Digital Copyright Blues

My column yesterday covered digital radio, but at the end it mentioned a different issue: the entertainment industry's campaign to build anti-copy controls into every computer and electronic device sold to consumers.

In this case, the Recording Industry Association of America is asking the Federal Communications Commission to require manufacturers to implement some form of "content protection" in digital radio receivers.

I discussed this issue at length on Thursday with Steve Marks, the RIAA's general counsel, and got a lot more material than went into my two-word summary of this idea: "belated, misguided." I'd like to expand on that description here.

Marks said that his association has been talking to iBiquity about this for a while, and only turned to the FCC when those talks didn't get anywhere. "We were timely in terms of raising it [with the FCC] about a year ago," he said. "We and our companies had raised it with iBiquity long before that."

But it's now way too late to get any copy protection hardware built into first-generation digital-radio receivers, and maybe even second-gen hardware. Contrary to what an RIAA publicist suggested this week, features like this can't be dumped into a receiver overnight.

What's the music industry's rush here? The RIAA's member companies, Marks said, fear two things. One is that listeners will program their receivers to "cherry-pick" specific songs, relying on the song-title information that can be broadcast in digital radio signals. The other is that people will redistribute digital-radio recordings over the Internet.

But will people necessarily go to the trouble of copying digital radio anyway? Waiting around for a station to play your favorite song so you can record it is mind-numbingly boring (I know; I used to do this when I was 12 or 13).

The only way you could make a habit out of this is with the sort of programmed cherry-picking the RIAA sketches out -- you tell your receiver to record songs by artists X, Y and Z, and it knows to copy them by monitoring the stream of title/ artist data broadcast with the music. This, I asked Marks, is the central problem, right? "You're right," he replied.

Here's where I think the RIAA's argument collapses. A radio station could defeat this by waiting to send out the title/ artist data for a new song until 10, 15 or 30 seconds into it -- and it would have every incentive to do so, since a station that made cherry-picking easy would quickly incinerate its own ad market.

What if that's not the case? The RIAA's argument still rests on a stack of ifs and hypotheticals. Before we give one industry this kind of veto power over another -- getting the government even more tangled in the business of hardware design in the process -- shouldn't we have a good, sound reason to do so?