The copyright clause of the US constitution is very important in setting up government's role in granting limited protection to copyright-able works. But it's far from perfect, and has been subject to significant corruption. I'm going to leave aside the foolishness instilled by the Supreme Court in allowing virtually unlimited retroactive extension of copyright, and focus on another really annoying facet of modern copyright law that has an effect on Comrex product development.
This is the ability of rights holders, as a collective, to dictate copyright protection mechanisms in commercial electronics. I think there's no other more outrageous example as the inclusion of HDCP protection in the actual interconnects (like HDMI and DVI) between media devices.
Now if I wanted to be told by a device manufacturer what I could and could not do with the product I purchase, I'd buy Apple products (cue rim shot). But the copyright industry has managed to require the use of device-hobbling technology on the actual wires we use to interconnect devices.
It achieved this using a two-pronged approach. First, the Consumer Electronics Association was forced to mandate inclusion of copyright protection mechanisms in digital media outputs (and therefore require the corresponding protection on monitors and other inputs). This became a requirement of licensing the technology required for playing out DVD and BluRay discs on digital ports.
Next, the industry lobbied the U.S. congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1996, which made it illegal to market any device that circumvents copyright protection, even if for non-infringing use. There are some narrow exceptions carved out, but none that would allow disabling of HDCP on an HDMI output. So no such devices exist.
HDCP is a fairly complex security layer which rides on the HDMI interface. The source and sink devices exchange a set of encrypted keys, and then decide whether the sink device is worthy of receiving the copyrighted works existing in the source. If the works are copyrighted, and your monitor doesn't support HDCP, no media for you.
The mechanism is licensed by a controlling body called Digital Content Protection LLC. In order for a manufacturer to support HDCP he must pay the high licensing cost and assume the huge liability of maintaining software keys that open these ports. It's certainly beyond the range of any company not involved in the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of consumer devices to consider.
Let me be blunt. HDCP is stupid. Here's just a few of the many reasons:
1) It does nothing to stop piracy. As anyone even slightly knowledgeable about digital media knows, the way to extract data is not through an uncompressed, real-time interface. Real pirates have already cracked digital media protection and use it at will.
2) It annoys the consumer. Besides incompatibility with sink devices manufactured before the mandate, HDCP is the cause of a raft of consumer headaches. User support forums for consumer devices are chock full of reports of users getting "blue screens" even when properly connecting HDMI devices.
3) Manufacturers of media playout devices are stupid, lazy, or both. Instead of properly detecting whether media has copyright protection enabled, they'll take the short cut of simply enabling HDCP on all outputs, all the time. Many consumer video cameras implement permanent HDCP on live video outputs.
That's right, the copyright industry restricts what you can do with video you are taping live! This type of "protection" is just a huge power grab by copyright holders that has become completely embedded in our industry and culture.
Why do I care? For the past three years I've been working diligently on our LiveShot video codec product. One of the important features of the encoder is the ability to interwork with cameras and other sources that output video and audio via HDMI. But if you go to Amazon and buy yourself an HD Handi-cam, there is at best a fifty percent chance it will work with the HDMI port on LiveShot. Or if you try to get live HDMI video off your phone, it will almost always fail. And it's because of HDCP.
Now when this happens to a LiveShot customer and I get the call, I can go into details on all the reasons this is so, but the end result is an unhappy customer, and me with no options to make him happy. And I really hate that. Hence the rage.
The HDCP ship has sailed, and no amount of rage-blogging will change things. I think the responsibility of the tech professional now lies in keeping an eye on the copyright industry and lobby to prevent further abuse. Since the DMCA was enacted in '96, it's become much easier for groups opposed to copyright interests to organize and publicize abuses through social media and other on-line resources. I also think it's a good idea to be aware of what your political rep's opinions on excessive copyright outreach is. It's hardly a topic that will make or break a political campaign, but it's a good topic (along with patent reform) to ask questions about to find out whether your congressman or senator is working for you, or "big copyright".
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