I attended the 89th meeting of the Copy Protection Technology Working Group at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel at LAX on June 2. This was the least interesting meeting of CPTWG that I have attended so far. The meeting was only one hour long. Most of the time was spent doing introductions and scheduling later meetings. Attendance is down. They have increased the cost of the meeting to non-MPAA members to compensate.
The most interesting section is usually the Regulatory and Legislative Update. This time there were only two brief items.
The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act is now law.
The FCC lost the Broadcast Flag case. MPAA is now lobbying Congress. There was very little discussion about this very important topic.
I asked about the situation in the French Courts about copy protection being declared illegal. Some of the CPTWG lawyers were aware of the case, but did not understand the details. The companies that are directly involved did not talk about it.
There was an announcement about iVDR. It is a new family of removable hard drives. It is intended for use in media systems and cars. It is supported by companies like Sanyo, Sharp, Hitachi, and Pioneer.
SAFIA (Security Architecture for Intelligent Attachment) is a copy protection scheme for iVDR. It depends on a Tamper Resistant Module within the iVDR cartridge. It provides support for Content Usage rules.