Congress Attempts to Lock Down Analog Outputs

Lord knows I'm sick of blogging about politics. I'm tired of alerting my readers to the daily evil being perpetrated in Congress. And I would gladly either give up blogging or find myself a new topic if Congress would stop trying to make life more of a pain in the ass.

Having said that, today's outrage is that Congress is now attempting to pass legislation to force manufacturers of consumer electronics to implement DRM restrictions out to the analog outputs.

The House Judiciary Committee today introduced a bill (HR 4569) to close the analog hole.

Here’s what we had to say about the draft version of the bill.

The government is proposing that devices (consumer electronics, computers, software) manufactured after a certain date respond to a copy-protection signal or watermark in a digital video stream, and pass along that signal when converting the video to analog. The same goes for analog video streams, to pass on the protection to the digital video outputs.

I'm just going to remind everyone that copyright protections were originally implemented for the public good, not to bow to the whim of media companies and provide legal protections to their profit margins.

As always, let's all contact our representatives and express opposition to HR 4569. And bds1313, you know I'm definitely talking to you, here.

(originally via boingboing)

Technorati tag: drm