Underlying Motivations in the Broadcast Flag Debate
Roshan Baliga, Deb Dasgupta, Anna Dreyer, Allan A. Friedman · 2012
The MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) claims that the broadcast flagging scheme will protect its constituents ’ content when broadcast free over the air on digital terrestrial television. We begin this paper with a description of the broadcast flag, and examine the MPAA’s claim with a formal threat model analysis to determine that the broadcast flag, while not successfully keeping content off the Internet, will offer the MPAA several other concrete benefits, quite different from the one publicly stated. Having determined the role of the broadcast flag, we turn our attention to the full range of players, including consumer electronics companies, broadcasters, the major television networks, consumer groups, cable providers, the FCC, and Congress, and use a costbenefit analysis to unpack the motivations and incentives each player has for supporting or opposing the flag. We then compare our analysis with the public statements by each of the players regarding the flag, to evaluate the sincerity of their claims and affirm our analysis. Ultimately, it appears that the underlying motivations of key players in the broadcast flag debate are quite different from the stated goals of the broadcast flag, and relate far more to DTV in general than digital content protection. We conclude that