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CBS News has fired the producer responsible for breaking into “CSI: NY” last week for a special report on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death, a CBS executive said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Of course! Priorities, my friend, priorities!

In this television frame grab provided by NBC, Democratic strategist James Carville cracks an egg on his forehead to demonstrate he’s got egg on his face after his projection of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was wrong on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ during a taping at the NBC studios Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004 in Washington,. Carville projected 52-percent of vote for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., 47-percent for President George W. Bush and one-percent for Ralph Nader. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Meet the Press/Getty Images)

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The FCC has filed a remarkable brief in the broadcast flag challenge pending before the DC Circuit. 

Some background:  Back in November 2003, the FCC issued an order (the broadcast flag rule) saying that all devices capable of receiving a digital TV signal (or storing DTV files) would have to comply by July 2005 with a set of technical mandates. 

The broadcast flag rule, distilled to its essence, is a mandate that all consumer electronics manufacturers and information technology companies ensure that any device that touches digital television content encrypt that content and protect it against unauthorized onward distribution.

In order to make this happen, the FCC has established a new and extraordinarily broadregulatory regime that mandates the use of “authorized” content protection technologies by virtually every consumer electronics product and computer product — including digital television sets, digital cable set-top boxes, direct broadcast satellite receivers, personal video recorders (PVRs), DVD recorders, D-VHS recorders, and computers with tuner cards.

In the context of both the flag rule and the IP-enabled services proceeding that was the subject of Bellhead/Nethead earlier this fall, the FCC has said that it has “ancillary” jurisdiction to act.  Translation:  “Congress hasn’t said that we DON’T have the power to do this, so we’re going to go ahead on the assumption that we do.” 

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The thing is, this rule doesn’t merely affect TV receiving equipment.  It affects everything that RECEIVES digital files from TV receiving equipment as well — every device inside any home network.  It affects the open-platform PC.  It’s a sweeping rule.  And now FCC’s jurisdiction to enact this rule is being argued in sweeping terms.

Why should we care about all of this?  We should care because if the FCC has the power to act on anything that has something to do with communication, we have only the FCC’s self-restraint to rely on when it comes to all internet communications.  We should care because we want open platforms and open communications to continue.  We should care because the future of the internet is at stake — the FCC will use its “ancillary jurisdiction” to impose “social policies” on any services that use the internet protocol, and will point to its broadcast flag action as support for its jurisdictional claims.

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An anonymous reader writes “German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called ‘Deepz0ne’ who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.”