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. Their white paper is a brief summary of their goals and intentions and does not go into full technical detail. But let's use a little common sense here, folks. It's pointless to try to shoot down this proposal by raising all these horror stories about ADC chips in industrial and technical devices being crippled by a watermark detector which will never be activated. If you waste time developing this line of argument, you will be left with nothing to say when the actual bill focuses only on the specific devices that the content holders are worried about. And sure, a sufficiently talented electrical engineer can produce a custom board to do non-watermark-aware ADC, and digitize TV shows and music. The MPAA has to accept that such activity will continue to go on at a low level. They just want to make sure that consumer devices are not sold that enable every customer to make easy digital copies of copyrighted data based on an analog source, as they can now with the Replay DVR. Please, let's use some common sense and not go overboard with an obviously mistaken interpretation of the MPAA's intentions. That wastes everyone's time.