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

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.

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!