Buying a Record of Reality–Corporate Content Tyrants Ready to Abuse
November 4th, 2005 by Adam Cuothe
Mark Hatchman at ExtremeDRM reports on US legislation regarding the “analog hole”:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself… The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday.
Scary stuff… What a bad idea to put rights on everything that happens within the tangible reality of society. Not to mention that the notion of forcing all analog media into digital formats is plain stupid. And that is of course how they’re attempting to enforce “rights”. Check out what Chief Technical Obfuscator, Brad Hunt (MPAA) says:
“Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites… In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection…and that’s why we need to drive this technology forward.”
He doublespeaks his way into making it sound like their plan is to help the “consumer” but the sole goal is to control the distribution of all meatspace recorded activity… if they can control it the can forcibly suck money of the populace to access it. These parasites, the MPAA–don’t they know parasites end up killing their hosts? How would it work?
The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.
A) This cannot work–it’s way hard to enforce and prevent circumvention of a forced analog-to-digital scheme
B) people have many legitimate reasons to prefer analog, a simple one being quality.
C) STUPID STUPID STUPID, to force all kinds of records into one ephemeral format that has no (and can have no) definite or proven ability to withstand millenia of preservation. If we can get anything from history it is because bits of it have been preserved and for all the wealth of knowledge and learning we gain from our past, we will definitely lose this by not permitting our present to be well documented and survive into the unimaginably distant future. To create an ongoing history that works to our benefit, we ought to have as many different modes of recorded preservation as possible–to insure against the fallibility of one. DRM is a mistake!
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