[IP] : MPAA try to close the analog hole

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:	MPAA try to close the analog hole
Author:	Chris Beck <cbeck@pacanukeha.net>
Date:		1st November 2005 12:48:06 pm

from EFF:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004106.php
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Ladies and gentlemen, the MPAA have chosen Halloween week to resurrect their
most misconceived monster ever: the Thing from the Analog Hole.

Feel free to flick through this new Halloween document: it's a legislative draft
proposed by the MPAA for a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the
Internet, and Intellectual Property, on the topic "Content Protection in the
Digital Age: The Broadcast Flag, High-Definition Radio, and the Analog Hole," on
November 3rd.

On Thursday, they'll be no doubt declaring this law's passing to be vital to the
entertainment industry's survival, just as Jack Valenti told the same committee
that the home video-recorder would kill the film industry.

Here's what the proposed law says, in a nutshell:

Every consumer analog video input device manufactured in the United States will
be, within a year, forced to obey not one, but two new copy restriction
technologies: a watermarking system called VEIL, and a rights system called
CGMS-A (we've covered CGMS-A before; we'll talk a bit more about VEIL soon).

And what might these MPAA-specified, government-mandated technologies do?

They prescribe how many times (if at all) the analog video signal might be
copied - and enforce it. This is the future world that was accidentally
triggered for TiVo users a few months ago, when viewers found themselves
lectured by their own PVR that their recorded programs would be deleted after a
few days.
########
-- 
Chris Beck  -  http://pacanukeha.blogspot.com
"We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children."

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