Former Senator Chris Dodd has been buttering the popcorn of movie theater owners since becoming Hollywood's chief lobbyist. So it's not surprising to see the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) and the MPAA commiserating together over what happened to SOPA. They're united in the delusion that the revolt of Internet users was started and orchestrated by Google--it's more comforting, no doubt, to paint a large corporation as the bad guy, instead of facing up to the reality of a populist revolt against your own greed and overreach.

On today's podcast, we discuss hacking the Kinect, the Square mobile credit card reader, $20,500 to access first run movies at home, and what wikileaks can tell us about copyright policy laundering.

You can download the audio directly by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

Want to subscribe to our podcast? Click here for the MP3 feed and here for the mixed audio/video feed.

While everyone is basking in the reasonableness of the FCC's plan to place broadband Internet access under Title II, the Media Bureau decided to sneak out a decision to prove that change doesn't spread everywhere at once.  After two years of considering the issue, and thousands of comments from the public (the overwhelming majority of which urged the Bureau to reject the petition), the Bureau decided to grant the MPAA's request for Selectable Output Control (SOC).

Background:  The Media Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today issued an order allowing movie studios and other content owners to close off the outputs of TV sets and set-top boxes of consumers through the use of “selectable output control.”

The order is here.

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“We are disappointed that the Media Bureau has succumbed to the special-interest pleadings of the big media companies and ignored the thousands of letters from consumers.  The order allowing the use of ‘selectable output control’ will allow the big firms for the first time to take control of a consumer’s TV set or set-top box, blocking viewing of a TV program or motion picture.

It looks like the Media Bureau decided to do the MPAA a solid--the media industry now has the power to deactivate part of your TV remotely.

If you were following our tweets yesterday (and don't forget to follow the tweets of our collective staff, found on this twitter list, too), you may have seen an update that PK Legal Director Harold Feld participated in a discussion about set top boxes, over-the-top Internet video, cutting the cord, and net neutrality on the Kojo Nnamdi Show. If you missed the live show, you can read the transcripts and listen to the recorded audio stream here.

At the December 16 Commission meeting, the folks working on the National Broadband Plan made a further presentation/sneak preview/trial balloon on what to expect when they publish the plan on February 17 (God willin' and the crick don' rise). While we at Public Knowledge criticized the plan for failing to have the courage of its convictions and the evidence by taking a pass (so far at least) on promoting structural separation, that does not make the plan worthless.

Although overshadowed by Joe Biden's big party for his Copyright buddies, the good folks at the House Judiciary Committee staged their own holiday party for Hollywood. Since "p2p" is now passe, the Judiciary's Secret Santa brought Hollywood a whole new villain to attack in the name of piracy, streaming media. (Hey everyone, remember when 'streaming media' was the good way to get content online because it could be protected unlike that evil peer-2-peer stuff so Hollywood pretended they loved streaming media so they could outlaw peer-2-peer? Boy, we were so young back then . .

As devotees of our hit video series Five Minutes with Harold Feld (or as the cool kids call it “5MWHF”) will no doubt recall, on the eve of Thanksgiving MPAA dropped a lengthy filing into the Selectable Output Control (SOC) docket. Among other things, it called Harold a liar. Harold immediately took five minutes to tell MPAA to chillax, and yesterday we filed our official response with the FCC. Although I urge you to read our full reply (I promise it is much shorter than the MPAA’s), if you are in a rush here is the short version. Our response basically made three points.

**Most of MPAA’s Filing is Unrelated to SOC.