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20 Lawmakers Want to Kill Your Television
Macki writes "As previously mentioned, the Broadcast Flag is back before congress. There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill. The insane thing about it is the fact that no one supports the bill except a handful of entertainment companies. Probably not even the employees of the entertainment companies. It's bad enough they want to break our televisions, but the way that they are subverting democracy is just astounding. Danny O'Brien at the EFF has done a spectacular job deconstructingthe MPAA/RIAA's efforts to ramrod this through, and more importantly, the motivations of the members of congress who are helping them."
OK, now do the RIAA/MPAA/whatever-AA really lose that much money due to fileswapping, piracy, video-taping, etc., that it is even financially worth all this bad PR? Or are they just run by a bunch of outright bastards who like being thought of as professional killjoys?
If slavery and civil rights were held to a popular vote, there's a good chance the laws never would have passed.
:) Prohibition is missing though.
Great examples of some of the better laws in the country
So please, before you trash Congress for against "the will of the people," bear in mind that is exactly why Congress exists; so that when the time is appropriate, Congress can go against the majority of the people in order to protect the minority.
So, these poor rich people get protected and everybody else gets punished. I think that this is the subverting that the gp was talking about.
Because the law and decades of court decisions explicitly give them that right.
So as software developers, we can tack on licenses such as the GPL to determine how our works are used... but networks cannot tack on restrictions to how their media is used.
There is nothing in the GPL that attempts to restrict your standard fair use rights, such as making a backup copy or loading the program into RAM. The GPL only deals with redistribution rights. The GPL gives you broad redistribution rights with some conditions attached. It is well understood that for a TV show, the producers give you zero redistribution rights. But redistribution has nothing to do with you taping a show.
This proposed law is about revoking rights that you already explicitly have, such as timeshifting shows, and transferring them to the content producers. These particular rights are not addressed by the GPL; the GPL simply assumes that you retain the standard rights that you already have under the law.
The truth is that history is repeating itself here, I know this sounds off topic - but a few paragrapshs down I'll explain some more. The speculative industrial stock bubble in 1850 is very similar to the speculative internet stock bubble in 2000. The "war against indians" is very similar to the "war against terrorisim" - back then advances in transportation technology exposed us to indian culture in a very fast and dramatic way causing a culture clash, today the internet has exposed many unfree cultures arround the world to US culture in a very dramatic way to them and some have reacted by lashing out at us.
.... Second, there is no nicely divided north and south. Instead it is more like a division between tech and content industries. Third, copyrights are not the only information people are trying to controll - "money" is a way of storing information about value and transaction costs. The Fed and some large financial institutions are definitely trying to controll it, and all hell is about to break loose in the market place as well as the copyright space. Fourth, there is compelling reason to believe that no government will be on the side of freedom this time until the battle is all over. A flaw of democratic government is that it is often more accountable to the media than it is to securing freedoms.
Back then it was about controlling the labor market (slavery) in the industrial era, today it is about controlling information in the information age. Back then they screamed bloody murder that people were stealing their property rights as industrialists wanted to use available labor without giving a damn about who alledgedly "owned it". Today many industires and individuals want to just be able to use information at their disposal to provide effective services, without being microregulated with a zillion tons of content restrictions. (like google's guntenberg project, apple's ipod, to name a few out of thousands)
The speculative advances of the industrial revolution also caused a period of growth followed by a deflationary adjustment. Today, the housing and every other market is way over saturated in debt - and the writing is on the wall. (watch out for a major economic "adjustment")
There were even people who desperately tried to get the slave states to get along with the free states who naievely didn't understand the nature of slavery or that the forces that would drive the industries apart were far greater than the ones that bound them together. Today there are all these people who are desperately trying to cling to the copyright system, even though any sincere thought will show it's pretty much DOA, and should be DOA.
So yes, the way congress is acting shouldn't be any supprise. Renember how they extended slavery to last forever for all colored people, renember how they punished people for simply teaching others how to read. Funny how copyrights have effectively been made to last forever, and copyright violations can be punished worse than rape.
There are some important differeces though. First you can't controll information with physical violence, but you can attempt to controll it with BS, threats, lawsuits, brow-beating, etc
I think this would be great. As long as the people in power push to make your existing TV unusable, it would end up making less people waste time watching this horrible television that we have. This can only be a good thing for society.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
I predict that if the broadcast flag gets passed, it'll be far enough in the future before it really takes effect, that the broadcasters will have a fair chance of claiming, "but it was always there, we just didn't turn it on"...
First, very few households get broadcast TV any more. I have seen numbers as low as 20%. Most housholds have cable.
Second, what about the mantra that if you don't want people to record things, then don't send it on the radio spectrum? Cable companies can ask you to sign terms of agreements for viewing their broadcasts. They could put broadcast flags in their transmissions if they so choose --and there isn't much that anyone can do about it except not subscribe.
Ultimately I don't think producers and broadcast networks realize that it is their very own throats they are cutting. Those people who have a life do not schedule them around television broadcasts any more. That's what VCRs and TiVO are for. If too many programs have this flag, those who sell advertising will notice that the circulation isn't as wide as it used to be. And then guess what: It will not get used.
Television shows aren't free. If the distributors choose to stop airing this stuff because they can't get the broadcast flag, that's their business. Are we so far gone that we're back to bread and circuses to keep us passified? I say let Congress pass this bill. It will be an interesting experiment. I can't wait to see how much illiterate hate mail the congress critters get because kids can't watch their cartoons on TiVO, housewives can watch their soaps, and those with little imagination can't watch their gussied up game shows we call "reality television"...
I think this is a lot of hooey over nothing. Nobody's got the guts to use a broadcast flag. I dare these guys to do this to this to a program for one year. It'll never survive.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
We have the same direct democracy here in California. We have a voters guide that often tops 200 pages, plus local voting guides ranging from 50 to 200 pages. And it is kind of fun getting to vote on all the nit-picky details of how the state is run. We've given ourselves plenty of tax cuts :)
Unfortunately, when people in the rest of the country need an argument against direct democracy they simply say "California" and everyone on the other side shuts up. Pity, they're missing out on the fun of figuring out what all the school funding formulas and bond measures and criminal statute amendments and auto insurance regulation schemes mean.
Nationalizing the healthcare (like in Canda) isn't going to fix the problem: that a pressure group has gotten special powers from the government and is using them to benefit it's supporters at the expense of the public. If we take away the special power, the problem would largely resolve itself.
Before someone mentions "tort reform":
While it is true that in SOME states, the loose tort laws have driven the cost of insurance so high that doctors can't get insurance (decreasing the supply further). This is neither a national problem, nor in and of itself can account for the high cost of health care. Real tort reform is a good idea, but GWB style tort reform is a waste of everyone's time.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
From the open letter:
"The broadcast flag protects free, over-the-air digital television programming from unauthorized redistribution over the Internet without restricting the consumer's ability to copy programming or enjoy it anywhere within a personal at-home network."
From wikipedia:
"Possible restrictions include inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials."
So is the open letter lying outright? There seems to be a conflict here... what am I missing?