FC: Hollywood wants to plug "analog hole," regulate A-D converters

Steve Schear schear at lvcm.com
Wed May 29 22:10:30 PDT 2002


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





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