COPYCENSE

"Mike Godwin, the legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital-rights advocacy group in Washington, is a fan of Showtime’s new drama series ‘Huff.’ So three weeks ago, when he missed the season finale, he decided to download it to his personal computer.

"To Mr. Godwin, the time-consuming download (and the file’s poor quality) indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs – a threat Hollywood has long warned against – was hardly imminent. But to the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America, cases like this one suggest a future of widespread illegal file-sharing that must be stopped before it begins."

"The debate will be presented in oral arguments tomorrow before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the F.C.C., challenging a new regulation that is intended to prevent such bleeding of television content onto the Internet."

Tom Zeller Jr. Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged. News.com. Feb. 21, 2005.

See also:
Ed Felton. Broadcast Flag in Court. Freedom to Tinker. Feb. 21, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Broadcast Flag "Just As Important As Grokster". Deep Links. Feb. 18, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook. No date

Update: Declan McCullagh. Court Questions FCC’s Broadcast Flag Rules. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005. (A federal appeals court questions whether the FCC has authority to undertake such sweeping regulation.)

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