Understanding law

Susan Crawford thinks that it would be a good idea for the politicos who pass new laws to understand the substance of the law they are proposing. She's specifically thinking of the Analog Hole bill, the latest effort drafted by lawyers of the entertainment industry and introduced by their friendly congressmen, Mr. Sensenbrenner and Mr. Conyers, to mandate drm in the US.

"So I want someone to call both Mr. Sensenbrenner and Mr. Conyers and ask them to explain how the Analog Hole bill (introduced late yesterday - 35 page PDF) works.

I bet they won't be able to do it. Oh, maybe they'll say something about "protecting digital content in a terrifying time," but they probably won't be able to go farther down the rhetorical ladder.

It's not an easy bill to parse. It looks as if two marking schemes, CGMS-A and VEIL, are going to be required to be acknowledged and adhered to through all analog-digital conversions of video. That's just my guess. The bill will probably affect an enormous variety of devices that have analog inputs."