Audio Video News

Excessive caution over copyrights could inhibit the already slow rollout of digital television, electronics industry executives told a US Senate committee last week.

On Thursday, February 28, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation heard opinions on the issue from representatives of the entertainment, consumer electronics, and computer industries. Presided over by South Carolina Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, the committee hoped to gain insight into the complex issue of balancing, on the one hand, the entertainment industry's need to protect its products and, on the other, consumers' rights to record movies and television programs for private use.

Senators hope to find a way to resolve the issue without resorting to legislation. Hollings has already authored a bill—at the insistence of Walt Disney Company—which would require new electronics products to recognize copy-prevention code and report potential violations to some sort of regulatory agency.

In his opening remarks on Thursday, Hollings said he would introduce legislation to create a deadline for concerned parties to resolve their differences. Should they not reach some workable agreement, the government would take over. Hollings derided the widely propagated view that the major obstacle to digital television is the lack of broadband connectivity—sometimes called "the last mile problem" in the telecommunications industry. Hollings insisted that the problem is lack of demand, because most Americans "don't want to pay $50 a month for faster access to e-mail." The real problem, he said, is that "there is almost no legal, high-quality content available on the Internet" because of piracy fears among television and movie executives. The entertainment industry's reluctance to release high-definition content is the real obstacle to both digital television and growth of broadband, Hollings stated.

James Meyer, Special Advisor to the chairman of Thomson Multimedia and the company's former chief operating officer, argued that "there needs to be agreement about what we're trying to protect and how." Thomson would like to see private agreements among all concerned industries that would guarantee what Meyer called "full functionality in a personal home network while protecting digital content from widespread piracy." One solution favored by Thomson is the so-called "SmartRight," a sort of user's license, that would allow viewing, recording, and archiving of digital content for use on private networks. The SmartRight could be equally applicable to cable or satellite transmissions, off-air broadcasts and Internet use, Meyer said. He was especially critical of what he called "closed and proprietary cable TV systems" that make it "impossible to develop new digital TV products that could easily be sold anywhere in the US and [would] plug directly into a cable outlet."

Disney chief Michael Eisner expressed his company's concern over the deployment of broadband Internet services and digital television without a system in place to prevent wholesale copying. He admitted that totally secure content is probably an impossible goal, but expressed his hope for "a reasonably secure environment to prevent widespread and crippling theft of the creative content that drives our economy." Eisner stated that all industries involved in this venture would benefit from "the pressure of a timeline for eventual government action."

Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti also emphasized the importance of the entertainment industry to the US economy, describing it as one of the few industries that have a trade surplus with almost every other country on earth. Copyright industries—music, movies, software, television, and video—are "responsible for about 5% of US gross domestic product," Valenti stated. Ignoring the importance of copyright protection would make any chance of redeeming investment in such ventures impossible, he told committee members.

Intel's executive vice president Leslie Vadasz cautioned against any governmental attempt to regulate the design of products, as in Hollings' yet-to-be-introduced bill. Hardware design is properly the private sector's domain, he stated, saying that government intervention could "irreparably damage the high-tech industry" and "retard innovation, investment in new technologies … and the usefulness of our products to consumers." Vadasz told the committee that a cross-industry technical working group is now examining copy protection systems, and could present a proposal for a content protection scheme by the end of the month. Vadasz's company is a member of the Computer Systems Policy Project, a computer industry association.