Our Government in Action:

Wired: Anti-Copy Bill Slams Codes

But the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) would also wreak havoc on programmers and software companies -- both those distributing code for free and those selling it.

No more than two years and seven months after the bill becomes law, the only code programmers and software firms will be able to distribute must have embedded copy-protection schemes approved by the federal government.

To put this in perspective: The CBDTPA would, if enacted in its current form, have the electrifying effect on computer professionals that the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore did to some Democratic Party members.

Legal experts said on Friday that the CBDTPA regulates nearly any program, in source or object code, that runs on a PC or anything else with a microprocessor.

That's not just Windows media players and their brethren, as you might expect. The CBDTPA's sweeping definition of "any hardware or software" includes word processors, spreadsheets, operating systems, compilers, programming languages -- all the way down to humble Unix utilities like "cp" and "cat."

"The definition will cover just about anything that runs on your computer -- except maybe the clock," said Tom Bell, a professor at Chapman University School of Law who teaches intellectual property law.

Then Bell paused for a moment and reconsidered. "There's a risk you could say it covers things like even a digital clock program on your computer," he said.

This is all laughable because the very people they seek to control are perfectly capable of cracking any protection scheme they come up with. The injured parties are the rest of us, who will find our newer hardware incompatible with existing systems. Worse, existing systems won't play upcoming content. Ah, for the good of all consumers indeed....