Understanding law
Particularly in an era in which our own President doesn't seem to care much about what laws say, it seems important that at least the people drafting the laws — senators and representatives — have a pretty good fix on what they're writing down.
So I want someone to call both Mr. Sensenbrenner and Mr. Conyers and ask them to explain how the Analog Hole bill (introduced late yesterday - 35 page PDF) works.
I bet they won't be able to do it. Oh, maybe they'll say something about “protecting digital content in a terrifying time,” but they probably won't be able to go farther down the rhetorical ladder.
It's not an easy bill to parse. It looks as if two marking schemes, CGMS-A and VEIL, are going to be required to be acknowledged and adhered to through all analog-digital conversions of video. That's just my guess. The bill will probably affect an enormous variety of devices that have analog inputs.
Now, the existence of analog inputs has been heavily relied on in Hollywood's discussion of why the broadcast flag was such a dandy idea — “plenty of room for fair use! you've got all of those analog outs that we're leaving alone!” — so if these things disappear that has to affect the fair use balance. The bill appears to carve out private copying of broadcast television, but that's not very clear, and even that will presumably disappear as DTV is phased in.
More to the point, this bill has the appearance of a snarling, heavily-detailed technical mandate. It even has a Table W at the back, where the marking system is (impenetrably, to me) tied to a particular approved device response.
I await the responses of Messrs. Sensenbrenner and Conyers. Surely the proponents of such a technical bill will be able to explain it to us.