Preparing for the Broadcast Flag?

Couch Potato asks: "I'm worried that, come next July, the FCC mandated broadcast flag will soon take away all sorts of fair use rights I have long enjoyed. Given that there are only a few months left to make purchasing decisions, how best can one prepare for the advent of the broadcast flag?" "I'm somewhat aware of projects like Myth TV, but it's not all that I want. Specifically, I want to make sure that I can record DVDs or similar files of any program I want off of cable, sattelite or broadcast TV, flag or not and without any other encumbering restrictions (such as the Macrovision DRM for DVDs) and without worry that someday they'll change something so that my old drivers and hardware are suddenly obsolete and useless when faced with updates to the formats. Note that this makes closed-source-only drivers an issue, because assuming the hardware can still be adapted to whatever they change on us, open-sources drivers can be modified and closed-source ones probably won't be, whether for legal or practical considerations. So then, what can someone with a modest budget do to make sure that their constitutional fair use rights don't succumb to planned obsolecense, like the VCR has?"

Comments

I'm ready: I don't give a crap

[metamatic]

So long as the broadcast flag only applies to HDTV, I don't give a crap, because I've already decided I have zero interest in HDTV. And yes, I've seen it.

There's no point having the shows in high resolution if they're still packed full of ads, have ugly station logos in the corner, and are mostly crap. There are maybe three stations I'd care to watch in HD, and it would pump the cost of cable or satellite to over $50 a month to get those stations in HD plus the handful of other channels I watch, so I'm not interested.

Movies I watch on DVD.