A Copyfighter’s Musings

So, I haven’t made it through all the notes yet, sadly.  There are just too many!

One thing that caught my attention:
Somewhere At bIPlog ,I read Frtiz Attaway discussing the broadcast flag.  He said something to the effect of, “the broadcast flag does not limit copying – it limits transmission.”  This is something that is often overlooked when it comes to the broadcast flag.  As far as I know, legacy devices would still work perfectly well, and you can make back-up copies.  You just can’t send your copies anywhere.

What I don’t get is why limiting transmission isn’t seen as a limit on copying.  The act of making a copy often means transmitting that copy somewhere else.

Also:  There were some people on that panel with Fritz Attaway who sounded like they saw the lack of a flag as a sign of the apocalypse.  That’s pretty ridiculous in the first place – but I think it’s even more ridiculous that they think the flag will solve the problem.

I don’t say this for the reason Professor Felten does in this post.  Compression does create a lesser quality recording, but it’s still pretty damn good – good enough for all the people on KaZaA, at least.

I don’t think the flag will have much impact because, if you know how to do the compression, you probably also know enough to do an analog capture in the first place to avoid the flag. Or, you’ll use a legacy device that doesn’t recognize the flag.  Or maybe you don’t know how to do those things and you just happen to have legacy devices by accident.  I think many people are pretty capable of doing all these things.  Again, plenty of people on KaZaA seem to be doing it.

Say the flag were mandated today.  I don’t know what effect it’d have.  There are already too many digtial televisions and video cards and software tools out there.  Maybe that’s a faulty impression, and some stats could prove me wrong. But, I honestly think that, for the flag to be effective, we’d have to implement it about 3 years ago.

Filed by Derek Slater at 5:18 pm under General news
Comments Off on More on the Berkeley DRM conference