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Opponents of MPAA's SOC petition pile on - July 22, 2008

Final comments on the MPAA’s petition for a waiver of the rules barring the use of selectable output controls on cable set-top boxes rolled into the FCC late last night and were being posted this morning. Not surprisingly, the studios were not getting a whole lotta love. A group of public-interests groups, including Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation ripped the MPAA’s proposal, as did the Consumer Electronics Assn. and its off-shoot, the Home Recording Rights Coalition. The National Assn. of Theatre Owners was also opposed, although perhaps surprisingly, not as stridently as some other groups.

Boiled down:

CEA/HRRC: The MPAA’s petition is too vague as to how and when SOC would be applied (a common complaint); Permitting the use of SOC could impact the viewing of content, not just recording, potentially punishing early DTV adopters whose sets rely on unprotected component video inputs to receive HD signals; the MPAA’s petition does not meet the burden of showing a compelling public-interest benefit to granting the waive; the studios generally suck. Irony watch: Sony Electronics, which helped launch HRRC in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Betamax” decision, filed comments endorsing the MPAA’s petition. Of course, at the time it bankrolled HRRC Sony didn’t own a major movie studio. The complete CEA filing is here, the HRRC filing is here and Sony’s comments are here.

Public Internet Groups: A waiver as defined in the petition would give the studios too much control over how consumers use their devices; SOC could be used to block non-infringing fair use of copyrighted content such as time-shifting via TiVo or space shifting via Slingbox (a point somewhat undermined by the fact that TiVo itself endorsed the MPAA petition, albeit conditionally); early-release VOD does not represent a “new business model,” given that many non-MPAA member companies already offer it; the studios generally suck. The complete filing is here.

NATO: Preservation of a robust and competitive cinema business is a “public-interest imperative” and would imperiled by early-release VOD; the petition doesn’t meet the MPAA’s burden of showing a compelling public-interest benefit to a waiver; the petition is vague as to how and when SOC would be applied; sequential release windows benefit consumers and collapsing them would harm the public-interest; we share the studios’ concern over piracy but still…The complete filing is here.

More later.

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