As television moved to the digital age, I was looking forward to this
technology making higher bandwidth digital components available more
cheaply that ham radio operators could use. The ATSC television system
carries a data rate of 19.39265846 mbps over a 6 MHz wide channel using
8VSB technology. This is something ham radio could use on UHF and SHF
frequencies to transmit some high speed digital data in less spectrum.
So I was looking forward to components like modulators that take a raw
bit stream (that in a TV application would carry the ATSC formatted data)
and output RF (to be upconverted to the frequency of interest), and
demodulators that to the reverse to reproduce that same bit stream.

The movie industry (e.g. Hollywood) has been insisting on copy protection
for their movies, to (as they claim) prevent then from entering the piracy
stream taking place on the internet. I can understand theur concern and
in principle I also support it.

However, I just learned that what they want to do to enable protection in
the over-the-air TV broadcast is in fact not protection at all. I had
assumed they (Hollywood) learned their lessons and started to use strong
encryption to protect the content until it reaches the final device that
plays it out. But in fact, the "Broadcast Flag" for TV is not anything
like this at all. The "protected" content is still transmitted in the
clear, unencrypted. It's just simply flagged (now it makes sense where
they got the odd name for it) as "do not allow this to be copied" (they
should have called it the "do not copy flag").

The real problem with this, though, is that all of this "protection"
relies on a prohibition to be applied to devices such as demodulators,
and it covers general purpose demodulators that amateur operators could
use for transmission of any arbitrary bit stream. Such demodulators
would be required to interpret the bit stream as ATSC television in
order to be legal for sale under this rule.

Currently, the "Broadcast Flag" FCC rule was struck down in court. It
is up to Congress to clarify or change statutory law that affects this
to allow the FCC to implement such a rule. I suspect Congress is very
likely to pass such a law. Hollywood very much wants this law, and while
they "own" a lot of Congress people, there is also the issue that without
such a law, Hollywood may not produce (as much) content for over the air
broadcast in high definition video.

But there may still be time to act on this. I would like to suggest all
hams in the USA contact their Congress persons and urge them to make sure
that any law they impose that provides for copy protection for digital
and/or high definition television also have terms that ensure generic
purpose devices like demodulators with all of this technology will NOT be
required to comply with the interpretation of data bit streams. Perhaps
this could be made to work for devices that specifically do not cover all
TV channels, since amateur radio use would not have to involve that. But
we need to make sure we have some exception in the law to ensure the
rapidly dropping prices of this 8VSB digital technology can be usable for
hams setting up new 19.39265846 mbps digital data links. In the next few
years such a demodulator could be built from one or two chips at a cost
well under $100 due to the same chips (doing error correction codes,
trellis coding, and polynomial (de)scrambling, as well as RF conversion)
being mass produced for the digital TV and set top box market.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for bringing this up, Phil. I've had discussions with some local ATV guys, and they've expressed the same sort of concern, and have contacts at FCC aware of the issue.