My experiment with BitTorrent found its way into a New York Times article today. The article’s not bad, but if I could change it I would have had the story distinguish more clearly between (a) downloading a TV show that originated as analog cable TV (and in reduced-resolution format) in six or seven hours and (b) downloading full-resolution HDTV, which would take maybe ten times as long or longer. I did the former; life is far too short for me to experiment much with the latter.

The whole argument for the broadcast-flag regime is that downloading full-resolution HDTV was going to be easier than downloading digitized analog television. What’s easy to demonstrate is that downloading even lower-resolution analog-originating television is hugely time-consuming — the problem only gets (much) worse with HDTV. In effect, HDTV’s huge and inconvenient file sizes are themselves a protection against digital piracy.

UPDATE: Ed Felten is more critical of the Times article, since its focus on my downloading of cable content — the TV show “Huff” — confuses the issue. Supposedly, he notes, the broadcast-flag scheme is about making broadcast TV as secure as cable. But of course cable content isn’t secure — you can capture it through the analog outputs from cable boxes or even your TV itself. Nothing in the Broadcast Flag rule or any other FCC-promulgated rule even addresses that issue.

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