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. If this level of ignorance, chuptza, and bloodymindedness had been around a hundred years ago, cars would be forbidden to have a range greater then 20 miles, to protect the railway industry, and transoceanic airline tickets would have a $1000/seat surcharge, to compensate the owners of ocean liners for lost revenue. I know that Tinsletown is based on dreams and fantasies (as well as the violation of Edision's movie patents), but someone needs to sit these people down and teach them the lesson that King Canute taught his nobles. Peter Trei [The above is my personal opinion only. Do not misconstrue it to belong to others.] ---------------------------------------------------------- http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/23/2355237.shtml?tid=97 - start quote - MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole! Posted by jamie on Friday May 24, @09:30AM from the op-amp dept. A month ago, the MPAA filed its report [PDF][1] with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terrors of analog copying. I quote: "in order to help plug the hole, watermark detectors would be required in" -- are you sitting down? -- "all devices that perform analog to digital conversions." At their page Protecting Creative Works in a Digital Age[2], the Senate lays out the issues they'll be looking at, including briefs from corporate groups, and provides a comment form[3] so your opinion can be heard as well. As Cory Doctorow writes: "this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed. ...the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood." Doctorow's article on the "analog hole"[4] for the EFF does a great job of explaining the issues to non-electrical-engineers, and has many thought-provoking examples of how requiring such technology would be a giant step backwards. [1] http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/content_protection.pdf [2] http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/feature.cfm [3] http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/input_form.cfm [4] http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000113.html - end quote -