Hollywood has fielded a shockingly ambitious piece of "Analog Hole" legislation while everyone was out partying in costume. Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.
This is like the Broadcast Flag on steroids. The Broadcast Flag only covered TV receivers. This covers everything with an analog video input. If this had been around in 1976, the VCR would have been illegal. Today, it would ban Mythtv, every tuner-card in the market, and boxes like Elgato's eyeTV the Slingbox and the Orb and the vPod. This is a proposal to turn huge classes of technology into something that exists only at the sufferance of the studios.
And what do they suffer? Not much. Here are a couple of the stupid ideas we can expect to see protected through rules like this, all drawn from real discussions with DRM lobbyists from the MPAA:
1. You can "accept a contract" by changing the channel. If you change the channel from 3 to 4, and the show on channel 4 has a signal that says it can't be recorded, then by watching channel 4, you're "making an agreement" to waive your time-shifting right in exchange for the show. This is like a shopkeeper hiding a "I reserve the right to punch you in the nose" sign somewhere in his shop and then randomly clobbering his customers, answering any complaints by saying that you agreed to it when you came through the door.
2. Everything with value has a price-tag. Today you can rewind TV, fast-forward it, skip the ads, move it to another device in your house, or stream it to your web-browser on the road. Tomorrow all of these features will only exist if they are permitted, on a case by case basis. The studios will "enable the business-model" of charging you money for the stuff that you get for free today. Here's a quote: "Doing this stuff has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge money for it." They do indeed have value: you currently enjoy that value. Under this proposal, the value will be stolen from you and sold back to you piecemeal.
Now, will this solve any problems? Don't be ridiculous. There are literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of products in the market today that don't obey the rules the studios want to embed in their video. If just one of those devices gets access to the video, then poof, it's on the Internet. In other words, you won't need to own a free and open digitizer card to get access to digitized video: you'll just need to own Internet access.
So what problem does this solve? In the parlance of the studios, this will "keep honest users honest." Which is to say that if you're someone who only wants to go on doing all the perfectly legal things that you can do with video today — watch, store, time-shift, space-shift, format-shift — then you will be prevented from doing so without permission.
However, if you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you. This is not a proposal to protect copyright — this is a proposal to bootstrap Hollywood's limited monopoly over who can copy its movies into an unlimited monopoly over the design of deivces capable of copying its videos.
Any lawmaker who supports this is an idiot. Americans will forgive a lot of sins from their elected representatives, but there's one thing they won't stand for and that's breaking their TVs. Watch this space for information on how you can contact your congresscritter and make sure s/he gets the message.
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.
But it won't just be your TiVo: anything that brings analog video into the digital world will be shackled. Forget about buying a VCR with an un-DRMed digital output. Forget about getting a TV card for your computer that will willingly spit out an open, clear format.
Forget, realistically, that your computer will ever be under your control again. To allow any high-res digitization to take place at all, a new graveyard of digital content will have to built within your PC.
Freshly minted digital video from authorised video analog-to-digital converters will be marshalled here and here only, where they will be forced to comply with the battery of restrictions dictated by Hollywood.
(Thanks, Danny!)
