Cory on Hollywood, DRM and more

Here's author Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation at Etech yesterday:

The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission.

If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed
bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner
-- any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with
digital TV signals -- you'll have to go on bended knee to get
permission to deploy it. You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats
or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and
consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring
to market will not disrupt their business models.

That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you
need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the
DVD-CCA. They don't give permission if you plan on adding new
features -- that's why they're suing Kaleidascape for building a
DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive
archive instead of the original discs. ...

A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they
were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid
into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to
something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't
lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs. ...

DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come
into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the
public's rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped
infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever.
All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting
artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an
artist's pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can't be
downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network. ...