Are There Alternatives to the Broadcast Flag for Protecting Copyright?
There are other ways to protect copyright material, which do not require the broadcast flag technology. These alternatives fall under four general categories: technical, legal, commercial, and educational alternatives. • Technical Alternatives DTV content transmitted in high resolution formats (such as high definition television or HDTV) contain too much data for consumers to conveniently copy and distribute over the Internet in high resolution. Currently, an hour of HDTV content fills approximately 8.5 GB of storage and would take about 14 hours to download on a typical home broadband connection. This makes the time and storage space required to share HDTV content prohibitive for the average user and ‘casual’ copyright infringer, who is the target of the broadcast flag initiative. This is why almost all television content that is circulating on P2P networks is via analogue to digital conversion.
There are other ways to protect copyright material, which do not require the broadcast flag technology. These alternatives fall under four general categories: technical, legal, commercial, and educational alternatives. • Technical Alternatives DTV content transmitted in high resolution formats (such as high definition television or HDTV) contain too much data for consumers to conveniently copy and distribute over the Internet in high resolution. Currently, an hour of HDTV content fills approximately 8.5 GB of storage and would take about 14 hours to download on a typical home broadband connection. This makes the time and storage space required to share HDTV content prohibitive for the average user and ‘casual’ copyright infringer, who is the target of the broadcast flag initiative. This is why almost all television content that is circulating on P2P networks is via analogue to digital conversion. While this may change in the future, the time between now and then could be used to develo
