Burn this flag

There has been a senatorial foofooraw about an anti-flag-burning amendment, ably punctured by many, including John Scalzi and Scott Adams. However, at the same time, the Broadcast Flag has been slipped into the Telecom bill.

The broadcast flag is a far more serious restriction on freedom of speech. It gives legacy broadcasters a veto over the design of future technology. What it most reminds me of is the Red Flag Act, when the entrenched Railway lobby inserted a clause requiring any self-propelled road vehicle to have a man walking 60 yards ahead of it, carrying a red flag to keep it under 4mph in the country and 2mph in town. There is a similar effort to treat the net as broken TV in the EU.

As Adams put it "The thing to remember about freedom is that it’s not given, it’s taken".

Technorati Tags: Broadcast Flag, law, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, rhetoric, television