Consensus At Lawyerpoint is a page put up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Apparently various large media corporations are spending millions of dollars each month, in order to get laws passed that would, among other things, prevent free software drivers for tuner cards for digital TV. Anything that touches a digital TV signal, according to the movie people, will have to meet their "standard", and they''re lobbying for their "standard" to become law. As the EFF''s summary puts it:
Whatever measures the studios take to "protect" their product from their customers will have to be applied to PCs, too. The tamper-resistant seal around their devices will have to be wrapped around your software and hardware. Will it become illegal to write tamper-friendly, open-source software for playing with digital video? We think so. Will copy-prevention mechanisms in hard-drives, video cards, and sound-cards be mandatory in your PC, even if those mechanisms break all kinds of legit software? Sounds like it to us. Will your computer be full of anti-privacy unique serial numbers that get transmitted back to some Content Central whenever you touch their stuff? Guess.
Every day, in every way, they chip away one more little bit. How can this be stopped?
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