Broadcast Flag praised, panned in Senate hearing
In the end, a comment from Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) characterized the situation best. Calling the broadcast flag "about the most balanced solution we have," Inouye unwittingly raised a point that I've raised several times: what is this a solution to? As Leslie Harris noted, even the video content industry admits that the broadcast flag will not stop piracy. After two hours of discussion, the Committee still couldn't see the light: this is not going to stop piracy, it's going to cause a lot of frustrations for a lot of honest people, and it's going to discourage companies from doing new and interesting things with technology. If that's the "solution," then I agree with Senator Inouye. It does that very well.And even if there was a non-destructive technological solution to piracy, is it really the government's place to mandate its use? Wouldn't the beneficiaries of this magical solution simply buy it and implement it en masse? I'm hard pressed to come up with analagous examples of federally-mandated uses of technology in order to force compliance with regulation (after all, copyright infringement is already illegal—there's no regulatory impediment to prosecuting pirates).
