Media Wonk

Full disclosure - January 31, 2007

It appears we now have a labeling requirement in this country regarding the use of digital rights management.

It’s spelled out pretty plainly in the consent decree agreed to Monday by Sony BMG Music to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission stemming from last year’s DRM “root-kit” fiasco.
That was the one where Sony BMG embedded copy-protection software called XCP on several of its top CD releases that installed itself on your computer without telling you, opened a security hole in your operating system that it used to spy on you, and then hid its presence on your hard drive with cloaking technology so you couldn’t find it and remove it.

Henceforth, according to the decree, “any covered product that contains copy-protection software, in or affecting commerce, shall prominently disclose:

A.) On the front of the product packaging, that important consumer information

regarding limits on copying and use can be found on the rear of the product

packaging; and

B.) On the product packaging, that the software: (1) will install on consumers’

computers, if that is the case; (2) will limit the number of physical copies that can

be made from the product, if that is the case, and the number of permitted copies;

and (3) allows the direct transfer of the product’s audio files or other digital

content [emphasis added] only to playback devices that use secure Windows formats.”

The agreement defines “prominently disclose” to mean, “On or affixed to product packaging, the disclosure shall be in a type size and location sufficiently noticeable for an ordinary consumer to read and comprehend it, in print that contrasts with the background against which it appears.”

Or, “On the screen of a consumer’s computer, the disclosure shall be unavoidable and

shall be presented prior to the consumer installing any content protection software.”

Although the decree appliesat this point only to Sony BMG, the commission made it clear it regards non-disclosure of limitations on the use of digital content to be an “unfair and deceptive” practice, so it won’t be long before the labeling requirement is applied more broadly.

Since the Sony fiasco came to light, ironically enough, the use of copy protection has begun to lose some favor in the music industry.

But the new labeling requirement could make things interesting for AACS, the copy protection used on Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, which includes a variety of limitations on the use of the content apart from copying.

In principle, the studios have already agreed to disclose on the packaging whether the Image Constraint Token has been invoked for a movie requiring a player to down-convert the image from HD if it is being sent over analog connections.

But exactly where and how prominently are still being negotiated.

In light of the Sony BMG decree, I guess we now know how those negotiations will come out.

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