[Home]
April 04, 2002

[Rants]
"We'll know it when we see it"

The studios say that laying out technical criteria for inclusion on Table A will stifle innovation. They say it with a straight face. What on earth could they mean?

Well, it's a puzzler. The engineer in the Fox entourage at yesterday's BPDG meeting elaborated a little:

It's our content. The criteria for a technology that we entrust it to are a complex matrix, involving pricing, security and ease-of-use. By the time we laid out the requirements for such a technology, we'd have a stack of paper an inch thick. How can we dream up all the criteria for as-yet uninvented technologies? Who could have predicted DES [an encryption alogrithm]? That was a singularity -- how could we lay out terms for inclusion that takes into account things that haven't been thought of yet?
Good question. Just the sort of question that makes the whole BPDG shennanigan so suspect -- how can this semi-secret gang of studio and technology people presume to lay out all the specifications for digital television technologies that have yet to come?

It's pretty revolting to watch the organization that tried to ban the VCR talk about its commitment to innovation. Clearly, it upset Philips, whose reps kept pressing on the issue:

How can a company build a product if it won't know until it's done whether or not it's legal?

The MPAA's response:

We can't tell you what we're looking for, but we'll know it when we see it.
Maybe that's how you run a film-studio, but it sure ain't how you make a law.

Posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:45 PM