Broadcast Flag rides again, courtesy of NBC & Microsoft?

by Richard Lawler posted May 18th 2008 at 4:28PM

Just like efforts to close the analog hole, our old friend the broadcast flag (don't remember what that is and how it was defeated? Take a quick trip back to 2005 with us) has reared its ugly head again. Displaying the kind of tenacity rarely seen outside of horror movie villains and potential presidential candidates, some Vista Media Center users have apparently gotten the above popup while trying to record broadcast TV from NBC. Since the FCC regulation giving the broadcast flag its power to remotely disable your recording ability was overturned, not only should it not be enabled, there's no reason the system should respond if it were. The EFF's working with the makers of the HDHomeRun to find out why this happened at all (although it's not the first time); whether it's an honest mistake somewhere or if Microsoft slipped a bit of extra DRM into its latest OS.

[Via EFF]

Filed under: Regulatory, Media PCs, NBC, OTA

Tags: broadcast flag, BroadcastFlag, copy protection, CopyProtection, drm, eff, fcc, hdhomerun, media center, MediaCenter, microsoft, ota, vista

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Rask @ May 18th 2008 5:40PM

I've gotten the broadcast flag up here in Canada attempting to record shows on YTV through Rogers Cable for my daughter. Then that stopped and somehow now whenever I record and attempt to play back a YTV show, the CPU gets pegged at 100% and the quality of the recording suffers dramatically, rendering it unplayable.

No other channels have this that I've experienced and the Broadcast flag shouldn't even apply in Canada.

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