The entertainment industry wants consumer electronics and PC companies to secure their product for them by encrypting it when they detect a “broadcast flag” in the content. They’re using the FCC in an effort to get their way.
Not surprisingly, consumer electronics and PC companies want the entertainment industry to encrypt their own damn signals. They’ve appealed to the FCC.
Since most content is cracked — converted from the original broadcast-quality source format to an unencrypted, unflagged, highly-compressed distribution format — long before it hits consumers, neither option will be significantly more effective at preventing content piracy than the other.
They know this, so what are they really arguing about? (1) Who’s going to pay to protect the entertainment industry’s precious content?, and (2) In which direction are fingers going to be pointing when content in inevitably cracked? The entertainment industry doesn’t want to pay or be blamed, and the consumer electronics and PC companies don’t want to either. | News.com story