The Analog Hole Bill, H.R. 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005, has been introduced in Congress.

Bill Rosenblatt's assessment of the legislation is well worth reading. I quote:

Whereas the Hollings Bill left it up to the Federal Trade Commission to dictate and maintain standards for DRM, and the Broadcast Flag was put under the jurisdiction of the FCC (which is how it failed in a federal appeals court; Congress cannot control the FCC in that manner), the Analog Hole standards are to be administered by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The PTO was chosen, apparently, because it is under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, whereas the FCC is an independent regulatory body. The bill contains an anticircumvention provision similar to that of DMCA 1201.

and:

We are usually against any piece of legislation that would require DRM-like technology by law. Others have commented on the bill's potential effect on consumers' rights to legitimately obtained video content. But we find the Analog Hole Bill to be even more objectionable because of its extreme provinciality, as well as its thinly veiled (pun intended) adoption of a single small vendor's technology solution -- a ploy that ought to raise some eyebrows, to say the least. The bill is as unfair as it is misguided: the former, because it benefits a segment of one industry at the expense of another; the latter, because if it passes, it is likely to become a quaint obsolescence within ten years. It is a textbook example of the problems in trying to legislate DRM.

A fine critique. But now what? The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe cannot be produced and given away for free, through an analog hole or otherwise. Closing the analog hole seems impossible to me; point a camera at an HDTV screen, and one has a fair copy.

With music, one might make commercial licensed services both superior and cheap, enough so that unlicensed services in the gray market really can't compete. With video, making a licensed service cheap enough seems unlikely. One might listen to a piece of music more than once, but most movies are done after one viewing. Is this part of the answer, to hope to get enough receipts from the early box office? That is surely not a technology of the future.

Will movies in the future be like Nintendo games, tied to hardware? Or will we go in another direction, relying on a less anonymous Internet (needed anyway to combat phishing, fraud, & spam) to track any large-scale distribution of pirated copies? Does *anyone* who takes the analog hole problem seriously have another solution?

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 1:23 PM | Legislation and Legislators

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