The Haus

Friday, March 22, 2002

It Gets Uglier, Folks -- 6:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Just when you thought the principle behind the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) was bad (story), Wired is reporting that the implementation is even worse. Here's some details:
Legal experts said on Friday that the CBDTPA regulates nearly any program, in source or object code, that runs on a PC or anything else with a microprocessor.

That's not just Windows media players and their brethren, as you might expect. The CBDTPA's sweeping definition of "any hardware or software" includes word processors, spreadsheets, operating systems, compilers, programming languages -- all the way down to humble Unix utilities like "cp" and "cat."

"The definition will cover just about anything that runs on your computer -- except maybe the clock," said Tom Bell, a professor at Chapman University School of Law who teaches intellectual property law.

Then Bell paused for a moment and reconsidered. "There's a risk you could say it covers things like even a digital clock program on your computer," he said.
The language is broad enough that it could make it illegal to own a post-CBDTPA copy of Linux in the United States. I wouldn't be awfully surprised to see Microsoft come out against this. Destroying Linux might be a good idea to them, but the CBDTPA would put a serious crimp in their business too. Even though I got this link from Slashdot, I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is not typical /. paranoia.

News for 03/22/2002

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