Oregon E-Business and the Broadcast Flag

I don’t usually write about politics here, but today’s news of the return of the Broadcast Flag struck close enough to home that I felt compelled to talk about it and maybe call some of you to action. If you haven’t heard about it before, the “broadcast flag” is a proposed mandate for a watermark on all digital content transmitted to televisions and radios. The watermark would allow the people who distribute the shows — TV networks and movie studios — to decide how they can be watched. For example, ABC could use the flag to prevent you from Tivo-ing Lost or Columbia Records could use it to prevent you from recording that rare Bob Dylan concert on satellite radio that you have to miss. The worst part about it is that the way the law prevents these things is by making it illegal to manufacture devices that can do them in the first place. Goodbye ever better TVs, radios, and portable media players.

Normally these kinds of big legislative boondoggles can seem horribly depressing and inevitable. But this time we’re lucky! As Oregon residents, our voices count more than normal in stopping this one because our own Senator Gordon Smith introduced the “Digital Content Protection Act”. I urge you to complete the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s online decision maker contact form and to contact Gordon Smith directly via his website.

I often find that the text of these form letters to legislators can be a little idealistic — true believer rants that may be easy for opposed lawmakers to dismiss — so I wrote my own, trying to lean more on the ‘conservative’ ideological principles that Senator Smith supposedly supports and on the practical considerations of job creation and economic improvement that is bread and butter to all congressmen. I though some of you, especially my Less Distracted co-residents, might appreciate the resulting text. Feel free to use it yourself and forward it on however you see fit:

I am a Portland-based small technology business owner writing to you in regards to your support for a “Digital Content Protection Act” which would enact a “broadcast flag” to limit the use of digital media by consumers. In addition to being simply un-American in the limits it places on such core free speech traditions as Fair Use, the proposal would stifle the up-welling of technological innovation which drives so much of this country’s — and, particularly of Portland’s — economic growth. I urge you to change your position on this issue, to withdraw your “Digital Content Protection Act” from consideration, and to fully support the intellectual property freedoms necessary to create this coming wave of digital wealth creation.

I am a part of a large and growing community of young entrepreneurs working in Portland on projects related to the internet and various aspects of the entertainment industry. For us, issues like the broadcast flag and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are make or break. They insult our core ‘conservative’ values — that the government should stay as far as possible away from interfering with creative and ethical businesses as they strive to innovate and create wealth for all — and we could never support a candidate who was on the wrong side.

In the coming decades, some amongst us will become wildly successful in the way of past generations of innovators in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. In the process, Portland could become one of the great economic engines of this country and secure for itself unrivaled prosperity. Every action taken against the digital freedoms endangered by legislation like the broadcast flag is a dollar lost for Oregon’s economy, a job never created by a successful new internet startup, a hard-working self-starting entrepreneurs made into a political opponent.

Please, reconsider your position.

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Tagged: broadcast flag, gordon smith, congress, republican, portland, oregon, policy, legislation