The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium sets digital television transmission specs for much of the world, but in recent years the group has turned its attention to crafting something far more controversial: a broadcast flag. While the FCC's attempt to force such a flag on the US market failed several years ago, DVB looks to be gearing up for a similar push that would especially affect European consumers, who already use DVB-T technology. If all goes according to plan, "fair dealing" ("fair use" in the US) could become irrelevant; broadcasters will truly control the horizontal and the vertical.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the only public-interest group that sat in on DVB's technical meetings over the last three years, and they recently sounded the alarm over the finalization of the Content Protection and Copy Management (CPCM) system. Though some commentators talk about CPCM as a new development, the spec has been under development since 2003. The EFF warned about the direction that CPCM was taking back in 2005, but the spec has now emerged from DVB and is ready for ratification by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
CPCM brings broadcast flag technologies to the many varieties of DVB, which uses different compression and modulation techniques for satellite broadcasting, terrestrial broadcasting, broadcasting to handheld devices, etc. The flag will allow broadcasters to restrict home recording and further copying of television shows (natch), but the EFF claims that the technology will go even further. CPCM can make use of GPS-based "geography controls" to allow playback of content only in certain regions, and it can prevent certain kinds of network sharing.
DVB was nothing if not thorough in its deliberations. In addition to taking four years to hash out a specification, the group "spent significant time arguing over what happens to a digital video in case of a divorce," according to the EFF.
Although the US has settled on ATSC for terrestrial broadcasting, much of the world has chosen DVB, meaning that the new CPCM technology has the potential to impact viewers from Namibia to the Faroe Islands to the Czech Republic to the UK. But it won't have much of an effect unless consumer electronics manufacturers play along.
Devices like TVs, DVD recorders, DVRs, and home theater PCs would all need to recognize CPCM signals and act on them for the system to be anything like robust. Manufacturers must be willing to limit the functionality that consumers want in order to implement the system, and that's unlikely to happen without regulatory intervention (the same reason that the FCC was called on by Hollywood here in the US).
Ratification by ETSI seems likely, and a campaign would no doubt begin soon after to pressure governments and telecommunications regulators to require devices to abide by the CPCM restrictions. Such rules, paired with the anti-circumvention clauses found in the DMCA and similar worldwide laws, would give broadcasters unprecedented control over consumer uses of their content, even when such uses might be legal under copyright law. Fair use will become whatever broadcasters say it should be.
The European response
This approach seems likely to run into trouble in Europe. EU Commissioners and national consumer ombudsmen have both showed a recent desire to stand up for consumer rights and for interoperability: just witness Apple's ongoing troubles over the iTunes Store "lock-in."
While intellectual property regulators and telecommunications ministers might be more likely to take the side of broadcasters, they will no doubt find some resistance to CPCM, some of it coming from other parts of the government or the EU.
Lurking in the background to all of this is the overhaul of the "Television Without Frontiers" directive that's currently underway. The legislation, which has been renamed the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, sets European-wide rules for broadcasters, many of which are consumer-friendly (limits on the number of ad minutes per hour, etc.). Should the CPCM spec reach the ears of the bureaucrats working on the Directive or cause a ruckus in any of the member states, the Directive (or its successor) could be forced to at least address the issue in some way.
And then there's the recent Gowers Review in the UK which illustrates the direction that the UK is leaning on intellectual property issues. That report largely failed to bow to corporate interests and refused to countenance the extension of musical copyright. It also introduced new rights for parody and commentary.
This makes Europe sound a bit like a pro-consumer paradise, but some Europeans have also backed the WIPO Broadcast Treaty currently under consideration. That treaty still might grant major new intellectual property rights to broadcasters, and the working group that's drafting the text is chaired by a Finn.
But most of the pro-CPCM pressure is coming from the US; according to the EFF. Hollywood execs sit on the main DVB committees and have pushed hard for broadcast flag technology, though European broadcasters have also expressed quite a bit of concern about protecting valuable assets such as football broadcasts.
CPCM would grant enormous control to broadcasters, but it's important to remember that it has yet to be ratified. Even then, it would require the force of national law to be at all effective, and this would certainly be a tricky sell to European governments, though it is possible. Fortunately for US consumers, this is one broadcast flag that won't affect them much, but have no fear: Hollywood is hard at work in Washington, still hoping to make its dark vision a reality.
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