Broadcast Flag back from the dead
Tuesday, October 11th, 2005The MPAA and RIAA just won’t quit in their effort to get your computer to serve their interests. Congress is being pushed to make the Broadcast Flag law, and they’ve got 20 members of the House to back them up.
The Broadcast Flag is an example of how big corporations work. They all talk the free-market talk, but when they can’t get what they want from the “free” market, then they go for government intervention every time. In the case of movie and record companies, they got a completely one-sided rewrite of copyright law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that allows them to take down anyone’s web site with no due process. The resulting abuses were entirely predictable: if someone criticizes the corporation, just trump up an allegation of copyright infringement and the critics disappear.
Similarly, the Broadcast Flag would make it mandatory for your computer hardware to copy-protect anything you record off television or radio. You’d never buy crippled hardware of your own free will, of course—which is how “free” markets are supposed to work—so they want to make it illegal for you to buy hardware that is not crippled.
Let them know that nobody but a few rich corporations want this bill.
