Disney is launching a movie-on-demand service that will transmit encrypted movies over the air to set-top boxes. Viewers can purchase a code that will unlock and play the movies. The studio's making good noises:
"If we don't provide consumers with with our products in a timely manner, pirates will," [Eisner] said.
But I can't shake the feeling that this service is yet another means for the studios to grab control of technology. The set-top cable boxes for this service have a secret key that they use to authenticate themselves to the service, and a consortium will control those keys through licensing agreements (just like the keys in DVD players). This means that anyone who wants to build a set-top box will have to come to the consortium — which will be controlled by the studios, who have a pretty crabbed vision of what fair use and the public's other rights in copyright consist of — and negotiate for the license.
The Broadcast Flag proposal and the DVD licensing regime give us a good picture of how licensing negotiations are hotbeds of abuse. In the Broadcast Flag proposal, the studios are trying to push a regime where the only outputs and recording methods allowed in the devices will be technologies whose manufacturers sucked up to the studios by backing the Broadcast Flag proposal, and competing technologies will only be permitted if Hollywood gets what it wants from other manufacturers.
In the DVD world, licensees end up building crippled devices and software — like Apple's DVD player, which disables screen-shot capability throughout the OS when a DVD is in the drive — and enforcing anti-competitive price-fixing measures like region coding.
In both cases, the licensing bodies won't give permission for their keys to be embedded in open source technology, and require a "secure path" from the input to the output. This means that if you plan on inventing a Linux-based PVR that turns all video into DiVx files that can be easily moved from the set-top to a laptop or streamed to a device in another room, you'd better think again.
Which is a goddamned shame. A general-purpose set-top box (that users could install software on) could be far more useful than any consumer electronics device: the deaf could install software that adds fan-authored captioning during playback; foreign-language speakers could add secondary audio with translation; the blind could add descriptive audio tracks. What's more, you could install drivers for new recording devices (a low-cost DVD recorder that will copy movies to discs that play in your laptop or can be shown in a classroom), install software that lets you edit out highlight reels for research and criticism, and so on.
But in order to keep the secrets of Disney's crypto secure, an entire licensing regime will be created that will narrow the universe of possible set-top-box applications to those that the studios (the same entertainment industry that tried to kill the piano roll, the radio, the TV, the VCR and the Internet) feel comfortable with.
