Broadcast Flag Oral Arguments, details of the first steps in American Library Association v. FCC. CNet story. The FCC recently ruled that all consumer electronic devices capable of receiving a digital television signal include technology to enforce the "broadcast flag," a bit of data embedded in the signal that claims the broadcaster has exclusive rights to copy and rebroadcast the signal. A compliant device might, say, prevent you from recording a TV show so you may watch it later, or share it with a friend who missed the original broadcast, if that was the wish of the broadcaster. More severely, it potentially limits fair use (the broadcaster can deny you your rights to access to the material), and unfairly regulates a wide range of devices, including personal computers and open source software.

If the broadcast flag stands, there is likely to be a lot of (illegal?) circumvention. I hereby dub the act of circumventing this regulatory technology "flag burning." Feel free to use it.

Incidentally, the broadcast flag only applies to unencrypted digital television signals broadcast through the air. If you subscribe to a digial cable or digital satelite TV service, your rights are already in the hands of the content providers. Indeed, the FCC argued that the broadcast flag mandate was necessary to prevent content from migrating to cable/sat-only (proprietary, for-pay) distribution for its added restrictions—though we've neither established that that is actually a problem, nor have we established that the broadcast flag will prevent it.