Enter Billy Tauzin, a lavishly corrupt Congressman...

Enter Billy Tauzin, a lavishly corrupt Congressman who would shortly quit "public service" to take a job as the spokesliar for Phrma, the pharmaceutical lobby. Tauzin had told the broadcasters and studios that if they could get the CE and tech companies to agree on a standard for the Broadcast Flag, he'd get a law passed that would make it illegal to build a DTV receiver that didn't check for and respond to the Flag.

11/

Like 7 Feb 2022 at 16:34 | Open on mamot.fr

2 comments

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

But here's where it gets *super* gnarly. Thanks to a technology called #SoftwareDefinedRadio (SDR), *any* computer could be a DTV receiver. That meant that a law that said you could only build a DTV receiver if it was designed to look for the Broadcast Flag and to prevent users from modifying it, that you would end up regulating *every computer that would ever be built or sold, forever*. What's more, that ban on "modifiability" would mean that all Free/Open Source software would be banned.

12/

7 Feb 2022 at 16:35 | Open on mamot.fr

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That's obviously a nightmarish idea, but the whole thing was so complicated that just explaining it to people was a huge slog. It was a classic #MEGO problem ("my eyes glaze over"), where a wicked scheme is so complex that it's just about impossible to get anyone to care about it until it's too late. This is what Dana Claire calls "The shield of boringness."

13/

7 Feb 2022 at 16:35 | Open on mamot.fr