The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (or CBDTPA) was a United States bill proposed in 2002 that would have prohibited any kind of technology that could be used to read digital content without digital rights management (DRM)—which prohibits copying and reading any content under copyright without permission of the copyright owner. The bill was known in early drafts as the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act (or SSSCA), and was sometimes derisively called the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act.
The CBDTPA was proposed by South Carolina senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC). Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had stated that he could "not support" the proposed legislation and, as chairman, intended to block consideration of the controversial bill. This essentially killed the bill in 2002.
Proposed penalties for violating the CBDTPA ranged from five to twenty years in prison, and fines between $50,000 and $1 million.
Richard Stallman criticized this act due to the restrictions that it would place in the immediate and long-term future on free software, dubbing the bill the "Consume But Don't Try Programming Act."
Other U.S. senators named as sponsors of the CBDTPA bill include:
- John Breaux (D-LA)
- Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
- Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
- Bill Nelson (D-FL)
- Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Famous quotes containing the words consumer, television, promotion and/or act:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“I am asked if I would not be gratified if my friends would procure me promotion to a brigadier-generalship. My feeling is that I would rather be one of the good colonels than one of the poor generals. The colonel of a regiment has one of the most agreeable positions in the service, and one of the most useful. “A good colonel makes a good regiment,” is an axiom.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)