Straight from the Electronic Freedom Foundation fellas! If you value your
ability to record for fair usage at home I urge you to write your Congressional
representatives and complain vigorously. Sure we can rush out and buy current
tech to bypass anything they introduce hardware-wise but sooner or later it'll
break down and need to be replaced not to mention the fact that technology
marches on. We have to vigorously fight each and every effort by these pricks
who are trying to make you and I into criminals because we timeshift or archive
TV and Radio programming for personal usage. They're trying to overturn the
Betamax Supreme Court decision that makes it legal to do so. Down with
H.R.4569!!!
The Digital Transition Content Security Act (H.R.4569) - or
Analog Hole bill - would force every video player or recorder
with an analog output in America to watch for and obey a
proprietary signal embedded in video broadcasts called a VEIL
watermark. But how would such a detector work? What would be
its cost? And how secure is the watermark? Security
researchers don't know - because the company behind VEIL
won't let them look at the technology without first obtaining
a "license." A license to examine the VEIL specification
costs $10,000 and requires signing a non-disclosure agreement
that forbids revealing the details of the technology to
others. Congress is choosing a technology that must be built
into your systems, and it's not giving non-entertainment
industry experts the opportunity to check out the technology
first to make sure it doesn't break your systems, or, even
worse, leave those systems vulnerable to attack.
A technology that is a basic component in almost every audio-
visual device, from camcorders to VCRs to TV cards - analog-
to-digital (A/D) converters - is about to be encumbered with
mysterious and proprietary black box watermark technology.
Congress is highly unqualified to mandate specific
technologies for us; tech mandates like this are even more
dangerous when there's no chance for independent review.
Oversight is impossible when third parties hold the keys to
the law. Write to your Representative now, and demand that
Congress reject outright this bill with its undisclosed,
proprietary provisions.
Visit our Action Center now:
<http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=207>
More Info:
Full text of the bill:
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:h4569:>
Ed Felten's attempts to examine VEIL:
<http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=958>
