On Thursday morning I finally managed to get through to Congressman Mike Doyle’s office on the issue of the broadcast flag. For once I was even able to speak to his technical aide on the issue. The basic gist that I got was that representative Doyle favors the need to protect copyrighted work from unauthorized distribution on the internet. Not all that surprising given his stance on internet decency and censorship.
On the bright side he is in favor of time shifting and allowing us to copy media for personal use. However, he doesn’t seem to understand the ramifications behind this. Any sort of DRM will inevitibly be broken and just be a pain for innovation and home users. I still have to get around to forwarding him the Darknet paper to better explain the problems with this logic. Anyway, I’m hopeful. But still, not ideal.