One of the things that the entertainment industry refers to often in their arguments for digital rights management and broadcast flags and other restrictions on intellectual property and copyright is the idea that digital television will immediately create a world where someone can 'beam' their friends the latest movie 'just like that.'

Raffi Krikorian has done some testing of this idea and sent the following comments to the FCC in response to their request for public comment on the proposed broadcast flag for digital television:

The initial comments of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), et al., in this docket, assert that the Digital Television (DTV) transition will create a series of risks to their intellectual property interests, and propose the "broadcast flag" in order to address those risks. They provide a laundry-list of new risks from clear-text free-over-the-air Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) broadcasts, including the prospect of redistribution of captured ATSC programming by:

electronic mail
"shared folders"
a web site, and by
P2P networked file-sharing software6

As a skilled and experienced technologist, I greeted these claims with immense skepticism as they seemed at direct odds with my longtime experience with designing, deploying, and using P2P and networked applications. In response to my skepticism, I undertook a series of experiments in recording and attempting to redistribute ATSC terrestrial broadcast programming. The results of my research are presented below

...

What should be noted is that all the numbers presented in this paper exhibit a linear relationship between program length and file size (or program length and transfer time). So, a four-hour recording is about twice as large, and takes about twice as long to copy, as a two-hour recording. The 43 GB file is for a five-hour recording, which means that a one-hour recording occupies about 8.6 GB of space -- this still means that it would take

a full day for a hour our television show to move out of my house network (because a standard broadband connection only has a 200 kilobit/sec upload speed instead of my 800 kilobit/sec upload -- this means an average customer would take 4 full days to ship out),
6116 floppy disks,
14 CD-Rs, or
2 DVDs
to transmit or to hold all the data received over the air. This is still impractical for routine transfers of a short television program, and, in the case of recordable media, still implies a significant media cost and recording time.

In this document, I have shown that the MPAA's view of the capabilities of current and foreseeable networking technologies is misinformed; they have provided a series of reasons to argue that their intellectual property will be distributed more readily as a result of ATSC terrestrial broadcast service than it is presently today, and I have stated why, in my opinion, I deem this to be incorrect and actually impossible. I conclude that there is no practical evidence that an ATSC broadcast flag mandate would address a real problem.