A group of industries meeting in Los Angeles is planning to recommend to Congress that regulations be imposed on all devices capable of receiving and demodulating ATSC broadcast signals. These regulations would include "robustness" and "tamper-resistance" rules designed to prevent end users from getting access to cleartext MPEG versions of broadcast signals. This proposal is similar to the more infamous SSSCA (now CBDTPA) but is much narrower -- it only applies to one particular technology (ATSC) rather than to all computer and CE systems. The industries which were concerned with SSSCA are actively promoting this as an "alternative", "compromise", etc., and using it as an argument against the CBDTPA! One result of this proposal appears to be that no ATSC tuners could have open source drivers, nor could open source software play back recorded ATSC signals, nor could those signals be recorded in open-standard formats. Existing tuner cards like HiPix which don't include copy controls and let you open an ordinary MPEG stream could be banned outright, in favor of alternatives like AccessDTV which require proprietary drivers. We would like to get in touch with lead developers on any projects which would be affected by this -- especially projects which include or plan to include ATSC support. Currently, I'm only aware of one or two tuner/capture cards which would be affected. If this initiative succeeds, any future cards sold in the U.S. will include "tamper- resistance" and copy controls. For more information, please see http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/ -- Seth Schoen Staff Technologist schoen@xxxxxxx Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org/ 454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 1 415 436 9333 x107
