Bill proposed to enforce broadcast flag on digital radio receivers

[joepic]

From

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13147

"When a federal appeals court threw out the broadcast flag regulations from the FCC claiming that they did not have the authority to enforce the broadcast flag for video, the FCC would unlikely get away with a similar enforcement for digital radio. To overcome this, a bill has been proposed by Mike Ferguson which aims to give the FCC the power it needs to enforce measures against unauthorized copying and restriction for both digital terrestrial radio receivers and digital satellite receivers. If this bill gets written into law, it would make it illegal to sell digital radio receivers without government-approved copy-protection technology.
According to Ferguson, this bill is necessary to protect the music industry from potential piracy from recorded radio broadcasts as well as to protect the IP rights of the creators. The RIAA is also interested in having legislation in place to prevent Americans from recording music from digital broadcasts; otherwise they would be able to build a personal music collection from broadcasts or potentially redistribute their recordings over the web or place them on removable media. Unfortunately, for the RIAA and Ferguson, some senators have already expressed their concerns in a hearing that having a broadcast flag for audio would infringe on consumer's fair use rights.

Unlike most analogue radio broadcasts, the majority of digital and satellite radio broadcasts include song and artist information, which makes it very straight forward to exploit for automatically recording and labeling individual songs. Back in 2004, XM Satellite Radio discontinued its PC receiver after software was developed to record individual songs from its broadcasts. Thanks to DamnedIfIknow for letting us know about the following news:

Ferguson's proposal would grant the Federal Communications Commission the power to enforce "prohibitions against unauthorized copying and redistribution" for both digital over-the-air radio and digital satellite receivers.

"With exciting new digital audio devices on the market today and more on the horizon, Congress needs to streamline the deployment of digital services and protect the intellectual property rights of creators," said Ferguson, who is a member of the House of Representatives' Internet subcommittee. Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, is one of the four other co-sponsors.

Without explicit authorization from Congress, the FCC can't get away with mandating an audio broadcast flag on its own. That's because a federal appeals court last year unceremoniously rejected a similar set of regulations from the FCC, saying the agency did not have authority to mandate a broadcast flag for digital video.


Digital Radio seems to be one of the few mediums left that the music industry is keen on clamping the notorious DRM technology upon. In my opinion, I cannot see how digital radio without restrictions can make piracy any worse than it is now. If one were to record music from digital radio and make it available online, chances are that the majority of music played on digital radio can be already found on file sharing networks. Even if one decides to try and build a music library from recordings, this has been possible even with analogue radio (albeit more tedious) and so far the music industry has managed to do very well despite how many decades it has been since the first radio-cassette recorder was put on the market!

DamnedIfIknow added: So, first they get it passed for digital radio and then the MPAA will say "Hey, what about digital television? Don't we deserve the same protection?" Great. All your digital entertainment files belong to us!"

[joepic]

If you are into music this looks very interesting.

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[Cornucopia]

I was actually going to go out and buy an XM/Sirius tuner this summer. I'm seriously thinking otherwise, if this passes. They just lost a sale of an enthusiast.

Scott

[whitejremiah]

no way would i EVER pay for radio, especially if it has that type of copy protection built into it...what the heck ever happened to the good ol days where if you recorded a song off the radio you weren't considered to be a criminal, you were considered to be a fan of the music......

[InXess]

time to pull the old casette deck out of the closet...

[whitejremiah]

or just any random radio with a headphone jack should work in combination with a pc with a line in..... in all honesty though, i dont think that this type of insane bill would pass....then again we shall see.....

[thevoelk]

I remember a college professor saying the same thing regarding the DMCA in a class idscussion.