There are so many benefits of a completely end-to-end digital home theater system. When you go through an analog connection, you’ve got to convert the signal, and when the signal goes into a digital display, like a DLP projector, you have to sample and re-digitize it, so there is a lot of loss there.
 
Image constraint is one way to create marketplace incentive to get people to use these protected digital connections instead of analog connections. But it’s not really powerful. The problem we face is that we can have all of this protected content delivery, but all of that has to be converted to analog because we have a lot of analog TVs that we have to feed. Since analog is not self-protecting, there are a lot of very high-quality analog-to-digital converters that can take the analog signal and make a very high-quality digital signal out of that, with no protection, and no obligation to look at any rights that are in that, which basically allows for unlimited copies and unlimited redistribution over the internet. Say that the content in that case is escaping through the analog hole. The idea is that we really need to find a way to manage the rights with an analog signal to the equivalent means as if it had gotten through a protected digital connection.

There is work going on to develop a process by which an analog signal can carry copy control signals and redistribution signals that would actually allow, in a standardized way, the detection of those rights at the point of analog-to-digital conversion and then trigger copy protection in the process of making a secure recording. We’re working with the CE and IT industries to find a means for solving this dilemma.

Q  How do you respond to the person who says that the MPAA is so concerned with piracy that they’re not thinking about the convenience of the consumer?

A  Our goal for copy protection is that it’s transparent to the honest user. When you buy a DVD in a store and bring it home, you put it in your player and you don’t really know that there’s copy protection. DVD was a success when it was introduced because that copy protection allowed content owners to release prerecorded media in a digital format without the fear that the content could be perfectly copied and distributed.

In the last eight years, though, what we’ve learned is that the current DVD copy protection system, CSS, is really a first-generation digital copy protection system, and we all recognize that there is a hack of it—but I think what we also recognize is that it’s pretty restrictive in terms of allowing consumers to use content like they want to use it today. Nine years ago we didn’t have media servers and portable video devices, and the idea of locking content to a piece of plastic made a lot of sense. It allowed us to launch a digital media format. Now we’re starting to realize that we’ve got media center PCs and portable devices that store several movies, so we must work on the next generation of content protection for both prerecorded movies as well as recordable movies that facilitate things like a managed copy onto a media server from a prerecorded disc, or the ability to digitally move content from a disc onto a portable device. We’re already working on amending the DVD license to provide new functionality like secure home networking.