Broadcast Flag: back again
p2p news / p2pnet: “You’re at home, fresh popcorn in hand, watching Mickey Mouse on your new digitally enhanced, flat-screen home entertainment system with surround-sound,” we posted in 2004. “It cost a packet, but that’s OK. Your kids are laughing their heads off at Mickey’s antics, and everyone’s having a great time.
“Then suddenly POW! Everything goes black and instead of watching Mickey, you and your kids are suddenly watching static. Because although your new system also has state-of-the-art remote control, you’re not the one using it.
“Your Mickey movie wasn’t the approved Hollywood version and technology embedded in the system you paid all those dollars for ratted you out to another entertainment industry system and Hollywood shut you down.”
It’s called Broadcast Flag and, dreamed up by the entertainment and software cartels, it’s the ultimate in direct consumer control technology, sometimes called DRM (Digital Rights Management).
The idea was/is: computers and video hardware would be sold with Broadcast Flag DRM hard-wired in and it looked like a done deal. But then, “In a stunning victory for hardware makers and television buffs, a federal appeals court tossed out government rules that would have outlawed many digital TV receivers and tuner cards starting July 1,” as CNET News‘ Declan McCullagh wrote in May last year.
However, that was then. Now, draft legislation making the rounds in the US Senate previews the MPAA and RIAA’s next target, posts the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Fred von Lohmann —– your TV and radio, .
And this time, it also covers iPods and PSPs, says Cory Doctorow. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
New Senate Broadcast Flag Bill Would Freeze Fair Use
By Fred von Lohmann – Deep Links
Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA’s next target: your television and radio. (Please write your Senator about this!)
You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow’s innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven’t thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?
Well, that’s not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here’s all tomorrow’s innovators should be allowed to offer you:
“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”
Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.
Fair use has always been a forward-looking doctrine. It was meant to leave room for new uses, not merely “customary historic uses.” Sony was entitled to build the VCR first, and resolve the fair use questions in court later. This arrangement has worked well for all involved — consumers, media moguls, and high technology companies.
Now the RIAA and MPAA want to betray that legacy by passing laws that will regulate new technologies in advance and freeze fair use forever. If it wasn’t a “customary historic use,” federal regulators will be empowered to ban the feature, prohibiting innovators from offering it. If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use.
Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We’ll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.
The new legislation, being circulated by Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), is the first step down that path (and is eerily reminiscent of the infamous 2002 Hollings Bill). It would impose a broadcast flag mandate on all future digital TVs and radios, much like legislation discussed by the House last year.
We’ve covered the broadcast flag and radio flag extensively in the past. These measures would impose federal regulations on all devices capable of receiving digital television and digital radio signals. What’s worse, the regulations won’t do a thing to stop “piracy,” since there are plenty of other ways to copy these broadcasts.
Sen. Smith’s bill would retroactively ratify the FCC’s broadcast flag regulations, rejected by the courts last year. This effort to impose content protection mechanisms in all future TVs is still just as terrible an idea now as ever.
The bill would also give the FCC authority to regulate the design of digital radios (both terrestrial HD Radio and XM and Sirius satellite). The bill envisions an “inter-industry” negotiation with a preordained outcome — federal regulations mandating content protection mechanisms in all future HD Radio and satellite radio receivers.
The FCC regulations could make room for “customary historic uses of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.” Presumably, that means you could design a digital device just as good as an analog cassette deck, but no better.
Sorry, Sen. Smith, but American innovators and music fans deserve better.
Please write your Senator about this!
UPDATE: For more on this, check out Public Knowledge’s analysis, as well as Boing Boing’s.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Broadcast Flag is back, this time it covers iPods and PSPs, too
By Cory Doctorow – Boing Boing
The Senate has introduced the “Digital Content Protection Act of 2006,” a bill that will create “Broadcast Flags” for all digital radio and television, leading to FCC oversight of all new digital media technologies from iPods and PSPs to TVs and DVD recorders.
Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models.
There are two things to be certain of this century:
1. Everything that can be expressed as bits will be expressed as bits
2. Bits will only get easier to copy
The entertainment companies are convinced that their businesses depend on copy-proof bits. This is ridiculous: there’s no such thing, there never will be.
Governments that try to protect businesses that demand copy-proof bits are like governments that try to protect businesses on the sides of volcanoes, who demand an immediate end to business-disrupting lava.
If the current entertainment companies can’t or won’t adapt to a world of bits, that’s too bad. Let them die, and let new businesses that thrive in the new technological reality take their place. If you can’t stand the heat, get off the volcano.
Back in the mainframe days, IBM made its money by giving away computers below cost and then charging a bundle for keyboards and printers. Hitachi killed the mainframe business by introducing cheap peripherals for IBM mainframes.
Killing mainframes didn’t kill computers: it made them better. IBM was forced to get into the minicomputer business, which led to the personal computer.
If computer industry complaints got the same attention as the entertainment crybabies get from lawmakers, there’d be 10,000 computers total in the world, running punchcards, with three companies making modest sums servicing them and shipping a new model every three years.
Hollywood’s crybaby capitalists accuse us of being “communists” with one breath, and in the next, they go begging to Congress to turn the FCC into device czars who keep the market from being disrupted by innovation.
Andy Setos, the Fox executive who invented the Broadcast Flag, once told me that his objective was “a well-mannered marketplace.” The entertainment industry’s version of a planned economy is bad policy.
Send a strong signal to your lawmaker: if you break my TV, radio, and computer, I will campaign tirelessly for anyone who will promise to throw you out of office and undo your deeds.
January 21st, 2006 at 9:05 pm
They’re just creating a niche for a modded-chip black market to spawn. There are modded chips for the xbox, there’ll be modded chips for hdtv. Done deal.
January 21st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
I will be buying stuff from South Korea….
January 22nd, 2006 at 12:42 am
“This action alert is for residents of the following states only: Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Message not found for key: LO, Massachusetts, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia”
Gee, guess the senators in MY state aren’t imporant enough to be permitted to find out about this nonsense.
January 22nd, 2006 at 1:29 am
You got it wrong. That only means you don’t have a senator in the committee, which is not EFF’s fault. You can still write a letter if you want.
January 22nd, 2006 at 8:41 am
…Does this keep coming back??????
Isn’t there some law or something that says after its been rejected like 4 or 5 times… that they can’t keep trying this again and again! >=(
January 22nd, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Nope. But even though laws can be brought back multiple times, that idea can be used for good laws too that were previously shot down by a congress that doesn’t favor good laws.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:03 pm
It’s not bad enough that these money hungry “bleep”s have to try to control my computer, control what I do with items that I have purchased, have had given to me, or have been shared by a friend, but now they choose to take over the device that I use to enjoy it. Who are the real communists here? Don’t governments over in communist countries control the media, free speech, and all that goes with it?
Yes, I intend to write my congressman Alcee Hastings, a really fine man. I also write to Senator Joe Biden quite frequently and I receive many notices of issues that are going to the Senate for vote. I can only urge others to do the same.
And yes, as to the comment that the poster’s state wasn’t on the list, trust me, if you write to your congressman or senator, the word gets around. And they all have to vote when the issue comes up before the entire congress. It will affect everyone.
January 23rd, 2006 at 1:09 am
It’s not bad enough that these money hungry “bleep”s have to try to control my computer, control what I do with items that I have purchased, have had given to me, or have been shared by a friend, but now they choose to take over the device that I use to enjoy it. Who are the real communists here? Don’t governments over in communist countries control the media, free speech, and all that goes with it?
Yes, I intend to write my congressman Alcee Hastings, a really fine man. I also write to Senator Joe Biden quite frequently and I receive many notices of issues that are going to the Senate for vote. I can only urge others to do the same.
And yes, as to the comment that the poster’s state wasn’t on the list, trust me, if you write to your congressman or senator, the word gets around. And they all have to vote when the issue comes up before the entire congress. It will affect everyone.