Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

While the Senate was standing up for civil liberties, the House was handing out a Christmas gift to Hollywood. For digital consumers and innovators, however, it looks to be a nasty stocking-filler.

Representatives Sensenbrenner and Conyers have introduced H.R. 4569, the “Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005,” a.k.a. the return of the MPAA’s “Plugging the Analog Hole” scheme, which is itself just a variant on the dreaded “Hollings Bill” introduced back in 2002.

The new bill is a rehash of the one we first mentioned on Halloween. It would impose strict legal controls on any video analog to digital (A/D) convertors “manufacture[d], imported or otherwise traffic[ed]” in the United States.

Digitizers and digital media devices that won’t jump through the specified outrageous regulatory hoops – automatically deleting protected analog content after ninety minutes; outputting only “down-rezzed” images, and satisfying “robustness criteria” that weld the hood shut against user modification and open source developers – are expected to simply turn off and refuse to convert watermark-protected analog video.

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