Telecoms bill: getting messy
p2p news / p2pnet: The 159-page Stevens telecoms reform bill, which now includes broadcast and audio flag provisions, was, "buried under an avalanche of 200 proposed amendments," posts Danny O’Brien on the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Deep Links.
"At the markup committee meeting, senators became quickly mired in discussions over a tiny fraction of these proposals,: he says, going on:
"The remainder of the amendments – including Senator Sununu’s proposal to throw out the flags wholesale – were postponed until next Tuesday.
"It’s certainly getting messy in there. With Senator McCain proposing that the broadcast flag be tied to broadcaster support for a la carte cable channels, and heavyweights like Intel balking at the current language, even the flag’s proponents may be having second thoughts about entering this cauldron of competing special interests.
"If you have a senator on the Commerce committee, keep calling or writing to tell them to do the sensible thing, and snip out the extraneous flags from an already overcomplex bill."
Yesterday, in Public Knowledge, Alex Curtis said the return of the Broadcast Flag might have been missed because, this time, it was, "tucked into Senator Stevens’ 151 page telecommunications bill, S.2686."
What was an "onerous copy protection scheme" doing in the middle of a telecommunications bill?.
"If you’re confused, you should be," said Curtis, because, "it’s a tactic designed to sneak in a regulation that’s been repeatedly rejected by both Congress and the courts."
Also See:
Deep Links – Telecom Log Jam – Broadcast Flag Decision Postponed, June 22, 2006
onerous copy protection – Broadcast Flag, reloaded, June 22, 2006
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