Hollywood after the Analog Hole again

Found on Boing Boing on Tuesday, 01 November 2005
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Under a new proposed Analog Hole bill, it will be illegal to make anything capable of digitizing video unless it either has all its outputs approved by the Hollywood studios, or is closed-source, proprietary and tamper-resistant. The idea is to make it impossible to create an MPEG from a video signal unless Hollywood approves it.

If this had been around in 1976, the VCR would have been illegal. Today, it would ban Mythtv, every tuner-card in the market, and boxes like ElGato's eyeTV the Slingbox and the Orb and the vPod.

The studios will "enable the business-model" of charging you money for the stuff that you get for free today. Here's a quote: "Doing this stuff has value, and if it has value, we should be able to charge money for it."

There are literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of products in the market today that don't obey the rules the studios want to embed in their video. If just one of those devices gets access to the video, then poof, it's on the Internet.

So what problem does this solve? In the parlance of the studios, this will "keep honest users honest." Which is to say that if you're someone who only wants to go on doing all the perfectly legal things that you can do with video today -- watch, store, time-shift, space-shift, format-shift -- then you will be prevented from doing so without permission.

However, if you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you.

If they would operate a blood bank, they would pull in random people and squeeze them until every drop is out. Besides, this will have no effect. Even if this law would become real, it would only be in the US; the rest of the world can continue to digitize any audiovisual content (and put it online). They are trying to milk a dead cow.