Hollywood's plans to control your TV

I just read the September issue of Scientific American, where Wendy Grossman has this article (subscription required to read full text): Flagging Copy Rights. Piracy protection may redefine home recording.

The right to protect against unauthorized copying of digital television and film seemed to take a step back for the entertainment industry and content provider--and a step forward for the consumer and video pirate--when a federal court struck down the planned July 1 introduction of the "broadcast flag." The flag is a set of bits in a digital transmission that can prevent recording. But advocates of free recording are not celebrating the defeat of the flag--transmissions standards currently being devised could trump the ruling.

The consortium creating the standards is the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project, a group that includes broadcasters, mobile phone companies, set-top box manufacturers and movie studios. Most of its work defines ways to transmit, encode and format data. But the next version of the DVB standards will include a scheme called Copy Protection/Copy Management (CPCM), which, if implemented, may give copyright holders even more control than the broadcast flag would have.

As drafted, CPCM will allow them to specify, for example, whether protected content can be copied -- and, if so, onto how many devices. They could dictate how many times a program can be viewed, where it can be viewed and how long a copy may be kept. While attending a public DVB Forum meeting held in Dublin this past March, Jim Williams, vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in private that preventing someone from accessing a single HBO subscription from two different locations is "social justice." ...