That's great it starts with a mandate, birds and snakes and aeroplanes…
Senator Fritz Hollings has introduced a modified version of the SSSCA, called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which will do just what it says: convert our rich innovative technosphere into a one-way medium run by coked-up Hollyweird fatcats who thought that the VCR was a bad idea but that Police Academy n -1 was just dandy.
The CBDTPA (let's call it the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act and have done with it) requires technologists to arrive at a trumped-up "consensus" with Hollywood Political Officers before they can bring any new products to market. This "consensus," reached at lawyerpoint, establishes what features every product that can store, trasnmit, display or manipulate digital files must have and which files it must not have: everything not mandatory is verboten.
If Senator Fritz has his way, no new technologies will be brought to market without a one-year review. Open Source will be dead, since there will be no way to ensure that your users don't remove your mandated copy-protection measures.
Now more than ever, it is time to put your money and time and energy behind organizations like the EFF as our technologies' very right to exist is challenged.
