As promised, Wired News has run an extensive, in-depth followup to the Reuters Broadcast Flag story it ran last week, soliciting comment from the activists who've been working on the issue since its earliest days. This coincides with a feature by Farhad Manjoo in Salon today, too. The Broadcast Flag will likely be enacted by Hallowe'en, unless we mobilize our friends to slashdot the FCC with letters in opposition to the proposal.
"The mandate comes with all kinds of obligations about what kinds of features you're allowed to offer with your product and how they must be implemented, and the people who control those requirements are the Hollywood movie studios and other technology and consumer electronic companies," he said. "It creates an environment where small innovators who are not willing to compromise for someone else's business model essentially get shut out."
He pointed to DVD technology as an example of what happens when technology is controlled by a particular group.
"In order to interoperate with DVD, you have to sign on with a bunch of agreements and private licensing arrangements under the auspices of the DVD forum," he said. "There's been no new feature added to DVD players since their introduction. And that's exactly the way Hollywood likes things to go."
