Consensus At Lawyerpoint

Seth Schoen writes "The EFF has started a weblog about the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), called "Consensus At Lawyerpoint". This is the EFF's first-ever blog, the brainchild of new EFF staffer Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing blogging fame. Consensus At Lawyerpoint covers the efforts of Hollywood -- with the complicity of consumer electronics and computer companies -- to impose a new government mandate for copy controls in digital TV devices. This mandate would outlaw tuner cards for digital HDTV, unless they included DRM (and prevented the end-user from getting a cleartext recording). PVRs and VCRs might be allowed, but only if all their outputs were encrypted. Since all TV broadcasting in the U.S. is supposed to be digital by 2006, this could have an enormous effect on technology and on the competition for video standards in the marketplace. We hope that the blog format will help us get the word out and let interested people see what this group is up to." Interesting for a couple of reasons, both the subject matter (the beloved SSSCA/CBDTPA) and the method.

Comments

There is nothing llike...

[theolein]

a lawyer to destroy any incentive for invention. I think that if there is If there is anything in your country that will one day make the US a technnological backwater it will be American laws giving lawyers so much power.

At the moment it is in a balance in that people who invent have a large incentive to make an enormous amount of money but will that always be so?

Am I just na�ve?

[Control Group]

I've always believed that one should never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity. In my mind, this applies to the House and Senate as much as (or more than) it does to the American public at large.

But we're hitting a point here where I find it literally incredible that anyone capable of getting him/her self elected into the legislative branch can possibly not realize what's going on. Is it just me? Is this issue tougher to understand than I think? Do I just think the injustice is so obvious because most people on /. agree with me?

My one hope has been that if the demands of the entertainment industry got preposterous enough, someone would "catch on," the light bulb would go off, etc. But that hope is rapidly being crushed. I'm beginning to think that we've already lost, and all the valiant, worthy efforts of the EFF won't end up mattering a tinker's damn.

Digital TV doesn't excite me.

[NanoGator]

Part of me can't help but think that the real reason this industry is trying to encrypt the digital signal is so that VCR companies will have to pay them royalties. I don't think they care as much about what happens to their signal after it hits household TV's.

I'd be okay with royalty extortion, except they're trying to control what I do with the content. Well, I have a piece of advice for them. The minute that a TV show becomes too hard to watch because I refuse to be anchored to my TV day and night is the minute that I stop watching TV. I have plenty of things I could be off doing, TV is more of a luxury than anything else.

How do they seriously expect people to adopt Digital TV over Analog TV when they don't get the same priveledges they are used to? Hell, the reason I don't have Digital Cable right now is that my home-brew PVR can't work with it!