Today's hearing seeks to answer the question of whether government should mandate DRM solutions to combat piracy, and whether such an action can be achieved without limiting the public's customary and legal uses of content.

Two days ago AT&T labs issued a report estimating that 77 percent of the pirated movie content available through peer-to-peer file sharing software has been made available by movie industry employees, not unaffiliated consumers. This report raises strong questions about whether digital video piracy occurring today is primarily a governmental or intra-industry issue to be dealt with at this point.

Currently the Federal Communications Commission is considering how to implement Hollywood's proposal for the Broadcast Flag, a DRM proposal designed to protect digital television programming. The proposal would require that a flag be attached to DTV programming, which would in turn inform consumer electronics devices that the DTV content cannot be redistributed over the Internet.

The Flag as envisioned by Hollywood is clearly problematic. Today consumers and the educational community are empowered to use content in a host of ways, none of which require the permission of the copyright owner. By including a complete ban on Internet redistribution of DTV programming, Hollywood's Broadcast Flag proposal will artificially limit the way consumers may take advantage of the Internet to make these customary and legal uses. In fairness to Hollywood, I am not aware of an existing DRM technology that both prohibits piracy, yet also allows consumers to redistribute content over the Internet in legal ways.

To the degree that digital piracy of video content is a real issue, I have proposed a different way to address the protection of DTV content from piracy in the Act. Instead of mandating specific technologies, and giving one set of stakeholders a veto over others, my bill would create a self-certification environment, where hardware manufacturers may use whatever technology they determine meets the requirements of the Flag. In addition, the flag itself imposes a rule that DTV content cannot be illegally redistributed to the public over the Internet, which is a more flexible anti-piracy policy that the one in Hollywood's proposal. In my bill it is the FCC that will resolve any disputes that arise in determining if a self-certified technology does not comply with this anti-piracy safeguard.

These are important issues for our nation's transition to digital television, as the content community has threatened to withhold digital content unless the issue of digital piracy is addressed. It has been said before that it might be the Republicans who stand up for consumer rights and due process as it is primarily Democrats who suckle most vigorously from the entertainment industry teat. If so, more power to them.