The court says no to FCC's broadcast flag

The war against piracy is held back by several factors, but the legal one seems to do more harm to studious and record companies than any other.

How else could you call the decision a US court unanimously took when they rejected FCC's attempt to make all major Hollywood Studious include anti-piracy technology intro all their digital electronic devices? To make it more clear, the project meant that every digital TV set, every DVD recorder and every PC had to include anti-piracy technology.

It's understandable that movie studious don't want to lose money or, to be exact, anymore money because of high piracy rates all around the world, but to ask for a federal judge to make it compulsory for every digital device to have installed such anti-piracy measures is a bit too much to take.

The system, backed by the FCC, would only allow programs to be recorded on hardware containing copy protection devices, and all devices built after 1 July would have to include the technology.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals based its unanimous ruling on the belief that the FCC had overstepped its authority. The new ruling, if upheld by a higher court, does not completely ring the death bell for a broadcast flag on digital television signal.

The FCC designed the strict guide-lines for this legal measure as a result of all the heat they took from Hollywood studios.

Even though the FCC's influence over the broadcast industry allows them to control content that is being related to TVs and other display devices, the court decided that the agency can only control how the devices receive a program and can't have any say in what they do with that content later.

Hollywood isn't too happy with the outcome of this attempt to slow down piracy, and they claim that should a federal court support this ruling, it would discourage them from producing high-quality shows for over-the-air TV.

On the other hand, the ruling is a certain victory for manufacturers, who would have had to redesign products such as digital-signal-equipped TVs, personal computers and DVR-recording devices to include the broadcast flag, keeping consumers from copying shows or distributing them over the Web.