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Amendment To Kill Broadcast and Audio Flags
Bruce Perens writes "Senator John Sununu is proposing an amendment, H.R.5252, to strike both the broadcast flag and the radio flag from this year's U.S. telecommunications bill.
If the amendment does not pass, we will be faced with mandatory DRM in video and audio devices, and with a prohibition on the use of Open Source software for such devices (because it can be modified to remove DRM). Time is short, the committee markup of the telecommunication bill is proceeding now in Washington and it's important to show your Congressperson that there is constituent support to remove the broadcast and audio flags. Please see the alert and please use the information there to call your Congressperson today."
If the amendment does not pass, we will be faced with mandatory DRM in video and audio devices, and with a prohibition on the use of Open Source software for such devices (because it can be modified to remove DRM). Time is short, the committee markup of the telecommunication bill is proceeding now in Washington and it's important to show your Congressperson that there is constituent support to remove the broadcast and audio flags. Please see the alert and please use the information there to call your Congressperson today."
I really hope there's somebody with a lot of money that can buy this bill through.
;) Our politicians aren't even hiding this anymore, they're in the pockets of corporations, and that's that, get bent, if you don't consume you're obviously a terrorist, or a left-wing nutjob.
The broadcast flag has zero use to the average american, and is nothing but a means of control as to what can be done with broadcast signals in favour of the media corporations. We've acheived a Marxian nightmare, a truly capitalistic soceity
To quote Lewis Black, "politicians and corporations have been in bed together our whole lives, they've just stopped hiding it."
Bah, I think I woke up on the wrong side of this democracy. >={
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I have already spoken with two members of Parliament and raised this issue with people I work with. But I feel helpless to stop the numbnuts running the show south of the border, and once it passes there, the rest of the world will be pressured to "harmonize" or we will be stuck with US-legal crippled consumer electronics in our stores.
My rights don't need management.
Just let the broadcast flag be mandatory, and then say in the court that even binary code is not a sufficiently tamper-resistant way to implement DRM (see the "Copy protection" section on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Audio for the past history) and thus should not be allowed. This will surely kill the entire DRM industry, because they will be left with no tools to implement their wishes legally.