Next-Gen "Analog Hole" Legislation Proposed

4th Nov 2005 13:50 #1

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http://www.extremedrm.com/article/NextGen+Analog+Hole+Legislation+Proposed/164220_1.aspx

Next-Gen "Analog Hole" Legislation Proposed
By Mark Hachman
November 2, 2005
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself.

The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday.

Although the bill lacks an official author, an executive at the Motion Picture Association of America said that the bill has been jointly developed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the chairman of the committee, as well as by several consumer-electronics and computer companies. The bill has yet to be read or voted upon within the House or Senate.

As presented, however, the bill would close the so-called "analog hole" on virtually all devices. Although digital streams can be encrypted and encoded with various restrictions and permissions, once converted back into an analog format, the stream can be copied or manipulated freely -- the analog "hole," first referred to by Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America around 2002. The provisions of the act would take place a year after its enactment.

Such an analog hole allows a consumer,for example, to tape a televised baseball game on his VCR, even if Major League Baseball expressly forbids him doing so. Under the new legislation, such rights would be enforced through technology.

According to the MPAA, the legislation is necessary to help shift the industry toward digital content, with the content restrictions such a format allows.

"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."

The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.

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