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Network outage - July 23, 2008

While many commentators continue (inaccurately) to harp on the studios’ “blocking DVR recording” through the use of selectable output control, the deeper issue is their evident hostility toward, or at least deep suspicion of home networking, as manifested in their multi-pronged efforts to control it.

The heart of the MPAA’s petition to the FCC for a waiver of the agency’s rules barring use of SOC by cable operators is not a desire to prevent people from recording high-def VOD movies with their DVRs—which you can’t do now anyway. Rather, the goal is assert studio control over the types of outputs that can be used or designed to connect digital devices together.

The Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA), for instance, the agency responsible for licensing Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), one type of encryption used to secure digital outputs, might reasonably be considered a candidate to endorse the studios’ petition. From DTLA’s perspective, what’s not to like about requiring the use of protected digital outputs?

Yet even DTLA sees a danger in the broad authority to approve such technologies asked for in the MPAA petition

From the DTLA filing with the FCC:

Petitioners ask the Commission to grant them and the MVPDs free rein to decide
which content protection technologies can be used to implement SOC. The choice of
content protection systems has a profound impact on both consumers and the technology
marketplace. Vesting Petitioners with sole discretion to select protection technologies
distorts the technology market. It allows the MPAA to pick technology winners and
losers – a decision that should be made through fair competition.
[…]
Moreover, the right to select technologies puts the MPAA in sole control over
whether a consumer’s home devices will interoperate when handling SOC content.
Interoperability is key to consumers’ right to buy products from multiple manufacturers
and retailers, and network them together seamlessly. Promoting interoperability for
consumers and manufacturers has been an essential tenet of DTLA’s founders. Placing
decision making in the hands of a single private entity, such as the MPAA or the MVPDs,
grants them the power to prohibit interoperability either by intention or omission.
Petitioners could select a single technology, such that only devices with that technology
can work together. Or, Petitioners could select multiple technologies that cannot or do not
interoperate, or could condition approval of such technologies upon adoption of
compliance rules that prohibit interoperability.
[…]
Control over technology selection also affects the future of home networking and
DVR usage. If the selected technology does not facilitate or permit home networking, the
consumer cannot benefit from advanced home networking features. Or, the Petitioners
may intentionally select a technology that does not work with DVRs at all, or is designed
to work only with DVRs supplied by the MVPD.

Such choices are neither abstract nor hypothetical. They are central to the future
of the digital home. Should the Commission grant the requested waiver, millions of
consumers will need to acquire new devices that can implement the technological SOC
restriction limiting content only to devices with certain protected digital output.
[...]
Without any constraints on Petitioners’ discretion, the future is left to whatever the
content community thinks is best for itself.

A similar presumption is evident in the studios’ latest proposal to the DVD Copy Control Assn. to permit the “managed copying” of DVDs for use over a home network. The proposal, which is up for a vote at the DVD-CCA meeting in Los Angeles this week, would leave it up to individual studios to decide which titles are eligible for managed copy. It would also allow each studio to designate their own digital-rights management system for managing the copying.

In other words, no standards, no certainty for consumers or device makers. Everything is left to the sole discretion of individual studios. Try building a home-networking platform around that.

On second thought, don’t try because the proposal will almost certainly be voted down—if not shouted down—by the device makers and IT companies, which outnumber the studios in DVD-CCA.

The real question is, what did home networking ever do to them that the studios are so hostile to it?
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