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Trade Groups Oppose Broadcast Flag on HD Radio

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) reaffirm that they opposed audio broadcast flag: With broadcast flag, originally produced for digital video broadcasts, the digital streaming media is encrypted and includes policy permissions. The encryption prevents simple transfer of the content to other devices. The policy permissions set the rules by which the copyright holders want the material to be used, such as, "can be stored for 24 hours only" or "cannot be burned to disc."

What broadcast flag rules run up against is the generally free and unfettered use of the public airwaves that TV and radio broadcasters have been granted in order to provide free and unfettered programming to viewers. We own the airwaves, and it's our permission that allows media companies to use them. I know that's naive, but that's how it's structured.

Thus, the broadcast flag contradicts a fundamental issue: that we have the right to do whatever we want within the copyright rules to the content that is broadcast. While copyright holders may have had those rights limited, the broadcast flag pushes that even further by removing rights to which we have grown expected and that are enshrined in both law and judicial decision. It's fiat by technology to bypass actual rights.

The broadcast flag rules would require, in the case of HD Radio, that all broadcasts be encrypted, as I noted, and that any device that can decode the broadcasts would be able to restrict the uses in a very particular manner. This extends to the idea that if you recorded digital audio by bypassing those rules, even using high-quality digital encoding of an analog output of the broadcast, that any other device that could play content back would refuse to play what you'd recorded.

The classic example for TV is that you're recording your child at a birthday party on a digital camcorder and you happen to pan by a TV set playing Little Mermaid or some such. Your camcorder would see the digital flag signal, interpret it, and then shut down or black out, even though any reasonable interpretation of copyright law wouldn't see that use as a violation. (Personal use, limited amount, etc.)

The NAB represents radio stations, among others; the CEA, the makers of radio equipment, among others. If the HD Radio broadcast flag were adopted, all current radios would be rendered obsolete and broadcasters would need to revamp their digital broadcasting equipment.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman on December 8, 2006 3:22 PM | Permalink