Hollywood Tastes New Copyright Victory - Act NOW

Geekwannabe writes "The FCC is about to pass regulations requiring all television manufacturers to include copy-protection in any television receiver or recorder. The 'broadcast flag' regulation is intended to allow TV networks and broadcasters to determine which of their shows you can record (essentially giving control of your VCR, TV and Computer back to the broadcasters.) In order for the new, copy-restrictions to succeed the FCC will make it illegal to manufacture or sell non-copy-protected devices in the U.S."

Comments

how about your 'air space' rights?

[nandix]

ok, so in a sense the broadcasters own the content they broadcast and therefore can somehow manage to get a law like this passed.
don't you own your house?, what about the broadcasted waves that go through your place?.
can't someone make it ilegal to broadcast copy-controlled content through his/her house?.
i don't live in the us, but if this gets passed, it probably will spread to third world countries
such as mine who are always passing laws in order
to get more money lent.

This is great

[the_other_one]

I'm going to open an appliance store in Niagra Falls Ontario. I'll specialize in legal uncrippled TV's

I should be ready to retire in a few months.

This has a big impact on curent HDTV sets

[cs668]

Since the current crop of HDTV sets do not have built in tuners they use external set-top boxes.

The RGB outputs of the set-top box are then hooked up to the HDTV set which is basically a monitor.

The problem is that since the RGB ouputs can be copied they will use the broadcast flag to determine when you can really get a 1080i signal from your set-top box. Anything with the broadcast flag set will come out in 480i.

That will make the current round of HDTV sets junk since most good programming will only show up as 480i. To bad for all of the early adopters.

Re:Attack the root cause of this.

[BitGeek]

If you think it started with Bush2 you're not paying attention.

Clinton worked hard to criminalize encryption, self-defense, homosexuality, etc.

And before him, along with congress during these whole periods, the politicians worked to increase their power base and their control over people.

Any democracy without really stringent controls on the government is a tyranny.

It really started here in 1919 when the constitution was ammended to allow income tax- the federal government has been growing like crazy since then. And the feds are far less accountable than your local state or city government. The New Deal, the gun bans of 1930 and 1968, the war on drugs that started soon after 1919... all of that is the result of people putting big government fans into power.

We need to rollback the last 100 years of laws- almost everything needs to go, except women voting.

Warning: Some FCC comments attached to WRONG rule!

[markwelch]

The author of the ZDnet article linked here made a mistake in one of his links -- changing the proposal number from 20-230 to the next sequential one -- and as a result, a number of comments clearly intended to be attached to 20-230 are attached to the next proposal in sequence.

Basically, the problem comes if someone uses the link in the article to locate the existing comments, and then submits their own comment by following links from there. I emailed the ZDnet author, so perhaps he can still correct the link.

There also appears to be some "spamming" of the correct proposed rule -- a huge number of identical comments. I'm sure that the FCC will treat all these identically-worded comments the same way your congressperson does: they count as ONE comment unless there are tens of thousands of them, in which case they count as a half dozen. Write your own reply comment in your own words!