FCC Puts MPAA On Notice To Resolve Studiosí Digital Copy Protection Differences

Just two weeks after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Bill Kennard chastised the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for dragging its feet on a digital TV copyright agreement, MPAAís spokesman Jack Valenti told Kennard in a letter sent last week that the major studios would hold weekly meetings with TV set manufacturers in an effort to hammer out differences by August 1, 1999.Valenti said that the MPAA was satisfied with the technology developed by the consumer electronics companies effectively will block pirates from making perfect copies of digitally delivered broadcast and cable programming. The copyright technology will allow televisions to distinguish between different types of programming, whose dataset would contain the programming to allow or disallow consumer to make copies of broadcast television shows. Valenti says the MPAA will insist that the companies who own the content, not the companies that display it, should decide how many copies should be make of a particular class of programming. Once the copy protection issues are resolved, digital television can be built to a standard. The current generation of costly high-definition televisions (HDTV) are not built to a universal standard and none of these sets can be hook up to cable, which is expected to be a primary distribution for new digital signals.