Cory Doctorow points out the real story on Broadcast Flag:
“it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that’s already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.”
Copying digital media will always be possible since human beings respond to analogue signals, whether they are air-pressure fluctuations or lights that shine on our retina.
Any hi-fidelity analog signal can be reconverted to digital without copy protection.
However… as more and more protection schemes are embedded in the devices we use to manipulate and transfer digital files I wonder whether there will be a market for obsolete uncompromised hardware in the future.
Ebay in ten years: “Clean” PC from 2003.