James Delahunty
22 Feb 2005 7:23
The legal director of digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge, Mike Godwin, is challenging the new proposals to stop TV piracy and the claims that are being made by the entertainment industry about TV show downloading on the Internet. He is a fan of the series Huff but unfortunately he missed the season finale episode. So he had a look around the net and found himself a resource to download the episode. It took 7 hours to get the episode using his high speed connection.
As well as taking 7 hours to download the single episode, the quality was also far from perfect. Nevertheless he enjoyed viewing it. "It's a great show," he said. However, he said the low quality, slow download indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs, a threat Hollywood has long warned against, was hardly imminent. The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) believe that this early TV series downloading stage should be stopped before it can start.
The debate will be presented in oral arguments this week before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the FCC, challenging a new regulation that intends to stop TV shows from leaking onto the Internet for everyone to download and share with each other. Public Knowledge maintains that the FCC does not have the power to tell hardware manufacturers how they should build their products.
"This is about whether the FCC is going to become the Federal Computer Commission and the Federal Copyright Commission," said Gigi B. Sohn, the co-founder and president of Public Knowledge. "The FCC does not have the power to tell technology manufacturers how to build their machines." The new regulations would require all new consumer electronics equipment capable of receiving over-the-air digital signals from digital televisions to computers equipped with TV tuner cards to include a broadcast flag that help it determine when content must be protected against copying.
Source:
News.com