Friday, May 06, 2005

The RIAA is like the famous captain in the Viet Nam war, who, standing in front of a burning village, said "We destroyed it in order to save it. " Interview with James Gosling. Mark Frauenfelder: Business Week has a good interview with James Gosling, aka "The Man Who Brewed Up Java." Gosling thinks copy protection and other crippleware schemes in consumer electronics are bad ideas. Q: What's your personal pet peeve that you think Java might help fix in the future? A: Just getting my home-entertainment system straight. We've got all of these technologies that are supposed to move media around our homes, but it's this dog's breakfast of agendas [from various suppliers] that makes things just impossible. "The MPAA has been shooting down anyone who wants to do anything sensible, forcing people like TiVo (TIVO ) to do all kinds of nonsensical things [like making it impossible to skip commercials]. I'd like to have more systems in my house far more open. I'd love to be able to get my car and house talking to each other, or have my telephones and other gear talking to each other, so the frigging CD player or the TV pauses when I answer a phone call. Link [Boing Boing] 12:47:28 PM

From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley - finally, a victory for the people. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington staged a flag burning of sorts today, ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to require makers of TV sets to equip them with a broadcast flag that would prevent digital broadcast signals from being redistributed. In vacating the regulation, the court sided with the American Library Association and others, agreeing that the flag rule, went far beyond the FCC's power to regulate broadcasts. The rule, passed in 2003 and scheduled to go into effect this July (see "Consumer groups refuse to salute digital flag"), was an assault on two of the Net's fundamental building blocks -- open-source software and the principle of end-to-end communication -- and the judges rightly ruled it out of bounds. "The broadcast flag regulations exceed the agency's delegated authority under the statute," the three-judge panel unanimously concluded. "The insurmountable hurdle facing the FCC in this case is that the agency's general jurisdictional grant does not encompass the regulation of consumer electronics products that can be used for receipt of wire or radio communication when those devices are not engaged in the process of radio or wire transmission." Or, as panel member Judge Harry T. Edwards more bluntly told the FCC's lawyers, "You've gone too far. Are washing machines next?'' 12:35:47 PM