Trying to plug another potential hole in the anti-piracy dike, Hollywood studios have started a new round of private meetings with high-tech companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers to explore ways to stop unauthorized recordings.
This time, the issue is how to preserve anti-copying signals on a digital television show, online video or DVD when converted from digital to analog.
That kind of conversion, which has to happen before a digital program can be sent to the vast majority of TV sets, is inherently fatal to digital copy-protection techniques.
Years from now, when consumers have digital TVs that connect digitally to set-top boxes and recorders, the potential problem goes away. In the meantime, the studios' fear is that the mixture of analog and digital devices in homes will allow their movies and premium TV programs to be copied digitally and distributed freely via the Internet.
If that happens on a global scale, as it has in the music industry, the studios worry that they would lose the ability to sell programs to syndicators, overseas broadcasters and DVD buyers -- in other words, much of what they collect from a program after its first airing.
Some participants in the group, whose co-chairmen are from Philips Electronics, Microsoft Corp. and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. unit, scoff at such dire predictions, arguing that today's Internet connections are too slow to enable widespread video piracy.
Nevertheless, there's no shortage of movies and TV shows already available for free online to those who know where to look for them. For example, numerous episodes from the first two seasons of HBO's "Six Feet Under" and a copy of the unreleased DVD version of "The Hours" are up for grabs from online sites that cater to video pirates.
"For those people who do suggest that audio-visual files are impractical to send over the Internet because of the size of the file and the speed of current Internet connections, here is a cautionary tale," said Andrew G. Setos, president of engineering at News Corp.'s Fox Group. "Ten years ago it took eight hours to download a song. Now it takes seconds."
The Analog Reconversion Discussion Group, as the inter-industry collective is called, says its purpose is simply to identify technological tools that may be relevant to the piracy issue. It's not supposed to select or even recommend any technologies, and it won't address such thorny policy questions as which programs can be protected and how severe the limits on copying can be.
