A bill has been introduced into Congress which plainly has the support of the music industry. Simply put the bill means anyone broadcasting on the Internet has to use digital rights management (DRM , a way to make it impossible for you to make a copy) technology. This would stop listeners from making unauthorized copies — that is copies from which the music industry cannot squeeze money — of any music or television or anything very much. And that includes, and this is not a joke, somebody singing Happy Birthday to You.

Senator Dianne Feinstein and three other senators introduced the wonderfully sounding Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (Perform) Act on January 11. This is not the first time it has been tried. Last year Congress refused to pass the bill. If at first you do not succeed and the music industry is leaning on you, try and try again.

The proposed act is all encompassing. It requires all satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to deploy ‘reasonably available’ copy-protection technology to stop listeners making a copy. The music industry would most certainly see that it was reasonably available.

Sadly, the proposed legislation goes further than that.

It wants to stop time shifting where you record a show at one time and listed to it at another. That is, Senator Dianne Feinstein said, A Bad Thing, and must be stopped.

She said, ‘New radio services are allowing users to do more than simply listen to music. What was once a passive listening experience has turned into a forum where users can record, manipulate, collect and create personalized music libraries. As the modes of distribution change and the technologies change, so must our laws change.’

Well, yes, perhaps you can argue that the law must change. But how must it change?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge, two lobbying groups who try to keep information and music and other things as free as is reasonable, oppose the legislation. The EFF said the bill would be a ‘backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio.’ It would prohibit digital and satellite radio services from offering TiVO-like recording options — record it now, play it later.

The Perform Act is also against the broadcasting of MP3 and Apple’s iTunes streaming radio stations. Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property lawyer at EFF said the bill sets a ‘bad precedent for our copyright laws. Over the course of a century, our copyright laws have responded to changing technology not with government technology mandates, but rather by letting new business models evolve …’

In fairness, the music industry has a case to make. It lost sales over the past Christmas period as if Santa Claus was taking a lunch break. And the profits that it has made in the past are now but a hazy and pleasant memory. It needs to do something.

None of this is new. The ability to make copies has been around since Emile Berliner invented the gramophone in 1903. Or, perhaps, more accurately, since Philips introduced the cassette recorder in 1965 as an office dictation machine and the world found out that it made acceptable copies of music.

At the time, the music industry said it would be destroyed by this invention. And that was over forty years ago.

The approach of the music industry to its problems has always been like that of the button makers. In Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers he tells the story of the button makers in France in 1666. Their reaction to progress precisely matches that of the music industry and the RIAA in dealing with innovations that have challenged their business models.

‘The button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers.

But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.’

Let us hope sanity breaks out and the button makers of today, the music industry, sees that unenforceable legislation is not the way to control the situation.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 9:24 am under Legal.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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