JOEL JOHNSON — The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined with other groups to protest the FCC’s decision to require the ‘broadcast flag’ — essentially a signal telling your future VCR or PVR not to record — to be recognized and implemented in all consumer technology by July 1, 2005. If left unopposed, the broadcast flag would allow media companies to regulate what the end-user could or could not record for later viewing, violating what many see as ‘fair use.’
The FCC has responded with an attempt to postpone the lawsuit pending internal decisions to ‘reconsider’ the mandate, but since this appears to be mostly a stalling tactic and not a genuine rethinking of the decision, the EFF and friends have pushed to block the postponement.
If you care about your ability to use your future purchases in the ways you want to use them, it wouldn’t hurt to check out and support the actions and aims of the EFF.
Cory added this clarification: The pernicious issue isn’t that the FCC is going to require a signal restricting copying, it’s that in order to protect that signal, they’re going to require that inventors get government and Hollywood approval before delivering new DTV technology, and will be outlawing open source for use in critical DTV applications.
Read [via boingboing]
