This week, some TiVo owners reported receiving a message telling them that they couldn't store their recordings of Family Guy and The Simpsons because the copyright holder had set a flag preventing this.
TiVo's official story is that this capability is part of the terms of their deal with Macrovision, which provides technology for restricting copying and use. However, they say that the Macrovision deal requires that this signal never gets applied except to pay-per-view and premium cable programs.
TiVo says that the two programs that got this flag received it as the result of a transmission error — noise that was "misinterpreted as a copy protection signal."
On O'Reilly Radar, Marc Hedlund expresses disbelief at this explanation:
Aren't we talking about reception of a single bit of data (flag on or off) — is that really so hard to receive through that noisy analog signal? Doesn't it seem a lot more likely that some overzealous scheduler clicked a "protect content" checkbox without realizing the storm it would cause?
I'm currently in Brussels, attending a DRM standards-specifying meeting. In the room are film executives, consumer electronics manufacturers, software and operating system vendors, semiconductor manufacturers and conditional access system designers. When I asked them if they believed that noise could be "misinterpreted" as a DRM flag, they burst into positive howls of disbelief. One present talked about Macrovision's checksums and said that that must have been "incredible noise if it completed the checksum." A semiconductor expert laughed out loud.
Charitably, an operating system vendor's rep suggested that TiVo might not be lying: rather, he said that perhaps they've just done an "incredibly bad" implementation of Macrovision.
