Your Computer and TV Aren't Yours to Control After All
November 16, 2004
9:42 a.m., MT
Combine digital rights management (ugh) with a gov bureaucracy, and what do you get? That's a no-brainer -- you get a mess. But it's worse than many people might suspect. According to law professor Susan Crawford, the FCC is poised to exercise its regulatory control over anything and everything that is somehow involved in sending and receiving information via radio waves and wires. Here's the money quote from Crawford's blog:

FCC's position is that its Act gives it regulatory power over all instrumentalities, facilities, and apparatus "associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received" via all interstate radio and wire communication. That's quite a claim. [Emphasis in original]

She elaborates very nicely on why we should care (not that anyone reading this is likely to need such help). Spotted at Slashdot.

Sunni