Re: [DMCA-Activists] DRM news

[Serge Wroclawski]

This is the second time you've done this!

You take my personal mail and you decide to address it to a public group.

You clearly have no clue about privacy or manners.

I will be sure not to mail you anything I don't want to be personal again.

- Serge Wroclawski

On 13 Jun 2002, Jonathan Watterson wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 11:09, Serge Wroclawski wrote:
> >
> > I thought it as the issue that RMS and Bruce Perens were discussing a
> > month or so back...
> >
> > They (certain parties) want to make DRM a requirement in television and
> > furthermore a requirement that all devices have it.
> >
> > That means no FS implementations of TV.
> >
> > Wish I had more details.
> >
> > - Serge
>
> Hey, Serge, thanks for asking, and you're not a schmuck. ;) I suddenly
> realize I haven't been keeping you guys posted on what's going on. Let
> me catch up.
>
> The issue you mention is the BPDG, or the Broadcast Protection
> Discussion Group. It is a nominally "open" group, reporting to a
> subcommittee of the MPAA, that's been meeting for the past year to come
> up with tech specifications for copy-protection/DRM controls to be
> installed in all devices capable of transmitting digital TV signals,
> including any computer with a video card. The end goal of the group was
> to present its results to Congress and have them made mandatory. This
> would criminalize GNU Radio. The group consists mostly of people from
> the tech industry, Hollywood, cable and satellite TV, and related
> industries.
>
> We and the EFF crashed the party. We put ourselves on the BPDG mailing
> list. Seth and Cory at the EFF maintain a weblog documenting the whole
> thing, at http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/. Last month Brad and I, along with
> Seth, Cory, and dozens of slashdotters, sat in on a conference call,
> scheduled to hammer out the details just before the "final report" was
> to be presented. That phone call is documented here:
> http://old.lwn.net/daily/bpdg-notes.php3.
>
> Largely as a result of our free-software advocacy and the EFF's consumer
> advocacy, the whole BPDG process fell apart. Tech companies like
> Philips, who looked ready to comply with Hollywood's plan for political
> purposes, suddenly were willing to raise their concerns -- after all,
> the plan would have given Hollywood *veto power* over any new
> digital-TV-related technology. Even *Microsoft* objected to the process,
> essentially putting them on our side. As a result, the "final report"
> was mostly a documentation of the group's inability to achieve
> consensus.
>
> I would forward the "final report" to the list, but it consists of
> several large ZIP files each including a bunch of really gnarly Word
> documents. If anyone wants it, let me know.
>
> The next steps: the BPDG has passed the buck to the shadier "policy" or
> "parallel" group, formed in conjunction with the BPDG to handle politics
> while BPDG handled tech. We're on their mailing list too, but after the
> slashdotted conference call, the cabal seems to be much less willing to
> discuss their business online. It is likely that before the end of the
> year, either (1) the parallel group will produce a DRM system that they
> will ask Congress to rubber-stamp, or (2) we will see a renewed push for
> the Hollings bill. Either way, however, we have thrown a big monkey
> wrench into the system and bought some time.
>
> The most immediate thing that y'all can do is spread the word. Shining
> the light of day on this process is what will thwart it. They're still
> putting people on the mailing lists for BPDG and the "parallel" group;
> directions are at http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000005.html#000005.
> Other than that, we're still formulating a longer-term strategy (and
> we're always open to ideas). But the bottom line is that now the DRM
> hydra will stick another head up somewhere and we have to watch for
> where that somewhere will be.
>
> J
>
>

-- 
"If you try to call the nested function through its address after the
containing function has exited, all hell will break loose." - St IGNUcius