Digital TV flags ‘will not stop piracy’

The US “broadcast flag” system aiming to prevent online piracy of digital TV programming will not work, say computer experts. On Tuesday, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that all hardware digital TV receivers built after 2005 must be capable of responding to a copyright protection mechanism embedded in digital broadcasts. But computer scientists say that injecting a string of bits called a broadcast flag into the signal will not stop widespread redistribution of TV shows on the internet. “Is this going to do what the movie industry is looking for? No. This will not have the desired effect,” says Drew Dean of the Computer Science Laboratory at the SRI Institute in Menlo Park, California. The Moving Picture Association of America (MPAA) fears that the advent of digital TV could boost the number of movies being freely and illegally shared online, and had demanded the FCC respond to the threat. “By taking preventative action, we can forestall the development of a problem in the future similar to that currently being experienced by the music industry,” states the FCC report. The new regulations will apply to TVs specifically made to receive digital signals, as well as add-ons for PCs and ordinary TVs. But many computer experts agree that the distribution of digital information is unstoppable. “These technologies will get defeated – there are always work-arounds,” says Dan Wallach, a computer scientist at Rice University in Texas.

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