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Senate Bill Again Aims to Restrict Internet Radio
JAFSlashdotter writes "If you enjoy MP3 or OGG streams of internet radio, it's time to pay attention. This week U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander, Joseph Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Lindsey Graham decided to reintroduce the 'Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (PERFORM) Act'. An Ars Technica article explains that PERFORM would restrict our rights to make non-commercial recordings under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, and require satellite and internet broadcasters to use 'technology to prevent music theft'. That means goodbye to your favorite streaming audio formats, hello DRM. The EFF said pretty much the same when this bill last reared its ugly head in April of 2006. It's too soon to get the text of this year's version (S.256) online, but it likely to resemble last year's S.2644, which is available through Thomas."
How will I get my daily fix of CowboyNeal's gentle croonings in his finest country ballads?
Ninjas use italics.
Looks to me like an attempt to squash free speech. There are technologies available to produce copy protected streams. There are technologies for those wanting to make their content available freely. Looks like they want to kill the latter.
Why not legislate technology to prevent copying text? After all, text can be copyrighted.
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I was about to say the same thing. What is it about Americans and acronyms? It seems everything has to have one. Titles get twisted to form a pronounceable acronym (like PERFORM); contrived expansions are invented to make perfectly good existing names into acronyms (like AMBER Alert). No other country has this fascination with acronyms. What gives?
Of all the problems in the US, and around the world, they decide that this is something they should work on. Ignore all the letters from the people they represent, and take care of special interests. This is what is wrong with our government. I am sure each and every one of these people have received thousands of letters on Iraq, and healthcare, and numerous other problems from everyday voting citizens. I would love to see the letters they have received that convinced them that this was an issue that needed their attention over all these other issues. I doubt they can produce even one that came from a private voting citizen.
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I read the article, yet, as is almost always the case, it is unclear why the bill sponsors have committed their names to it. Clearly there is only one benefactor: recording industry groups obsessed with piracy. The radio stations do not benefit, the listeners do not benefit. However they [the lobby] are probably well aware that Internet Radio area is, most likely, not a common place for piracy.
This leaves us the option that they are trying to push this through as an attempt to soften the ground for a larger blitz on personal freedoms on commercial products of a digital nature.
But can anyone say for sure why these alleged representatives of the people have deemed it necessary to impose a law that most people will not need, understand and be worse off for in the long run? I can think only that, someplace, there is a trail of money, or of gratuity, or of favours and deals or offers that are the real reason that any member of the nation might even acknowledge the phantom problem of audio piracy.
Eliminate it. Thats what should be done about DRM. DRM is a violation of fair use. And just because you are 'some musician' doesn't give you a damn right to trample MY rights. So as far as I am concerned, you HAVE no right to ensure that you get rich because you made some crappy song, or movie. If you, or they don't like it, then tough f*cking cookies. Deal with the burnt underside. The problem with the idiot IP flounters today is that they think because they made this 'thing' that they have some kind of right to trample people to make a profit margin. The world isn't fair. F*cking deal with it. IP flounters sound like children when they whine and cry, and don't get their damn toy.
I make commercials for small companies in my spare time, and make tons of money from it, if someone wants to copy it, then good fracking doodly doo. Promote me and my customer for free. Have at it. I personally like the Holiday Hawk, whoever created that is pretty damn funny.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0d0rQnVIOvA
as a person responsible for over hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Sony products sold. And one that has mostly Sony products I too will never ever recommend or purchase another Sony product as long as I breathe oxygen on earth for the same reasons you listed above.
You are absolutely right in your analysis of all of the other players in this. No one stands to benefit from it since satellite radio is not a source of piracy. The answer is Occam's Razor: remove all of the other players from your formula.
Headlines appeared recently announcing that Howard Stern received a huge stock bonus due to the large number of satellite subscribers. Suddenly Congress needs to introduce legislation to regulate some aspect of the industry. I noticed the same thing starting happening when video games sales shot through the roof. Suddenly there was a need to regulate.
Congress is all about getting re-elected which of course requires money. They can only go to the same sources so many times, so when a new industry or technology issues a press release to lure investors or some trade magazine interviews a CEO on their success, it is like chumming the waters for Congress to step in and "regulate".
This is really a way for Congress to get a new source of campaign donations flowing in their direction. Introduce a bill that will appear to substantially drive up costs or lower sales for an industry and the industry heads will realize that it is going to be a lot easier for them to donate to the campaigns of the named sponsors than to try a fight the bill with a PR campaign or by donating to their own proxies in Congress. Then, after some time has passed and enough donations have been squeezed, the bill will be removed of any teeth and Congress can claim a "victory" for whatever straw man they set up to knock down whether it is copyright infringement, exposing children to violence, or whatever.
If the CEOs are not forthcoming with the donations, then the next step to shake them down is to hold Congressional investigations and hearings. Because Congress sits as both judge and prosecutor, they have (as we have seen time and time again) and extremely unfair advantage in their ability to paint whoever they are questioning in a bad light (greedy, ignorant, uncaring). These have the potential to be PR disasters for the industry or company and will affect their bottom lines with much bigger numbers than any campaign donations.
Congress is often the lackey for various interests to take a comparative advantage and turn it into a monopoly, but when there is no obvious beneficiary of legislation, the true beneficiary is usually Congress itself.
What should be done about it?
Come up with different business models to respond to changes in tech, instead of trying to enforce systems that were created to deal with very different technological/business environments.
When copyrights were invented, it was unthinkable for one person of modest resources to be able to quickly a cheaply send unlimited copies of a written work across the world at no charge. Now nearly every household in the western world can do this. I don't think we can abandon copyright, but I do think some different understanding is required.
I think of the movies Cars, for example. My kids really like that movie. We have the DVD, but I'm sure Pixar have made more from us out of merchandising than by the DVD sale. I'm pretty sure that financially succesful movies could be made even without ever doing anything to stop downloaders. Commercial pirates could still be prosecuted, but have liberal fair use for non-commercial purposes. If they went so far as to promote it as free to download (a reasonable time after the cinema release) they could potentially gain a much larger market share and therefore merchandising revenue.
Looking at software: Microsoft use copyright violation to sustain their market share. It is a part of their business model, they don't openly admit it, but it's not a secret. If personal copies were permitted, but copying for commercial use forbidden, in reality it would not destroy their profits. Most people buy their computer with software on it, and would continue to do so. Most people simply don't want to install their own operating system. Redhat seems to remain a viable business, despite CentOS. Probably CentOS helps Redhat retain market share in much the same way that pirated windows does for MS, but without requiring the law to be broken.
In short:
1 - There are currently viable business models that don't require changes to copyright law/enforcement. Use and improve on these.
2 - Accept that some businesses may have to operate with smaller profit margins. Deal with it.
3 - Accept that some industries may have to become smaller. Deal with it.
4 - Acknowledge that there is much "content" produced today that would not harm society in the slightest if none of it ever got made again.
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I'm one of those externally financed researchers, who are involved in a lot of different projects. Giving these projects some short and easy to remember shorthands makes life much easier. So finding a good acronym is useful. I suspect the same is true for bills in the political scene.
No, the people who build the atomic bombs were giants, the people who decided to use them were midgets (actually, they were not, but that it another discussion).
Refusing to impose your own morality on other people does not make you a midget. We scientist, engineers, and craftsmen create the tools with which humankind can build paradise on Earth. We do not impose paradise (or our view of paradise, which may be a hole lot nerdier than others) on them.
but Americans don't like stuff made elsewhere.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
With the Republicans in control, we get big oil calling the shots. With the Democrats, we get the entertainment industry and law lobby. Choose your poison.
I've been involved heavily in internet radio for over 3 years and running my own station ThereIsNoRadio for over a year now. We are constantly trying to keep within the guidelines of the DMCA and keep streamrippers off our streams when we see them. Unfortunately streamrippers would not function in the way described in Senator Feinstein's comments if not for the DMCA. The DMCA requires that we digitally include the artist, song title, and album that we are playing in the stream. The main reason for this seems to be to ensure that the RIAA can police us by tuning into any station stream and logging all the music played so they can collect evidence of DMCA violations and get us shut down. What it does instead, is allow streamrippers to search stream lists like shoutcast and find the songs they want, connect to the stream, and record just the songs specified by the user. If we were not forced by law to send this information, the streamrippers would only be able to record a long time chunk of our stream and the end user would have to listen to it and edit the file to extract the songs they wanted without any reference points. The only internet radio stations that I know of that actually make money are backed by major corporations (yahoo, aol, clear channel) or are the internet streams of corporate terrestrial am/fm stations. The rest of us pay for our bandwidth, our royalties, our music, etc. The royalties we pay to the RIAA are not just based on the music we play and how many people hear it. Our royalties are also based on how much money we spend to run the station as well as how much we earn. They get money based on our website hosting costs as well as our website advertising revenue, which is completely separate from the streams. We also pay a percentage of what we spend for advertising and marketing for the station. Our station and lots of other stations are heard on cellphones as well, with DRM forced formats, we will have to use additional bandwidth to send our stream to the cellphone stream provider. We will also have to spend more money on stream hosting to ensure that we don't alienate any of our listeners by streaming both windows media, and quicktime or realmedia drm formats, nevermind having to find a new hosting provider that can support it. If congress would do some research and quit letting the RIAA make the laws, maybe internet radio could grow as an industry, but they are pretty successfully forcing internet radio into the realm of hobby and making the costs prohibitive for even that. We have done and continue to do everything that congress asks of us and we still get accused of enabling theft, when it is the legislation that they write that is actually enabling the theft. They were better off when it was filesharing, but due to ignorance, they have made it a lot worse for everybody involved and this is the next move to destroy the internet radio that the RIAA can neither influence nor control.
You are correct that it is a social problem and that there will never be one great technological fix that solves it all. However, if you accept that it's a social problem, then: * You should not be so aghast at the idea of fixing it with laws (after all, laws are intended to fix social problems) * You should nevertheless support community efforts to CURB the problem.
You're either talking past or not getting what torques me and "the Slashdot crowd" off: Screwing up our hardware with "Fritz Chips" and then criggling up the software that runs the Internet so that only "Fritz Compliant" equipment can get online in the first place. Fucking up our computers so that only the likes of MicroSoft can truly program them is NOT tantamount to marking a child's toy as such. Keeping our hardware above the child's toy level is very much what we are about here; it is one issue you damn well count on to generate "community action". Secondly, I'm not against reasonable laws made by people with at least a modicum of clue. Diane Feinstein is notorious for basically letting the xxAAs draft legislation for her. The xxAAs are nasty middlemen who operate according to The Golden Rule namely "He who has the gold makes the rules." They screw both artist and customer and I don't especially give a rat's ass what hurts them. This opposition to pissing in our Wheaties is not an objection of any kind to community morals. Incidentally, many of are writing our own software and making our own entertainment under licenses and legal regimes that are FAR more compatible with community ideals. Many of us DO condemn piracy and instead advocate things like Creative Commons licensed content and FOSS software. For some reason, entrenched interests seem to find that to be more dangerous. I often think they'd rather suffer piracy than risk what "rolling our own" brings. BTW, We are not a monolith here. But even the MS fanboys don't seem to want their machines fucked over.
Just law respects everyone and not simply those who draft it to suit themselves then fork over bags of campaign contributions to get it enacted. The law is currently tending in the direction of letting companies like MS and cartels like the xxAAs dictate what we can and cannot do with our own hardware be it right, wrong, or indifferent. Until there is some acknowledgement that not all technology users are criminals and have rights just as important as those of corporate copyright holders, then they won't get any sympathy. A few years ago, Orrin Hatch tried to push through a law that would permit copyright holders to remotely disable PCs and other equipment if they merely suspected infringement. Since they can't achieve that in one fell swoop, they are doing it piecemeal. This shows a far more profound lack of respect of rights both property and moral then anything you'll see from "The Slashdot Crowd". As long as the laws proposed are blatantly unfair products of raw avarice rather than a genuine desire to serve ALL of the public then yes they'll be almost universally opposed.