation. In addition, devices that were designed ""solely of displaying programs,"" and ones that could not be ""readily modified"" for redistributing content would also be exempt.The bill would also grant a wide degree of latitude to content providers to regulate the use of their content, using the ""CGMS-A"" (Content Generation Management SystemóAnalog) and Veil Veil Rights Assertion Mark (VRAM) restrictions.While CGMS-A has been available to U.S. broadcasters since the mid-1990s, most U.S. broadcast content has been transmitted without restrictions attached to it. However, HBO and its subsidiary channels have used CGMS-A to restrict users from making more than a single copy of its broadcasts, and prevented them from making any backups of its pay-per-view programs. The CGMS-A technology is also supported by programs such as Microsoft's Windows Media Center.The Veil VRAM will serve as a watermark, asserting the content holders' rights, which will be governed by schemes encoded inside the CGMS-A, which will in turn be transmitted using the vertical blanking interval (VBI) inside the content stream.About the only loopholes granted to consumers under the new rules are the ability to back up a single copy. From there, however, the bill grants content holders the right to prevent users from making another copy or retransmitting the content into other devices or formats. The proposed legislation also prevents a middleman rebroadcasting the content -- such as a local television network -- from stripping out the rights restrictions or mechanisms.In late September, legislators voiced frustrations with current legislation in the wake of the Grokster ruling, which involved copyright and peer-to-peer file sharing. At the time, senators like Sensenbrenner and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) actively solicited advice from industry representatives on how to craft legislation to prevent content from being illegally copied.The MPAA's Hunt said Wednesday that Sensenbrenner ""had taken a real leadership role"" in developing the legislation, which had been co-developed by an undisclosed number of CE and PC companies.However, in a commentary published to its website this week, the EFF raised the spectre that content providers would be granted absolute control over how users viewed and interacted with their programs.""And what might these MPAA-specified, government-mandated technologies do? They prescribe how many times (if at all) the analog video signal might be copied - and enforce it,"" the EFF said. ""This is the future world that was accidentally triggered for TiVo users a few months ago, when viewers found themselves lectured by their own PVR that their recorded programs would be deleted after a few days.""But it won't just be your TiVo: anything that brings analog video into the digital world will be shackled,"" the group added. ""Forget about buying a VCR with an un-DRMed digital output. Forget about getting a TV card for your computer that will willingly spit out an open, clear format. Forget, realistically, that your computer will ever be under your control again. To allow any high-res digitization to take place at all, a new graveyard of digital content will have to built within your PC.""

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