The Day We All Became Collectors
by Scott Brylow
I'm a collector. I have a stack of 1930s radios in the basement, a couple of old cars in the garage, some stamps and coins squirreled away from a youth of collecting.
But collecting has always been a hobby for me -- just good fun. It's not something I need to do. I'm not trying to keep an old car running because otherwise I wouldn't have a car; after all, this isn't Cuba with its 1950s American cars on the road because there's nothing better available.
Now this will all change: We'll become a nation of collectors -- and worse, we'll be doing it because we need to. Rights that we're used to, fair use rights of copyrighted material -- rights enshrined by law -- are at risk because of maneuvers by the FCC and continued pressure by content owners such as movie studios. And people who want to maintain those rights will have to maintain old equipment to do so.
In early November, the FCC passed a rule mandating a "broadcast flag" in terrestrial DTV broadcasts beginning in 2005. Correspondingly, it requires TV receivers (or demodulators) to recognize that broadcast bit (whether in a TV or a computer card). In the aftermath of this ruling the movie studios will tell you it's a "big victory for consumers" and the consumer organizations will tell you it's the "end to general-purpose computers". There's a lot of ground in between those, but it is clear that the broadcast flag is a bad idea. Lots of people (the best example is the Electronic Freedom Foundation) will tell you why: Loss of fair use for libraries, schools, and individuals, loss of freedom to "time-shift" TV viewing the way millions do with their VCRs, or move to another platform (computer, mobile device, etc.) and view it there.
Oh, and it's worth mentioning why the deadline is 2005: That's roughly 1 year prior to the earliest planned (mandated) end of analog broadcast TV. This will free up a large amount of spectrum the FCC would like to auction off.
Still, most importantly, it's a bad idea because this ruling will mandate hardware that is less capable than the consumer electronics it replaces. And I'm worried that there's a knock-on effect for personal computers. On that dark day, we all become collectors. Not hobbyists, but collectors-because-we-have to.
Think ahead to 2010 (giving the FCC a few extra years to make those 250 million analog TVs obsolete). Do you want to record a show and take it to dinner at a friend's house for viewing there? Not guaranteed to work on his old DVD player after the broadcast flag exists. Do you want to move your legal copy of a show onto a mobile device? Don't bet on it. Would it spice up your wedding video to have "America's Most Wanted" credits roll at the end? You may never know. Is your daughter working on a school project to create a video mosaic of recent news events? It may not play at school, even if it works when you test it at home. Do you want to e-mail the funniest 30-second snippet of your favorite show to your friends? That's almost certainly prohibited.
If you want to do any of the above, reliably, you may want to hold on to those pre-broadcast-flag DTV sets and tuners. It may make sense to keep the last good video editing application you own because the lack of demand for home-quality video editing tools may plummet when so much content is protected. Maybe that means keeping old hardware to make sure your old software will continue to run. That's a sea-change for our culture, our history as innovators, our reputation as early adopters, and our American quest to improve things.
Does this sound like a sufficiently bleak future? Here's the latest idea from those-with-content: Since even content that is delivered digitally is eventually rendered as analog, there needs to be copy protection on all analog signals as well. This is referred to as the "Analog Hole" and one of the proposed fixes is analog watermarking with "cop chips" associated with ADCs so that analog "piracy" (apparently, there's little room for "fair use" in their vocabulary) is either preventable or trackable or both. Look, nearly all of us are electrical engineers; we know how many ADCs there are in an incredibly wide range of equipment. And we don't want a government "ADC User License" or "Developer License" every time we convert something from analog to digital or vice versa.
I collect enough foolish things already. I don't want to start collecting TV and computer hardware necessities. And I don't want to start collecting memories of the good old days when everyone was a content producer and video editing was fun and cool. You know, back in the days before digital TV…
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