MPAA FCC comments: too many howlers and fibs to count

The Motion Picture Association of America has released its comments on the Broadcast Flag proposal before the FCC. This has too many howlers to count (though I imagine many groups will be countering 'em in their reply comments), but here are two choice ones, in which the MPAA says that sharing 19.4Mb/s video files will require no special software and only need you to save them to your hard-drive and the idea that a requirement that all DTV technologies be resistant to end-user modification would not stop open source developers from shipping compliant code.

Once received in the home, digital broadcast television content can easily be redistributed via retransmission over networks like the Internet by such means as rebroadcasting, hosting files on a web server, or peer-to-peer file trafficking. Such unauthorized redistribution can be accomplished without downloading any special software, without the need for circumventing any copy protections, without such tools as analog-to-digital converters, or indeed without any complex technical skills whatsoever. For example, all a person has to do is to select "Record" while watching TV on his or her computer using a TV tuner card, and then save the file to a publicly accessible folder on his or her hard drive, where it can be illegally redistributed to anonymous users via peer-to-peer file trafficking…

Similarly, the Broadcast Flag solution will not, in itself, interfere in any way with continued innovation in the development of open source software. While building a secure open source protection technology will no doubt be a challenge, it is a challenge faced by open source programmers in developing any secure application, not just Authorized Digital Output Protection Technologies or Authorized Recording Methods…

Link (648k PDF)

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