PVRBlog spotted a funny thing about DRM and the TiVO last week - an episode of "King of the Hill" got flagged as something protected, and the people at Tivo said that the flag was caused by line noise. The technical response to that?

When I asked them if they believed that noise could be "misinterpreted" as a DRM flag, they burst into positive howls of disbelief. One present talked about Macrovision's checksums and said that that must have been "incredible noise if it completed the checksum." A semiconductor expert laughed out loud. Charitably, an operating system vendor's rep suggested that TiVo might not be lying: rather, he said that perhaps they've just done an "incredibly bad" implementation of Macrovision.

Most likely, it was an error on the part of some tech setting broadcasts up. What it points out though is this - fair use rights to programming are being eroded as we sit here.