Slashdot Mirror
Broadcast Flag 2 - Electric Boogaloo
blamanj wrote to mention that, a week after we reported on the court rejection of the broadcast flag, the MPAA is working on new legislation to broaden the FCC's power. From the article: "The draft bill says, simply, that the FCC will 'have authority to adopt regulations governing digital television apparatus necessary to control the indiscriminate redistribution of digital television broadcast content over digital networks.' The DC Circuit nixed the flag on the grounds that the FCC didn't have the authority. This language would clear that up." Update: 05/13 19:20 GMT by Z : Title amended with apologies to the Bugaloos.
"... the MPAA is working on new legislation to broaden the FCC's power"
...
I didn't know the MPAA was a legislative body
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
the official sequel joke is now "The Secret of Curley's Gold"
As you were
doesn't mean you're paranoid.
Sigh.
The only flag I want is the one sewn on my old uniform.
Will in Seattle
Whatsa matter, sport? Courts got you down? They say you have no legal leg to stand on? Don't listen to them! Get your own laws! You write 'em. You pay for 'em. You benefit from 'em.
I get the feeling that a gigantic black market will emerge if this passes. If the internet routes around censorship as if it's damage then technological progress will route around hardware restrictions as if it's censorship.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
1. Anything not nailed down is mine.
2. Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
3. If the only tool you have is a crowbar, every problem looks like hours and hours of fun!
Of course we can get along just fine with the software industry. TCPA, DRM, Steam, Valve, Half-Life, Crowbar. It all makes sense now!
A bugaloo is not the same thing as a boogaloo.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's a path of self destruction - there's a price people are willing to pay for entertainment. Cross the line and they'll become pirates. The real challenge of capitalism is to make sure that it works out fine for EVERYONE. For socialism the challenge is induvidual incentive. Neither works, if they don't try to address these challenges.
Scott Adams: If the capitalists don't like capitalism, they shouldn't have named it after themselves.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I love it how the MPAA can draft legislation for the Congress now. I thought that we elected people to actually draft legislation but I guess I was wrong. Now all you need to draft legislation is a billion dollars and the knowledge of where to deposit some of the money.
I'm going for a new meme here:
My mom washed the broadcast flag, and it BLEW UP!
put the what in the where?
This would solve a variety of problems: Fair use would not be destroyed. And because information broadcast is, to all practical extents, available for consumption by "the public", then there should be no restriction on time- or format-shifting of the same. This law would be much more fair to both sides of the issue, as the bottom line is that our country is meant to be free, not governed by the will of corporations, though corporations should still have a fair chance at profits, even big profits, because corporations are the ones that pay us, feed us, drive our economy, and give us a better standard of living through the channeling of funds and efforts that would otherwise not take place.
Nothing is digital, once going to the pure nature of electronics and electricity. Even information transmitted over a fiber optic cable is an analog wave of light. Anything transmitted over a copper wire is an analog electrical waveform. When it comes down to all of it, Digital does not exist. We cannot look at a digital signal thru an oscilloscope and see 1's and 0's shooting across our screen.
Digital phone network? Nope, it's still an analog wave carrying all of the information. No matter how anything goes or is transmitted, there's no true such thing as digital.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You know, it's interesting that the MPAA is taking the approach of giving additional regulatory power of the FCC rather than lobbying congress to mandate the flag.
...
Laying groundwork for easier actions in the future, perhaps
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Let's not lose sight of how the U.S. Government works here...
Congress *makes the rule*, and the courts *enforce* them. So, the media, having been told by the courts, "this is not what Congress intended", are going to the source of the rules and requesting a change -- as any group of citizens in the country have a right to do. You may not agree with the request, and it is your right to oppose and argue against the change, but there is no "bypassing" to rant an rail against.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
[in unison] "F**k the poor!"
"Good!"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The device makers will put up a pretty strong resistance to this. MPAA isn't the only industry group that would be lobbying over this.
:)
The FCC regulations were politically convenient, since the elected officals could distance themselves from it, claim to support or oppose it depending on the direction of the political winds.
Republicans would probably find it hard to increase the amount of regulation on high-tech industries. Not saying it's impossible, but it's hardly going to zip right on through. Unlike the DMCA which was generally pro-business this bill pits several intrests against one another. If the bill directly attacked consumers it would pass in a hearbeat
Save a life, sign your organ donor card.
Nothing is more harmful to the rule of law than measures such as these. Blatantly obvious purchase of legislation, the ever-expanding scope of "criminal" behavior, and plainly selective enforcement of the law is combining to create an entire generation of people who will simply ignore the increasingly broad and self-contradictory stack of rules.
People truly follow the small subset of the law that they understand, and nothing more.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
The FCC mission is to prohibit interference among signals, by enforcing the assignment of segregated communications channels. Some of those channels travel over "airwaves" owned by the public: the space between points in the US which carries light in frequencies invisible to humans. That trusteeship of the airwaves justifies another role: publicly receivable signals transmitted over those airwaves must meet acceptable standards for public consumption, as agreed by transmitters in the terms of their license for spectrum leased from the FCC. Those standards are limited to offensive criteria, like sexual representations, some politics, and (minimally) violence. That is the FCC's entire mission, which excludes private transmissions (including subscriptions like cable and satellite), and transmissions in media other than the airwaves (including telephone and data networks).
This "broadcast flag" rule is not just "technically illegal". Content policing is the jurisdiction of the Library of Congress' Copyright Office. That office is already complicated (and often contradictory) enough, with its own overreaches (eg. copyright perpetuation). This rule is not so much the FCC filling a gap, or even augmenting LoC oversight. It is really a recognition by a bureaucracy that its main source of power, administering the airwaves, is becoming a tiny area of activity. As other media dwarf the airwaves in traffic, and tech like phased arrays undermine even the necessity for segregation of channels by frequency, the FCC is becoming merely a 20th Century office, as obsolete as the 19th Century offices governing horsedrawn carriages. But its ability to influence Congress, while it still controls the still popular airwaves (which carry most news broadcasts), offers a way to change its mission to one with more power than it ever had. If it jumps beyond the airwaves domain, to define its mission as censor (rather than guarantor of signal integrity), it will not only have power over otherwise free American activities, but need never again be threatened with obsolescence.
The FCC's creeping power grabs are completely predictable, given the increasing irrelevance of the underlying problem it is chartered to solve. But Congress should see this as a chance to phase out a dangerous and unnecessary bureaucracy. Preserving only its technically necessary functions, while they still exist. Then let it die, not reanimate it as a monster censor we'll never banish.
--
make install -not war