Astonishingly: Your Friend, The U. S. Court of Appeals

The Broadcast Flag is illegal!

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the FCC brazenly overstepped its authority. Regardless of the potential for piracy, the judges ruled, the FCC could regulate only the design of devices that handle the transmission of programs, not ones that help consumers view or record them or play them back.

See, back a few months ago, the FCC decided that having people record TV shows was bad, because the TV station might be airing a movie, and then you could share the movie with your friends. So, they instituted a rule requiring a "broadcast flag" to be sent out in every TV signal, so that only flag-compliant VCRs, DVRs, and PCs would be able to record broadcast TV programs. This would allow the movie industry to regulate what movies you could record, what you could record them with, and what you could play them back on - even WHEN you could play them back.
Enter the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Thanks to the intervention of the court, the FCC's rule was repealed, and manufacturers are no longer required to comply with the provisions of the Broadcast Flag Rule. According to the court, the FCC

had abused its authority by forcing manufacturers to use new anti-piracy technology in equipment that only receives TV signals from July 1st. Finally, the court could find nothing in law or legislative history that backs the FCC’s broadcast ruling claims .

CDFreaks adds the following:

For the FCC and MPAA, this is actually very bad timing as by the time they do manage to properly enforce a broadcast flag ruling (if successful), the majority of consumers may have upgraded to digital TV displays and equipment that lack broadcast flag support. When it comes to HDTV, so far only 10% of the population had a HDTV set by the end of 2004.

Oh, and while we're putting the limelight on the antipiracy fight yet again: did you know the Boy Scouts can now get MERIT BADGES for intellectual property law, thanks to the MPAA? That's right. It's real.
How goofy can you get.

In other news, despite the fact that the Sony PSP has only been on the market for a few weeks, the encryption for the UMD (Universal Media Disc, Sony's proprietary standard for the PSP,)has already been broken by at least one pirate group. It is suspected that the pirate group is working on a way to create bootable game images that can be played from the Memory Stick, which will allow filesharers to download and play PSP games with a large enough Memory Stick. There's some evidence that one hacker, at least, has already gotten software to run on the PSP from a Memory Stick, so it's not likely to be too long before this is generally available; it only remains to be seen whether the same techniques can be used to duplicate UMD movie releases. For some reason, I suspect those efforts, as well, will meet with success, and we'll see a flood of movies available for PSP - MS being shared online in a few months at most.