This week's NTK newsletter has an hilarious story about my recently released paper on Europe's coming Broadcast Flag:
While scientists valiantly warn of the pandemic spread of
the DRM flu, has anyone considered that innocent-seeming
CORY DOCTOROW might be an unsuspecting carrier? After years
of close physical contact with the biohazardous hands of
MPAA lawyers during the brief Broadcast Flag outbreak of
2004, he now seems to have been in *just* the right spot to
see the pestilence jump the species barrier to European
Digital TV. And this variant seems a lot nastier: tweaked by
Hollywood lawyers to determine at a much finer grain what
Europeans get to record off their TVs, where you get to save
it, what constitutes a "family", and who exactly in open
source will be buggered this time. And while the American
Broadcast Flag appears now to be at least temporarily
cordoned off in a batch of carefully isolated politicians,
this European "CPCM" mutation looks to be spreading through
the sprawling, marshy standard bodies endemic to the European
continent. Will we live in a locked-down, quarantined TV
world? Or are we *insufficiently paranoid*?
(Thanks, Brian!)
