Protect your home electronics!

Filed in archive Legal on May 7, 2006

The U.S. Senate is engaging in lying doubletalk again. The Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act (S.2686) doesn't give consumers choice. It takes it away and gives it to the entertainment industry, which will be able to control how you use your home audio and video players and recorders.

Please sign the EFF Petition. While you're at it, tell Congress you also rejects RIAA's terror campaign against file sharers.

According to the EFF:

If this bill (S.2686) were to pass, government - and the entertainment industry - would control what you could do with digital media in your home. The broadcast flag would place TV shows in a DRM ghetto, where your right to copy, back-up, sell, time-shift or convert them into formats convenient to you would be at the whim of the broadcasters. The audio flag would give the FCC matching powers over "digital audio broadcasting," including satellite radio, digital HD radio, and potentially even Internet radio.

There's no benefit here for artists or customers, and for infringing copiers, evading these copy controls will be as easy as ever. No matter how inconvenienced individual users would be by a flag, pirates would be able to bypass it. The bill would usher in a new world of anti-consumer electronics, and a chance for the MPAA's and RIAA's member companies to seize even greater control over all media distribution and use.