Wired on Friday: I've seen and heard a lot of media produced by technologists. Radio shows distributed online, feature-length motion pictures produced by computer graphics enthusiasts, even two-hour live action thrillers manufactured by slightly overweight amateur geek dramatists.

Generally speaking, most of them are quite dreadful. But none of them are quite as bad as when Hollywood movie-makers decide to make technology.

Yesterday, in a US congressional sub-committee, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), unveiled their plans for the future of American - and sadly, by some extension, much of the world's - multimedia technology.

Their requests consist of introducing a set of compulsory hardware, commissioned and specified by Hollywood lawyers, into all the devices manufactured by American companies.

Every new digital radio in the United States will have limits placed upon it by these Hollywood governors.

New radios will not be able to record programmes in steps of less than 30 minutes, and you will not be able to record more than 70 hours of material before your recordings start to delete themselves.

Every digital television receiver will have to listen out for, and obey, a "broadcast flag", which will tell it when its user can freely copy TV output, and when they must be prevented from making simple copies.

Any digital device that takes a video input must be designed to look for a "watermark" concealed in the television image, and carry and obey what an anti-copying mark requires.

If the mark says "don't keep a copy", your digital video recorder will keep a maximum of 90 minutes of programmes. After that, the start of the show will begin to delete itself.

The three proposed laws, the Broadcast Flag Authorization Act (BFAA), the HD Radio Content Protection Act (HDRCPA) and the Analog Content Protection Act (ACPA), have all been written by Hollywood lawyers.

The technology that they would require to be installed in every device was similarly designed by Hollywood. The watermarking system, for instance, is a slightly modified version of a technology used to make Batman toys leap up and respond to animated TV shows.

But they're not the kind of technology you expect to see added, especially not compulsorily by law. They're intended solely to remove features from digital devices, sometimes features that we've come to expect.

For those who have grown up watching technology grow cheaper and smaller and more powerful, these proposals are genuinely shocking. They're more than a demand by the entertainment industry for a legal mandate over how digital devices work: they're a Hollywood commandment to include its technology in every consumer digital device that conveys their work.

The entertainment industry, already an oligopoly in much of media production and distribution up until the consumer's door, now wants to extend that monopoly control into their very homes.

Both organisations are understandably concerned that the ability to freely manufacture and redistribute perfect digital copies of their works may affect their members' business models.

But rather than work to adjust those business models, Hollywood has come to Washington to ask that the problem be erased by fiat.

The problem here being digital technology as a whole. What Hollywood is attempting to pursue is the dream of preventing the copying of certain digital bits within a system designed around the very idea of copying.

Each of the proposals being put forward before Congress is almost trivially circumventable: watermarks can be erased, flags can be ignored, radios can be jury-rigged to record less, and store more.

Preventing a digital device from copying is like attempting to push a stream upwater with your hands. If you're not devoting all your time and effort to the problem, you're doomed.

Which is why they are currently attempting to get America's lawmakers involved.

Only by criminalising what is easy, and then steadily increasing the punishments involved, can the MPAA and RIAA even appear to stop the inevitable.

Previously, this has involved pursuing those indulging in infringing acts of copying. Now, it involves creating new crimes. The crime of tampering with your radio to make copies of a show. The crime of providing a device to let critics make fair use samples of political TV broadcasts, or the crime of providing one too many features in your consumer electronics product.

At some point, it was clear that the entertainment industry were going to overreach themselves. Cosy agreements between themselves and the technology industry have always been based on the understanding that the technologists would not design equipment that would undermine too far the content providers, as long as the content providers did not meddle too deeply in how technology is designed.

That peace appears to be ending. There are very few hardware manufacturers that would eagerly look forward to the US government declaring how they should design their digital equipment, and what consumer-friendly feature they should omit.

It may transpire that the computer industry's geeks will finally realise that they have spent the last few years making a Faustian deal with Hollywood, which the wily lawyers of that town have no intention of honouring.

Whether or not Congress decides this year to listen to Hollywood, Silicon Valley is listening.

Instead of the restrictions the entertainment industry wants, we may finally get the banned extras - like automatic ad skipping, music that can play on any device, streaming media you can record - that we, and Hollywood, so richly deserve.