The Center for Democracy and Technology has posted its Public Interest Primer on the Broadcast Flag [PDF]. The report goes into a lot of detail and provides some helpful technical and political clarity on the battle over copy protection for digital television. CDT also offers a series of very interesting proposals for repairing the MPAA's proposal. (Full disclosure: Up till August, I worked at CDT and participated in early research and drafting of this report, but these opinions are entirely my own and don't necessarily reflect CDT's thinking -- for that, read the report.)
One reason that the Broadcast Flag proposal is so fascinating is that it seems so incremental, at least on first blush. The content industry has made compelling promises that the flag will protect consumers' ability to record TV shows and watch them at home. And, after all, DTV is currently a pretty small portion of the market, compared to digital cable.
What's critical to note is that the proposal won't enable, and won't permit, any use extending beyond what MPAA has promised -- like streaming video across the Internet, or obtaining short video clips for fair use purposes. More crucially, the MPAA's proposal would impose strict requirements on the networks consumers are permitted to use to move digital video content around their home -- the whole flag proposal is built on an insidious supposition that consumers will (or can be made to) abandon "open" home technologies in favor of a much more controlled model. The question of whether this is good public policy is at least as crucial as my ability to build up an archive of my favorite episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog.