Do you own a VCR and use it for time-shifting? Do you burn your own CDs to play at work or in the car? If so, there's stuff going on in Congress you ought to be paying attention to -- and you probably aren't.
That was the message delivered Nov. 5 by Alan Davidson, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C., group working to promote civil liberties and human rights in digital media. He spoke in Statler Hall as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Cornell Computer Policy and Law Program.
The Internet, Davidson pointed out, has always resisted any form of regulation and control. But now, he said, movie studios, record companies, musicians, artists and writers are trying to do just that: impose controls that would be built into digital media. The result, he said, may be "A world where all the devices promise to obey the rules." Translation: your video recording device may refuse to record "The Sopranos" so you can watch it the next day, and your CD player may not let you download a track off the latest Counting Crows album to your computer.
Bills to mandate such technology are under consideration in Congress, Davidson explained. They are vigorously promoted by industry lobbyists and, so far, rather weakly opposed by the technology industry, he said. Consumer interests are seldom represented in the discussions, he added.
Underlying these moves is the shift to digital media. Most music already comes in digital form, and television broadcasting is expected to be entirely digital by the year 2006. A movie or television program will come down the cable to your house as a series of binary bits, no different from the files on your computer. For the entertainment industry, that's a two-edged sword: On one edge, it's possible to make perfect digital copies of such material, with no loss of quality; on the other, it's possible to impose restrictions on digital files to limit or completely prevent copying, something the industry calls Digital Rights Management, or DRM.
Content providers insist (without much verification, Davidson suggested) that they are losing millions because people are copying their material instead of buying it. But control measures being considered, Davidson said, raise the possibility that consumers will no longer be able to do the things they now enjoy, like time-shifting, space-shifting (watching at someone else's house) or copying small excerpts of a program for a special use.
Of the literally hundreds of bills now working through Congress, the one likely to pass first, Davidson said, implements a "broadcast flag." This would be a bit of code incorporated in a television broadcast that would tell recording devices whether or not recording is permissible. The law would require that recording devices read the code and follow its rules.
Other laws in the hopper would impose various restrictions on the manufacturers of digital devices, and some would make it illegal to make or sell devices designed to circumvent protections.
Besides making things difficult for viewers and listeners, Davidson warned, many of the proposed laws would restrict innovation, making it harder to develop new uses for the technology. And, he said, if we move into a system where consumers must buy various rights -- such as the right to copy -- on an individual basis, there will be a loss of privacy. We will no longer be able to "listen anonymously."
Apparently, Davidson said, lawmakers are listening to lobbyists but not to consumers. "What are we to think about laws created to protect copyright when millions of people are violating them?" he said.
His final message: "Get involved."
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