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.
Comments
3 Responses to “Understanding law”
Got something to say?
Susan, I take your general question to be: should a law maker understand the law they are making? The answer seems obviously to be YES. But then those voting on the law should understand it too, and by extenion those that vote for those people - but this is never going to happen, law makers and citizens just cannot all be experts in law and each specific field - from technology, through economics and every other subject that laws are made about.
The way the UK get's around this is by having the House of Lords - its tottaly un-democratic, and that's a wonderful thing for many resons. One being that one group of the members of the house tend to get there through merit. So the Lords does have experts in many fields that can help in the review and revision of new laws. But it's far from perfect, no political system is, we can only work to have the lest imperfect one.
I'm not sure how an 'pure' sysem of democracy or specfically the US system (as it presently stands) can get around this.
So to you, do you understand evey piece of legislation that ever law maker that you ever voted for said that they were for or against?
Ren,
Your point is well-taken — I was pointing to this bill as a particularly egregious example of legislation being tossed about without anyone really knowing what it means.
And, yes, I certainly don't understand everything. But I only got to vote for a Senator (or Congressman) recently — I was without representation when I lived in DC.
We usually get around this problem by having some accompanying documents that attempt to explain what the proposed bill is doing. This analog hole bill doesn't seem to have those supplements.
Susan
Here's a short writeup by ArsTechnica.