On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 08:52:29AM -0600, Lane Schwartz wrote: > > Wendy, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I've been thinking about > this for a while....
Good thought, but as Brad notes, the government is quite creative about defining "interstate commerce." Best to get a stockpile of cards before the flag mandate kicks in, and hope that our challenge to FCC's jurisdiction is successful.
--Wendy
> > Would the federal government have the authority to regulate the > manufacture and sale of an HD-capable TV card which doesn't respect > the broadcast flag if such a card was manufactured and sold entirely > within a single state? > > That is, no internet sales, no shipping out of state, just a factory > and a store (and maybe even a drivers license check or a signed > statement to verify that you live in the state). > > Just a thought... > Lane
They are amazingly good at turning things into interstate commerce. For example, right now they're claiming that a woman growing pot in her own back yard for her personal medical use affects interstate commerce. It's before the supreme court.
In your case, can the card be used to receive signals from a transmitter in another state? Perhaps in Hawai`i or Alaska you could safely claim otherwise, but not in the 48.
And then they have their catch-all, which is to say that even if your card is not sent over state lines, it competes with cards that are, and thus affects their market.
Besides, the chips are largely made overseas. You can't just up and build your own chip fab for this, though there is some fab in some states.
This is a very hard argument to win.
Instead hope we can strike down this law, or keep it out of Canada and other ATSC nations.
The card vendors will no doubt build up large stockpiles of the cards before the deadline, so there will be a supply for individuals for a while, but the inability to make or import more will mean nobody will be willing to make a product based on them.
Moore's law is a killer here too. Even if somebody wanted to invest in making 20 million cards before the deadline, they would have to do it at today's prices, and compete with locked up PVR systems selling for less than the card years down the road. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
-- Wendy Seltzer -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Electronic Frontier Foundation Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html Chilling Effects: http://www.chillingeffects.org/
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