EFF: Stop the broadcast flag -- now

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a special blog bulletin to alert people about the FCC's pending adoption of the broadcast flag, pushed by the motion picture studios as a way to thwart digital piracy. But there's much more to it than that. Here's the text of the alert sent out this afternoon by EFF outreach coordinator Cory Doctorow:

Hey folks. Lately at EFF, we've begun a practice of sending out personal notes, very rarely, to bloggers whom we believe will be interested in our campaigns that are in the balance -- that is, campaigns that we could really achieve something positive with, given enough push from the blogworld. We don't do this often, and we won't send any more to you if you ask us to stop.

Today, we're asking for your help with the Broadcast Flag. This is a proposed technology mandate that would give Hollywood studios a veto over the design of the output and recording technologies that get built into DTV receivers -- which is by way of saying the stuff that we take for granted on our general-purpose machines, like CD/DVD burners, high-speed cabling standards like FireWire, and so on. This is an unprecedented maneouvre: the Hollywood studios are saying that tech companies should have to get the studios' permission before releasing new tools to their customers. These are the studios that tried to ban the VCR, that sued ReplayTV over commercial-skipping, that put Fritz Hollings up to the CPDTPA bill, a proposal to make *all* technologists get the entertainment industry's approval before producing new equipment.

What's more, the Broadcast Flag demands that approved technologies will have to be built to be "tamper-resistant." That means that we'll have a law that will require an entire class of general-purpose technologies to use only obfuscated, closed-source drivers. That's right, it bans open source for tech that can be used in DTV applications.

The worst part is: there's no problem. Hollywood has made more money every single year since the last fight like this, over the VCR. Last year was the movie companies' best year since *1959* -- this despite a worldwide economic crisis! Hollywood doesn't dispute this, but they insist that since there *might* be a problem tomorrow, they need to take
extrodinary measures *today*. This is ridiculous, of course: it's like eating your seatmate on the off-chance that your plane will crash.

EFF has been fighting this proposal since day one, marshalling a large oppositional coalition that tore apart the inter-industry consensus that would have made this regime trivial to enact. The Congressman who got the ball rolling backed off from his commitment to requiring the FCC to enacting the Flag, preferring instead to request that they seek comment on it.

Well, the FCC sought comment on this. They asked the public and other organizations to participate in the rulemaking, to help them make up their minds. EFF has been calling on our supporters to send notes into the Commission in opposition to this plan, and we've passed over 15,000 faxes onto the Commissioners' desks.

Numbers count in this fight. When over 700,000 Americans wrote to the FCC on media consolidation, it so alarmed lawmakers that Fritz Hollings (of all people!) called for Congressional action to limit media consolidation.

We need lots of people to write into the FCC asking them to set this proposal aside, and we want you to help. If you are willing and able, we'd like you to post a call-to-action on your site. You can write your own, or feel free to re-use this letter (please omit the leading paragraph!) or the copy on the EFF's site:

http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2801

That link contains our "action center" item, which allows people to send a fax to the commission with one click.

Thanks for your help.

Cory