TV networks, film studios and consumer electronics companies are homing in on a technology they hope will keep consumers from swapping TV shows and movies in Napster -like fashion online.
The new drive, under the auspices of the longstanding cross-industry Copy Protection Working Group, is just one part of a growing effort to keep television from becoming the newest front in the digital piracy wars. As broadcast TV turns digital this year, studios are looking for ways to control how shows are recorded and traded, and they are proposing technologies that could ultimately bar consumers from freely recording TV programs from the airwaves.
The latest effort, a plan to insert digital tags into broadcast TV shows that would prevent them from being put online, is just part of that broader aim. But as more TV content shows up at digital swap meets, copyright owners see it as an increasingly urgent issue. They say they'll have a standard ready by the end of the first quarter of the year.
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