Sununu Sets Aim on Broadcast Flag Again

Flag waver writes "Senator John Sununu (R-NH) will introduce legislation that will prevent the FCC from creating technology mandates for the consumer electronics industry. As a result, the FCC would be hamstrung in its efforts to revive the broadcast flag. '"The FCC seems to be under the belief that it should occasionally impose technology mandates," Sununu said in a statement. "These misguided requirements distort the marketplace by forcing industry to adopt agency-blessed solutions rather than allow innovative and competitive approaches to develop."' Sen. Sununu previously tried without success to remove the broadcast flag provisions from the massive telecommunications bill that died before reaching the Senate floor during the last Congress."

Comments

I wish he was my representative

[packeteer]

I am sure i am not the only one who wished i was being respresented by someone sensible on topics like this.

Re:I wish he was my representative

[arivanov]

If I was an american - I wish he was not my rep.

This is a classic case of throwing the baby out along with the bath water as this will also prohibit FCC to enforce mandatory interoperability and adherence to standards.

Re:I wish he was my representative

[2.7182]

"Wonder if Sununu's fired now ?"

(It's a palindrome I just made up.)

Re:I wish he was my representative

[kg4czo]

Why? This kind of legislation is good. It allows the market to grow on it's own as opposed to the FCC dictating what technology can and can't do with respects to DRM.

There is no mandatory interoperability or standards enforcement the FCC does with respect to these kinds of technologies.

In essence, the FCC doesn't have the power to dictate which road technology takes. They can, however, dictate by whom and how the frequency spectrum can be used, and also regulate censorship on public broadcast networks.

Good, more limits on the FCC

[Ingolfke]

The FCC is taking on too much power. Limiting their abilities is a very good thing.

Sununu

[G�tz]

My first thought was about an Opensolaris distribution by the Ubuntu folks.

I don't think I could support this bill

[zenyu]

As a MythTV developer I'm as anti-broadcast flag as one could be, but I don't think I could support this bill.

While the broadcast flag was a travesty amoung quite a few travesties surrounding the ATSC standard the FCC needs to be able to impose standards on the industry. Without mandated standards the cable industry would fragment with each manufacturer of devices coming up with their own standards like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta and all the different access control device manufacturers did in the 1990's. At the moment the FCC is pushing OpenCable(TM). It is in fact anything but open, but it is marginally better for the consumer than the current state of things in the USA because it allows you to buy a box from Motorola, SA, or TiVo you are not locked into whichever one your cable company chooses for their entire system.

But under a different administration the FCC might push for something like Europe's DVB CAM standards which are a better trade-off between allowing broadcasters to encrypt copyrighted material+ and allowing consumers to watch the material as they please once they've paid for it. In Europe they allow broadcasters to encrypt the material but once the consumer decrypts it with the key they buy from the broadcaster the copyrighted material is now a normal video they can transfer to their laptop or iPod to watch there. With "Open" Cable the materials are locked in your OpenCable receiver and can only be transfered to other DRMed devices if the broadcaster specifically allows it.

This bill looks like it would bar the FCC from doing the only good thing it does do, promulgate technical standards. It would basically religate the FCC to enforcing government mandated censorship and to enforcing technical standards directly dictated by congress, i.e. laws written by companies that write the largest checks to legislators and their families. If get the FCC out of the business regulation business, it would be much more wise to have it give up it's monopoly regulation powers and hand those over to the FTC. The FTC could apply the same standards to telecommunications as it does to other industries and could be more effective without getting into nitti-gritty regulation of specific fees, etc. It could simply bar a cable company that used anti-competitive tactics from selling any content over their pipes, or prevent a content company from owning any cable in the ground.

If you want to pass a simple law that makes any future broadcast flag moot, pass a law that removes copyright protection* from any work where the a paying customer can not easily remove DRM from media without paying an additional fee. You would quickly see content producers begin to police the broadcasters to prevent them from implementing any unworkable and expensive "content protection" schemes. The broadcasters would instead do something smarter like embedding your subscriber ID in the file when it exits the CAM so that any bit-perfect or even decent looking copy could be traced back to the subscriber who originally lost control of it.

+As a guy with a liberterian bent I have no problem with allowing DRM without restriction when dealing with non-government protected creative works in a competitive landscape.

*Copyright protection is a very non-liberterian form of restriction on property that prevents you from improving your property once it begins to look like something someone else did in the last 150 years or so. We accept this restriction on our liberty because the term of the restriction is short and it presumably encourages the distibution of new ideas into the public domain. When DRM prevents the entry of a work into the public domain this alone makes copy rights on works "protected" in this manner troublesome. Combine that with the current term of copyright, which has actually lengthened in these last two hundred years instead of shortening as the means of distribution became cheaper, and extending any copyright protection to a DRMed work in this day and age is downright immoral.

Re:I don't think I could support this bill

[rollingcalf]

The FCC should only be in the business of setting standards on what is *transmitted*, and should not be in the business of dictating what end-user devices *must* do. It is then up to manufacturers to implement devices that interoperate with one or more (or none) of those transmission standards, and the market will decide their fate.

So it would be appropriate for the FCC to set a standard on how the broadcast flag is delivered in the signal, but not for them to force end-user devices to interpret it.

Re:Legislating the market

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

The irony of the attempt to introduce a law to prevent the ability from another government agency introducing laws in the area it was set up to oversee is amazing - laws to castrate the law-making powers of a government body?

Somebody needs to go back and relearn their civics(not the ones from Honda).
See the FCC is part of the executive branch, it(the FCC) should be executing the laws from Congress(the legislative branch)instead of just making up mandates through some sort of fiat the FCC does not posses. It's all about checks and balances.

PLEASE support this!

[Anonymous Coward]

All:

I'm posting anon for damn good reason.

I work engineering for one of the largest cable companies in the country. We've been hearing that all the new contracts have clauses forcing us to provide broadcast flag measures. We've been told to have it ready this spring for a test run against customers this summer.

I'm talking about:
  - Disable record
  - Limit playback to N times
  - Disable analog
  - Limit outputs to 480i
  - Disable fast forward/rewind/skip forward/skip back

I feel it's unethical... especially since you're already paying for these channels.

Please support this legislation. I don't want this to happen!