The Broadcast Protection Working Group is an obscure cabal of Hollywood Studios and cowed technologists who're skating down the slippery edge of the wedge. They're building a "consensus" standard for digital television devices.
On the face of it, this seems pretty innocuous. Who cares about digital TV? What's wrong with a consensus? And what do the internals of set-top boxes matter, anyway?
Don't be fooled. All over-the-air TV signals will be digital by the year 2006 (so sayeth the FCC), so the standards set down by the BPDG will govern every television set in four years time. What's more, the range of devices that the BPDG's standard extends far beyond simple TVs. If your computer has a capture card, the BPDG's decisions will govern the card's design and will therefore influence your OS vendor your hard-drive supplier, and the specs for your video card, cables and motherboard. (Don't even get me started on the illegality of making open-source software that works with digital TV broadcasts)
The worst part is that this "consensus" won't be optional. Once the BPDG signs off on its technophobic panic, they will go to Congress or the FCC and quietly get their "standard" written into the law. This is how the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act may come into law — not with one sweeping bill that inspires a Million Geek March on Washington (Why Washington? Why not Hollywood?), but with a series of mini-SSSCAs, each one picking off another technology.
The BPDG isn't a secret, but they're just not telling anyone about ti. It has an "open" mailing list that no one outside of the cabal receives and "open" meetings that no one outside of the cabal attends 00 and that the press is barred from.
Time to shine a light on the "consensus." The EFF's first-ever blog is a true account of the undertakings of the BPDG. If the BPDG isn't going to explain its workings to the world, someone's gotta. This is one of those situations where Google makes the bad guys crings — by the time the BPDG's spin-doctors get their act together and put up a brochureware site full of bland, reassuring homilies about the wonderful high-def utopia on the horizon, the EFF's BPDG blog will have so much Googlejuice that it will rule the top slot on BPDG queries forever.
<nelson>Ha ha</nelson>
