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December 19, 2005

Analog Hole to be Sewn Shut?

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines
I know that ain't allowed
(Life during wartime, Talking Heads)

It's life during wartime alright and it looks as though the erosion of civil liberties continues and we're being told it's fully legal as the president has a "duty to uphold the laws of the United States" [1] and therefore somehow while holding up the law he must be acting under it as well. The logic confounds.

If that weren't enough, I was made aware of legislation introduced into congress and lobbied for by the RIAA and MPAA which limits the rights of fair use of analog content in an attempt to "close the analog hole" [2] whereby requiring analog devices to honor the "rights signaling system" imposed within the digital domain, including the ability to flag certain content as Copy Prohibited Content thus denying the viewer the ability to produce even an analog copy of the content for personal use. The notion that this legislation was even introduced further convinces me of how far out of whack the business model of media distribution really is.

Imagine that a disruptive technology comes along that changes the way you must do business. Instead of adapting your business to work with the new technology, you try and get the new technology to be crippled by legislation so your old business model is still profitable. The RIAA and MPAA in concert with the large, slow moving media distribution organizations seem to be doing exactly this.

To my mind, legislating against analog fair use is exactly as ridiculous as if Kodak lobbied for the introduction of legislation that would ban anybody from printing photos taken via a digital process without paying Kodak a small fee for the privilege; or if book publishers required photocopiers to recongnize watermarks in text and thereby not makng a copy. I had better not give anybody any fancy ideas or soon I'll find myself trying to sketch my photos and hand copy my paper citations.

Will the law win and hackers loose? Will all this digital convenience yield to the legal impediments introduced by special intrest? Absolutely not. The old way of content distribution is dying a slow, painful death. But it isn't going to stop them from trying to take a few of them with us by using legal wrangling on their way down into the ground.

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• [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html
• [2] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051218-5797.html

Posted by jordanh at December 19, 2005 11:34 PM

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