Oregon E-Business and the Broadcast Flag

greg — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:51:17 +0000

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.

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

Roboflop 2005

greg — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:47:33 +0000

Recently, reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s collection of a career’s worth of brilliant essays and reportage, Politics: Observations and Arguments, I came across an early version of a now popular portrait of a certain prominent national politician. The essay, titled “Roboflop”, describes the politican as a “vain and unreflective” semi-draft dodging son of privlege prone to humiliating public gaffes and guided primarily by instinct, the leaders of “fundamentalist sects”, “out-of-favor right wingers” and “cultural conservatives”. Hertzberg imagines a world where this candidate had ascended to the presidency as one in which the US and its former NATO allies stand divided, crowds demonstrate against radically conservative supreme court nominees, all out partisan warfare breaks out in the senate, and the world stands posed on the verge of an ideological version of the same.

The candidate Hertzberg is describing is, of course, Dan Quayle — the election that of 1988. From today’s point of view Quayle’s candidacy seems less like an easy punchline, the butt of a thousand Saturday Night Live skits and Tonight Show monologues than a chilling forerunner of today’s political reality. And Hertzberg’s response to him, a kind of throw-up-your-hands-in-disbelief irony of undersatement, seems quaint, even nostalgic.

Even in the midst of his horror at the prospect of an actual Quayle presidency, Hertzbeg is bitingly funny:

“Let’s say it’s next April, and President Bush is out having a brisk springtime sail off Kennebunkport. Maybe he gets his tie caught in the jam cleat. Or maybe, just mabye, he doesn’t hear the cry of “Hard to lee!” when the boom sweeps over the deck. Suddenly — bonk! splash! — a vacancy occurs, and J. Danforth Quayle III, maybe still dressed in his lime-green golf pants, putter in hand, standing at the club bar, takes the oath of office as the forty-second president of the United States”

He makes gold out of Quayle’s famous foot-in-the-mouth moments as well as some forgotten gems, like his closing statement in the ’88 vice-presidential debate:

“You have been able to see Dan Quayle as I really am. . .George Bush has the experience, and with me the future — a future committed to our family, a future committed to the freedom.”

As Hertzberg so aptly comments, “What?”

Near the end of the piece, Hertzberg quotes in detail from an interview he did with Quayle near the end of the campaign when the candidate discussed his affinity for Machiavelli’s Prince. Quayle outlines Machiavelli’s “three classes of mind”: the true leader who is creative enough to “lead a great nation without much help”; the second class which, while not as self-suficient as the first, “could take ideas, put people around him, and be able to lead nations forward”; and finally the third class who “didn’t know much of anything. And they were the worst kind of leaders, because not only were they not creative, but they didn’t know what was right or wrong and they just sort of went by whatever they felt like.” To wrap it all up, Quayle places himself “somewhere in between one and two”.

Faced with such rich material Hertzberg takes a light touch saying, “I’m not sure what I can add to this”, but then brings the hammer down hard:

Quayle seemed like a pretty nice guy, and he can be charming. His politcal views, which is to say the political views of his grandparents and parents and minders, are of course awful. But they are awful in a way that unfortunately has become routine in recnt years. The question raised by the prospect of President Quayle is the same as the question raised by the likelihood of President Bush and for that matter by the reality of President Reagan: How long can a great nation afford to have silly leaders?

I’m not sure what I can add to that other than to say: can you imagine how great it would be to live in an America where the worst thing you could say about our leaders was that they were silly? I never thought anything could make me feel nostalgic for Dan Quayle, but there it is.

Tagged: Hertzberg, Quayle, Bush, president, 88, roboflop, politics

politics – Ideas For Dozens

Oregon E-Business and the Broadcast Flag

Roboflop 2005