At 06:20 AM 5/30/2002 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Peter Trei writes:
My mind has been boggled, my flabbers have been ghasted.
In the name of protecting their business model, the MPAA proposes that every analog/digital (A/D) converter - one of the most basic of chips - be required to check for US government mandated copyright flags. Quite aside from increasing the cost and complexity of the devices many, manyfold, it eliminates the ability of the US to compete in the world electronics market.
This is absurd. In all the commentary on this issue, no one has made the obvious point that the MPAA has no interest or intention in putting watermark detectors into every ADC chip! They don't care about the ADC chip in a digital thermometer or even a cell phone. All they care about are things like PC video capture cards, which are high fidelty consumer devices capable of digitizing copyright protected content.
But that also means it could block sale of analog test instruments, such as programmable PC-based spectrum analyzers. steve