Editing Broadcast flag (section)

== FCC ruling ==
Officially called "Digital Broadcast Television Redistribution Control," the FCC's rule is in 47 CFR 73.9002(b) and the following sections, stating in part: "No party shall sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered [[Demodulator]] Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements." According to the rule, hardware must "actively thwart" piracy.

The rule's Demodulator Compliance Requirements insists that all HDTV demodulators must "listen" for the flag (or assume it to be present in all signals). Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" (such as [[Digital Visual Interface|DVI]] and [[High-Definition Multimedia Interface|HDMI]] ports with [[High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection|HDCP]] encryption), or in degraded form through [[analog signal|analog outputs]] or [[Digital data|digital]] outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels ([[Enhanced-definition television|EDTV]]) or less. Flagged content may be recorded only by "authorized" methods, which may include tethering of recordings to a single device.

Since broadcast flags could be activated at any time, a viewer who often records a program might suddenly find that it is no longer possible to save their favorite show. This and other reasons lead many{{who|date=August 2020}} to see the flags as a direct affront to [[consumer rights]].

The Demodulator Robustness Requirements are difficult to implement in [[Open-source model|open source]] systems. Devices must be "robust" against user access or modifications so that someone could not easily alter it to ignore the broadcast flags that permit access to the full digital stream. Since open-source [[device driver]]s are by design user-modifiable, a PC [[TV tuner card]] with open-source drivers would not be "robust".

The [[GNU Radio]] project already successfully demonstrated that purely software-based demodulators can exist and the hardware rule is not fully enforceable.