On Monday, a consortium of broadcast, consumer electronics and technology companies gathered with House Commerce Committee chairman Bill Tauzin (D-Louisiana) to hash out the digital rights management that will be attached to digital television broadcasts to keep consumers from making unlawful reproductions of Hollywood movies and TV programs.

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Tauzin's group hopes to avoid the pitfalls other groups have hit while developing a standard Internet security system that protects intellectual property while serving the consumer's best interests.

The current fight centers on the "broadcast flag," an application embedded in a digital television signal. When television broadcasts all go digital, movies and television shows will come pre-packaged with meta-tags that allow devices like Tivos and PCs to parse, reshape and share files with relative ease. The broadcast flag would trigger technological roadblocks, preventing digital files from leaving the home.

Like the roach motel, your television signals can check in to your home entertainment network, but they can never check out.

People could record a movie or a television program, store it on a hard drive, parse it and ship it to their bedroom TV. But this technology could also prevent people from watching a movie they have recorded in their own homes at the house of a friend.

The music industry tried to implement this application with the Secure Digital Music Initiative, but failed miserably after two years. Movie studios also failed to solve the digital-rights management problem, putting their on-demand services on hold indefinitely.

In other words, Hollywood is spinning its wheels trying to develop a secure system for digital television, a much more difficult proposition than Internet security, said Mark Cuban, the outspoken CEO of HDNet, the only digital cable network.

"HD video is not like an MP3 file or a Real or Windows Media video file," Cuban wrote in an e-mail. "You can't just take an HD file, whether in original format, encoded or captured from over the air and really do anything with it."

Today, Cuban is correct. It takes 24 hours to send a 30-minute program recorded in high-definition format over a broadband connection. Tauzin's group wants to short-circuit the Napster program -- millions of people sharing billions of files -- before it ever has a chance to start.

The flag itself wouldn't necessarily restrict consumers, said Dave Arland, director of public and trade relations company, Thomson Multimedia. Many networks might never turn the broadcast flag on, much like HBO. The cable channel has the technology to block anyone from recording its original programming, something that it could implement if it felt home taping was eating into revenues from its on-demand service.