[DMCA-Activists] MPAA Attempt to Plug the Analog Hole

[Seth Johnson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [IP] : MPAA try to close the analog hole
Date: Tue,  1 Nov 2005 12:58:46 -0500
From: "David Farber" <address@hidden>
Reply-To: address@hidden
To: address@hidden



_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:        MPAA try to close the analog hole
Author: Chris Beck <address@hidden>
Date:           1st November 2005 12:48:06 pm

from EFF:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004106.php

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Ladies and gentlemen, the MPAA have chosen Halloween week to
resurrect their most misconceived monster ever: the Thing from
the Analog Hole.

Feel free to flick through this new Halloween document: it's a
legislative draft proposed by the MPAA for a hearing of the House
Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property,
on the topic "Content Protection in the Digital Age: The
Broadcast Flag, High-Definition Radio, and the Analog Hole," on
November 3rd.

On Thursday, they'll be no doubt declaring this law's passing to
be vital to the entertainment industry's survival, just as Jack
Valenti told the same committee that the home video-recorder
would kill the film industry.

Here's what the proposed law says, in a nutshell:

Every consumer analog video input device manufactured in the
United States will be, within a year, forced to obey not one, but
two new copy restriction technologies: a watermarking system
called VEIL, and a rights system called CGMS-A (we've covered
CGMS-A before; we'll talk a bit more about VEIL soon).

And what might these MPAA-specified, government-mandated
technologies do?

They prescribe how many times (if at all) the analog video signal
might be copied - and enforce it. This is the future world that
was accidentally triggered for TiVo users a few months ago, when
viewers found themselves lectured by their own PVR that their
recorded programs would be deleted after a few days.

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-- 
Chris Beck  -  http://pacanukeha.blogspot.com
"We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it
from our Children."

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