No More Copying TV Programs

Losing Control of Your TV – Indeed, Hollywood was always set up to be one of the winners of the home technology revolution. What would have been different if the movie industry had won in its lawsuit against Sony is that the revolution in camcorders, amateur video productions, and independent moviemakers never would have happened. Steven Soderbergh would never have created Sex, Lies and Videotape. The Rodney King beating by the police wouldn’t have been filmed. Perhaps a generation of creativity and political change would have been lost. And Hollywood would have been happy. This is why I am so passionately opposed to letting the movie industry dictate design specifications for consumer electronics and home PCs. Hollywood moguls want consumers to purchase one-way devices that jack-in to the today business models. They are terrified of creativity that they cannot harness and monetize. Instead of sharing the golden eggs with the world, they would rather kill the magic goose. The broadcast flag ability to stamp out the recording of high-quality digital signals is probably the largest step in this direction since Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act back in 1998 a piece of legislation that has had astoundingly negative impacts throughout the high-tech world.

It seems to me that this is why we have laws. The problem is now that there’s a technical temptation to hard code prevention for possible violations into equipment. Seems to me that this is dangerous ground – what if the laws change? Also, aren’t we still innocent until proven guilty? Commercial interests apparently have more value than individual rights.