Short diary this time, as I don’t have a lot of spare time today. But everyone should know about the Sony-MPAA case that established the legitimacy of recording, time-shifting, and (to a degree) archiving broadcast and other purchased content using new technological means. Predictably, the content cartels are using the current fascist-conservative domination of the American government to try and change this. And the bill’s up for debate in a House Subcommittee on Thursday.
(As seen on Slashdot.)
A full article on the legislation is up at eXtreme DRM. The legislation attempts to close the “analog hole”. What’s the analog hole? Many devices these days have encryption measures on all digital channels, to attempt to prevent users from accessing, saving, or manipulating the content moving over those channels. While the encryption measures are trivial to crack, the DMCA (one of Clinton’s many horrible moves) makes doing so 100% illegal… Even if you’re, for example, trying to get a blind person an audio transcript of a text document. This severely and unfairly restricts your right to Fair Use of said content, and effectively prevents it from ever entering the public domain, making it blatantly unconstitutional.
And would have been ruled such, with a sensible Supreme Court. Of course, the prior one thought that “unlimited retroactive copyright extensions” were “sufficiently limited” as long as the duration was limited at any given time, so they weren’t exactly sensible. But I digress.
The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself.
In other words… It makes analog output illegal, and very tightly controls what technology will allow you to do with any audio output streams you manage to acquire. Basically, it delimits – in law – the acceptable functionality of any audio/video recording, storage, or editing device. Wonderful little bill here, isn’t it?
Oh, and to make things even better, here’s how the content cartels justify it:
“Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites,” Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. “In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection…and that’s why we need to drive this technology forward.”
Uh-huh. And the fact that it prevents them from doing anything with your content, kills alternate distribution methods, and restricts their ability to become authors is completely irrelevant, right? The MPAA most certainly are luddites. Instead of adapting and taking advantage of the opportunities offered by this new technology, they’re trying to legislate it out of existence. They claim to be concerned about copyright infringement… Yet refuse to adopt proven solutions, such as cheap, un-DRM’d online distribution in the mold of the Apple iTMS. (Yes, the iTMS does have DRM, but it’s so trivial to circumvent that it’s barely worthy of the name.)
Interestingly, the proposal also supports government censorship, but severely limiting the ability of ordinary people to manipulate video and audio recordings… Even those they own the copyrights for, or which have moved into the public domain! Guess what, dear readers? You no longer control your computer. Even TiVos now delete recordings after a pre-specified interval, with chilling implications. That news conference from two months ago where the President praised the country he declared war on today? Gone.
Never mind the impact on the American technology design, manufacturing, and research sector. This bill effectively destroys any possibility of A/V innovation. And while the content cartels may be a cash cow, technology is a bigger cash cow. Especially since (I’d hope) few other countries would consider legislation this draconian, which would leave the USA crippled in the international economy. It would also effectively terminate many up-and-coming niche content industries, establishing the MPAA as a cartel in name and fact.
The EFF is doing their best to fight the legislation, but they can use all the help they can get. Write or e-mail any representatives of yours on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property ASAP. Though don’t bother with Senator Feinstein – she’s so deeply in the pocket of the MPAA that you’d need an industrial crane to extract her. Apple damn well better be fighting this too, as it kills a number of their more interesting pieces of software, but they’re a sporadic ally at best.