In a great victory for the rest of us, a Federal appellate court told the FCC to quit mucking with television receivers and to stop meddling in areas for which the Commission has no authorization. If that sounds harsh, it's mild compared to what the judge actually said:
You're out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?" asked Judge Harry Edwards. Quipped Judge David Sentelle: "You can't regulate washing machines. You can't rule the world."
Back in 2003, the FCC had declared that all television tuners and receivers sold in the U.S. after July 1st, 2005, had to respect the "broadcast flag," which is a gimmick dreamed up by Hollywood (the Motion Picture Association) to control content unfairly and to force everyone in the country to eventually buy a new TV, among other problems. The broadcast flag, a digital code that would be included on every television broadcast, would tell VCRs, Tivo-type devices, computers, and anything else capable of recording video that the material could NOT be recorded, or if it could, under very limited circumstances.
The FCC rules flew in the face of decades of court rulings that generally said consumers had the right to make recordings for their own use and certain other uses (in libraries, as one example). The "fair use" doctrine has consistently been supported and extended by the courts, even for related technologies like photocopying.
The court ruling will keep some manufacturers from having to drop whole product lines because the cost to add the complicated broadcast flag circuitry was prohibitive.