Michael Binder of Canada had a good line on Friday [paraphrasing]: “I've heard about e-government, e-rulemaking, e-commerce — I say E-nough!”
I'm at a conference that has a single, shared, dialup connection supporting all of our wireless work. Life has slowed down. E-nertia!
Rob Pegoraro has a good follow-up column today in the Post. He's making the right point: the content industry wants control. “Copy protection” as a term doesn't really capture what they want, and sounds benign. This industry can't control the internet (yet), but they want to make sure that all the devices that connect to the internet are unable to transmit marked files online or connect to anything other than similarly compliant devices.
There's no reason these marked files, by the way, will be limited to digital broadcast content. Once machines are configured to respect the flag (and all the kneecaps have been broken in the FCC's ad hoc interim procedure), any marked content, received by any compliant machine (including PCs), won't go online. Could be public domain data that's marked. Could be anything at all. Doesn't matter where it came from. This is quite a step.
And it's all about control. E-nough!