Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders. Sen. Fritz Hollings' new bill embeds copy-protection tech in digital hardware devices. But the proposal would have an even bigger impact on the software industry. Programmers, look out. Declan McCullagh reports from Washington. (Wired News)

Legal experts said on Friday that the CBDTPA regulates nearly any program, in source or object code, that runs on a PC or anything else with a microprocessor.

That's not just Windows media players and their brethren, as you might expect. The CBDTPA's sweeping definition of "any hardware or software" includes word processors, spreadsheets, operating systems, compilers, programming languages -- all the way down to humble Unix utilities like "cp" and "cat."

Also of interest is this, shorter article:

What Hollings' Bill Would Do. The proposed copy-protection bill from Senator Fritz Hollings would demand restrictive technology on practically all new devices. Here's a rundown on what the law would do if passed. By Declan McCullagh. (Wired News)  4:23:37 PM    

My favorite quote from the article:

Looking further ahead, Okamoto saw even bigger changes for Sony's game business. "Maybe the PlayStation 6 or 7 will be based on biotechnology," he said.

I can't decide if that's wacky or terrifying. I think it must be both.  2:07:32 PM    

To make their game complete, they printed 13 versions of the magazine, each touting a different city as the greatest. About 75,000 magazines named Detroit No. 1 and were distributed throughout Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

[...]

But when the editors slashed the list of contenders to 13, they couldn't decide which one they liked best.

"We just couldn't bring ourselves to tell the Southies in Boston that they weren't No. 1," Heidenry said, "or the people in New York that they weren't No. 1. So like a guy juggling different girlfriends, we told them all they were No. 1."

He added that "everything we said about Detroit, we meant."

The downside is that, in each issue, the 12 runners-up each receive a paragraph of insults. Detroit's dose of vitriol called it a "dismal wasteland of abandoned warehouses and Kid Rock wannabes," and said the best thing about it is that it's "not quite Canada."

(via this Plastic discussion)  1:48:13 PM    

This is absolutely disgusting. This requires any kind of "digital media device" to include and employ an as yet undetermined "standard security system" to prevent the unauthorized copying of digital media. These vaguely defined digital media devices almost certainly include computers.

Whether the legislators intend it to or not, this act deeply discourages the existence of open platforms. For a security system to be embedded into the machine in any kind of effective way, you can't allow people to write arbitrary code -- after all, how will you ensure they use the security system? For that matter, the copy & paste systemes will have to be drastically revised. Web context, word documents, and text files are all "digital media" too -- gotta protect those from being copied!

This is a dramatic step backward from the computer-age promise of being able to easily work with information. The legislators introducing this bill are trying to outlaw piracy by outlawing the tools that allow piracy. The horse is out of the barn; hell, the barn is burning down. Shutting the door now is hardly the solution.

(To be fair, the text of the bill seems to only require that the manufacturers make the security system available, and offers legal punishments to those who choose to not employ the system. Nevertheless, I do believe that the legislators don't understand the ramifications of what they request, and I think that the cut & paste system is an excellent example of that. "Digital media" is a much broader term then they believe it to be, and requiring every paste (and every file copy) to somehow be vetted through a security system is a herculean and perhaps unachievable task. Certainly, it will regress the user experience by decades -- how do you explain to the end user why they can't copy a file? How do you cover all the cases in a meaningful way?)  11:44:12 AM