A Copyfighter’s Musings

I must confess: I have yet to get through the entirety of the FCC’s gargantuan Order.  I have been trying to keep abreast of others’ analyses and excerpting of key parts We know it’s not really going to affect piracy and it’s going to cripple production and consumers uses of digital TV equipment.  But precisely how bad have we been screwed?

Professor Felten goes through his Broadcast Flag scorecard, and comes to the conclusion “The FCC’s order will be harmful; but it could have been much, much worse.” Sure.  But, reading Felten’s entire post, I thought he would have ended by saying, It’s bad, and it could get a lot worse as the FCC sorts out these details.  I have little reason to be optimistic at this point.

But forget what they might say – I can’t even discern what they already said.  SethF points out that the FCC wants to protect open source software defined radio; however, it seemed that open source does not gel with the FCC’s robustness requirements (as described here).  Aren’t they still, as the EFF argued in its comments on BPDG, still not tamper proof?  I noted in my brief skim of the Order that the FCC brought up distinguishing software, but how far does this go?

And Ernest’s checking out a possible loophole regarding exports.

In any case, I’ve got more reading and thinking to do on this. So, keep reading the great analyses out there, go back to the Order, then ask a friend, then back to the primary sources, rinse, repeat.

Filed by Derek Slater at 3:46 pm under General news
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