At the March 5 meeting of the ARDG, Brad Hunt from the MPAA offered a 3-slide presentation aimed at defining the "analog reconversion" problem and a "reference architecture" within which it might be examined. The presentation was not intended as a substantive proposal, but rather an overview of the scope of the problem.
Nevertheless, it introduced several themes that I expect will recur frequently during the ARDG's future meetings.
First, Brad introduced the MPAA's preferred rhetoric for the ARDG's efforts. The challenge is, in Brad's view, guaranteeing "equivalence" between protected digital outputs and analog outputs. At a minimum, I imagine this means that all analog links between digital video devices should offer roughly the same protections as the DTCP-protected FireWire links just now beginning to appear on high-def TVs and cable/satellite set-top boxes.
Of course, this is a bit like choosing the part of the playing field that is the most tilted in your favor, then arguing that all other parts of the field must be "leveled" up to match it.
Second, the PowerPoint slides foreshadowed what I predict will be two recurring battlefields at ARDG: "robustness" and "how many detectors".
It's all in Brad's last slide. The slide expressly recognizes the need for a "trusted environment" for both source and sink devices, by which Brad means to suggest that devices will have to be designed to be "robust" (i.e., with the hood welded shut to prevent user "tampering"). Just how "tamper-resistant" these devices have to be will be a major issue for makers of general purpose computers. It will also, of course, determine whether open source programmers have any ability to participate in the digital video revolution, as "robustness" rules disqualify open source programmers by charaterizing their products as "tamper-friendly" (i.e., user modifiable).
This slide also identifies a variety of places where watermark detection might take place in a sink device, without taking a position on where or how many times the device has to check for the watermark. This is also likely to be a major issue for IT companies (i.e., companies that produce devices intended for use with general purpose computers), whose enthusiasm for watermark detection may be inversely related to the number of places inside a general purpose computer that they have to install detectors.
Posted by fred at March 20, 2003 05:27 PM