Cory Doctorow on the proposed Analog Hole bill.
This just in from our friends over at Boing Boing: those wacky suits in Hollywood have just proposed new legislation that's even more ambitious than the Broadcast Flag fiasco. According to the good Mr. Doctorow:
Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.
This is like the Broadcast Flag on steroids. The Broadcast Flag only covered TV receivers. This covers everything with an analog video input. If this had been around in 1976, the VCR would have been illegal. Today, it would ban Mythtv, every tuner-card in the market, and boxes like ElGato's eyeTV the Slingbox and the Orb and the vPod. This is a proposal to turn huge classes of technology into something that exists only at the sufferance of the studios.
...So what problem does this solve? In the parlance of the studios, this will "keep honest users honest." Which is to say that if you're someone who only wants to go on doing all the perfectly legal things that you can do with video today -- watch, store, time-shift, space-shift, format-shift -- then you will be prevented from doing so without permission.
However, if you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you. This is not a proposal to protect copyright -- this is a proposal to bootstrap Hollywood's limited monopoly over who can copy its movies into an unlimited monopoly over the design of deivces capable of copying its videos.
Cory has a long, in-depth examination of what he sees coming out of this idiotic proposal. You can read his commentary here, the original story from the EFF over here, and I'm sure J.D. will be logging in some thoughts about it before long.
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