A lockbox for digital radio

Mindjack has just published a piece I pulled together, culled from research for my upcoming book Darknet. Will digital radio be Napsterized? looks at a new proposal by the Recording Industry Association of America for the FCC to impose new regulations mandating the adoption of a broadcast flag standard for audio.

What does this mean for you?

Where today you can tape anything you want over the free analog radio airwaves, that may not be true tomorrow. Want to record the digital broadcast of Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, or Terry Gross on your PC and listen to it in your car? Or tape a cool new digital radio station you discovered and play it for friends at a party?

Your device may well tell you: I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

On April 15, the FCC bowed to the RIAA’s request and initiated a notice of inquiry, typically a step leading to formal rule-making. The public may submit comments to the FCC between June 16 and July 16.

It’s almost shocking that no mainstream news publication has reported on this, given the potential stakes. To my knowledge, only Consumer Electronics Daily ran a short piece last month. Cory Doctorow of the EFF gives this explanation: It’s too complicated.

While the Mindjack article adequately describes the issues involved, there’s more to the story.

Two weeks ago, a lobbyist friend in Washington emailed me copies of correspondence sent back and forth between RIAA president Cary Sherman and Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro. The letters speak volumes about the RIAA’s and CEA’s visions of what users’ rights and prerogatives ought to be in the digital age.

Sherman, in the role of King Canute commanding the sea to recede, wrote in part to Shapiro:

[W]e are concerned that new devices manufactured by your members will enable radio listeners to become owners and world distributors of a personalized collection of sound recordings. Specifically, our understanding is that the next generation of digital radio receivers would grant the unfettered ability (1) to redistribute recordings widely, whether on the Internet or digital media and (2) to automatically copy and disaggregate from a broadcast particular recordings of the user’s choice, thereby transforming a passive listening experience into a personal music library — in many cases without the user even listening to the original broadcast. These features, especially when combined with inexpensive storage devices, would fundamentally change the character of broadcast radio from a listening service to a distribution and on-demand reproduction system, displacing the sales on which the entire music industry relies.

Among the forward-thinking ideas that Sherman outlined was a “buy button” that consumer electronics makers could add to their devices, giving consumers “the ability to quickly and easily purchase music that they hear on the radio.”

Shapiro all but chortled in his riposte, writing that he was “puzzled” by “your belief that longstanding and legitimate consumer recording practices suddenly pose a threat to your industry.” He also needled Sherman, “You state that you do not wish to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts. Instead, you apparently want to force them to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves. As you know, we have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the ‘play’ button on our devices to a ‘pay’ button.”

Shapiro pointed out that hundreds of thousands of digital radios have been sold in Great Britain without harm to the recording industry, that digital radio has never been linked to illegal file-sharing services, and that the RIAA position seemed to breach an agreement it entered into in January 2003 not to seek technical protection measures imposed by the government.

I sent the letters to John Young at Cryptome, who just published them as PDF files:

April 14, 2004 fax from RIAA President Cary H. Sherman to Gary Shapiro

April 15, 2004 response from CEA President Gary Shapiro to Cary Sherman

John also created a zip file of the two letters combined, to speed downloading, in case this gets Slashdotted.

And at BoingBoing Cory has a few words to say about “the unbelievable, suicidal stupidity of restricting the ability of end-users to record digital radio signals.”

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.