[Home]
June 14, 2002

[News]
BPDG Round Two: Consensus at Congresspoint

Now that Rep. Billy Tauzin has heard from the BPDG and seen firsthand the nonexistant "consensus" that emerged from the six months of BPDG discussions, it's time for round two.

Philips CEO Lawrence J. Blanford (who earlier made some very brave remarks to Congress lambasting the BPDG) has issued a new statement, in which he calls for an open "Public Policy Forum" in Congress to determine how best to encourage the American public to switch to digital television.

In the new statement, Blanford ennumerates Philips's problems with the BPDG process to date, echoing many of the concerns EFF raised in its own report.

Rep. Tauzin has hand-picked a small number of parties to produce documents between now and July 15th to establish a new set of recommendations. It's not clear how groups like EFF and the Free Software Foundation (whose GNU Radio technology would be illegal under the terms of the current mandate) are to participate in this new process, beyond submitting an alternative proposal for adding new technologies to Table A (the list of approved technologies).

The problem is that framing new objections to BPDG in the context of the approval of new technologies exempts the possibility of not having to approve technologies at all. Under the Betamax doctrine, the test for legality of new technologies is whether they have "substantial non-infringing uses," not whether Hollywood deems them appropriate for use in the marketplace.

More disturbing is that Rep. Tauzin's proposal makes no room for objections to the "robustness requirements" that would outlaw free and open source software from use in digital TV contexts because they are not "tamper-resistant." Given the clear legal precedent that establishes software code as speech, this is clearly unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment.

We'll be looking into this most carefully and reporting in this space as we learn more.

Posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34 PM