Well, they’ve barely finished hosing the blood off the tile after our total creaming of Hollywood’s would-be device-czars in the Broadcast Flag victory (where we got a judge to tell Hollywood that they shouldn’t have a veto over new digital television technologies), but it’s already back.
Here’s the shockingly broad and badly conceived bill that Hollywood is shopping on the Hill, trying to find a Congresscritter so fantastically, suicidally stupid that s/he will actually set out to break America’s televisions.
Look at this fox-in-the-hen-house language! You’d think that the studios were still living in their glory days of 1998, when they could get the DMCA passed without any debate, and not 2005, where 18 months’ worth of intensive lobbying on the Hill has resulted in NOT ONE major Hollywood-backed law being passed.
Read it through: not only does this give the FCC the right to regulate the Broadcast Flag rule, but also to “plug the analog hole,” the bizarre Hollywood plan to build fantastical “watermark detectors” in “all devices capable of performing an analog-to-digital conversion,” that will make your camcorder switch off if you point it at your television (or if you’re recording your daughter’s first step as she toddles past the television).
Hollywood — whom the Republican Congress already mistrusts as a bunch of crazy commie perverts — is proposing to mushroom a federal agency into an entity that will have to regulate every single contractual relationship between every single digital television tech supplier, and every device that can be used to receive a digital TV signal, which means every PC.
The draft bill says, simply, that the FCC will “have authority to adopt regulations governing digital television apparatus necessary to control the indiscriminate redistribution of digital television broadcast content over digital networks.”