EFF filed its comments on the hateful Broadcast Flag — a proposal to turn over a veto over new general-purpose digital media technology to Hollywood studios, the same companies that tried to outlaw the VCR — yesterday. The FCC got over 2,000 comments on the issue, most strongly opposing it. There's a reply-comment period that opens today and closes mid-January; hope you folks will all think about contributing between now and then (watch this space for more).
The value of any new technology is in large part derived from
unanticipated, innovative uses, uses that spring up as the widest possible
variety of technologists and end-users tinker, modify, and experiment to
discover remarkable ways of extracting new value unimagined even by the
technology's inventors. The explosive growth of technologies such as the
Internet, the cellular phone and the automobile is characterized by a
Cambrian explosion of innovation in each case. From the drive-in theater
to telephone dating to Internet-based auctions, innovation has been a
principal driver of consumer adoption of a new technology.Innovation flourishes in the absence of stricture. Hot-rodders and
overclockers both rely on open hardware to tweak their equipment for
maximum performance, and even an average driver would balk at the
notion of purchasing an automobile whose hood was welded shut. A
broadcast flag mandate, particularly if it includes tamper-resistance
requirements, effectively welds shut the hood of every DTV device. It
insists that only authorized parties may peek at the works of any given
DTV device, and requires that interoperability be subject to the prior
consent of vendors who may have reason to discriminate against new
market entrants. In this regime, which BPDG co-chair Andy Setos of Fox
Studios described as an "orderly marketplace," competition is replaced by
gentlemen's agreements between self-interested parties who seek (in the
case of the entertainment companies) to control private use of DTV
programming and (in the case of the technology companies whose
protection technologies are chosen) to shut out their competitors.In the absence of a broadcast flag mandate, all an innovator needs
to know to build a novel DTV device is what she can find in publiclyavailable
materials. She need not beg permission of a favored vendor for
some exotic copy-control system nor submit to a private license agreement
governing the scope of her use of that system. She need not add
superfluous tamper-resistance measures that seek to prevent end-users
from modifying her invention or lock out service-centers from performing
minor repairs.The broadcast flag proposal turns all this on its head. An innovator
in a broadcast flag mandate world needs to build her technology to interact
not with a simple MPEG file, but with a proprietary system whose only
documentation and tools exist at the sufferance of a private licensor. She
is bound not only by the strictures of the art and science, but by any
conditions that the licensors with whom she must treat choose to burden
her with. She can not rely on free/open source software — which
encourages end-user modification — for critical components.
Link (200k PDF)
