I pledge avoidance to the flag

Slashdot reports that the FCC has decided on a broadcast flag mandate. That’s bad news. The FCC thinks we are all copyright criminals first, and owners of the public airwaves second.

The good news is, they’ve decided on a broadcast flag so devoid of sense, relevance, and utility as to render it less of a threat to your TiVO than the spit-take you will be performing upon reading about it. Get this:

• The HDTV stream will not be encrypted. So all current, broadcast-flag agnostic devices will still work, and will be defacto flag-stripping machines.

• They think they are going to allow you to share video over your “home network,” but prevent you from sharing it over “the internet.”

• The flag will not restrict analog output at all.

• “The flag does not restrict copying in any way.”

• “The FCC adopted an ‘ordinary user’ robustness standard”—ensuring that every teenager in the world will be able to shut the flag off in under 5 minutes.

• “Today’s decision by the FCC is an historic step forward for consumers.”

(The quotes are from this FCC press release.)

Now clean up the milk that just shot out of your nose. While it’s funny to see self-important dweebs cocking up so mightily in their efforts to serve their moneyed masters, this stupid mandate is going to hurt the US electronics industry. In 2005 when new TVs start costing more and doing less than old TVs, who will buy new TVs? At least, who will buy a new TV without a debug sequence that disables the broadcast flag “accidentally” left in by the factory—the factory outside the US that is only subject to silly US laws in theory. They should have called it the Masturbatory Bureaucrat Grey Market Enhancement and Offshore Electronics Factory Full Employment Flag.

Filed under: copyright