SSSCA, CBDTPA, and BICCA: Acrimonious Acronyms
by Susan at 09:17PM (EDT) on July 29, 2005 | Permanent Link
All three of these acronyms stand for federal legislative attempts to design digital devices and applications. The first two failed. The third has just been proposed.
So what are these things? The first, the 2001 Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, suggested that any "interactive digital device" (defined as "any machine, device, product, software, or technology, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine, device, product, software, or technology, that is designed, marketed or used for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form") needed to respect digital content restrictions and "certified security" technologies. Because standards for indicating digital content restrictions (and implementing them) didn't exist, industry was supposed to come up with them.
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