The EFF has issued a warning about a new gambit at play by Hollywood and the record companies to nip new technology in the bud. This effort comes about in the form of new broadcast flag legislation, which would limit access to TV or radio content by any new devices to
“customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law.”
In essence, instead of allowing “fair use,” which is a forward-looking concept that enables a user to reasonably access a certain amount of content under certain conditions, “customary use” would make any new technological feature by its very definition a tool of copyright infringement. Moreover, the FCC would have the power to determine if a new feature falls into the “customary use” category. As EFF points out
If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use. Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We’ll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.
The concept of “customary use” has raised an outcry among bloggers and copyleft-types. My favorite is this statement from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:
Hollywood’s crybaby capitalists accuse us of being “communists” with one breath, and in the next, they go begging to Congress to turn the FCC into device czars who keep the market from being disrupted by innovation.
Ars Technica has this deconstruction of the new bill and raises yet another alarm, this one about a provision dealing with “secure moving technology” that limits the extent to which content covered by the broadcast flag can migrate from its original receiving device to some other platform.
The broadcast flag alone isn’t enough, because what happens when you want to actually listen to the audio that the device has received? Unless you’ve got headphones attached directly to your digital radio, you’re going to want to move the signal from the digital radio to a stereo receiver (for “rendering” as the draft puts it), even if you’re not necessarily planning on ripping the music and uploading it to eDonkey. This where the “secure moving technology” kicks in. The “secure moving technology” ensures that whatever you do with the signal that leaves the digital broadcast receiver, it definitely won’t be anything you can’t already do right now. Furthermore, even some things that you can currently do will be outlawed if those things could facilitate piracy. This probably means that such devices won’t have much in the way of hi-fi analog outs.
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:48 PM|Comments(0)
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