Broadcast Flag will make recording TV shows illegal!
cha...@dougstanhope.com
ALL I WANT is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend," says Sarah
Brydon, looking up from a long table covered with half-built
computers. These sound like the words of a science fiction nerd, not a
revolutionary. But Brydon is a new breed of protester – and she's
expressing her discontent with the U.S. government by building a
television.
She's one of a dozen consumer activists who have gathered on a
Saturday morning in late January for a high-definition television
"Build-In" at the Mission District office of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (where I work). Part computer hardware nerdfest, part
hell-raising political action, the Build-In is a high-tech protest of
a new Federal Communications Commission regulation called the
"Broadcast Flag."
According to the FCC, the flag is going to ease the nation's
transition from today's analog televisions to tomorrow's
high-definition televisions. What exactly does it mean for a
government agency to "ease" the transition from one kind of TV signal
to another? In this case, it seems to mean making the entertainment
industry feel very warm and fuzzy inside.
The Broadcast Flag is designed – poorly – to stop people from putting
high-quality recordings of TV shows on popular file-sharing networks
like BitTorrent. In reality, it will give the government an
unprecedented amount of control over what we do in our own homes with
recordings of HDTV. The flag is supposed to stop mass copying and
infringement, but it will also stop most consumers from perfectly
legal activities like saving HD copies of shows for personal use.
...
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Security cameras in toilet stalls and bedrooms are a small price to pay if it makes us safer!