RIAA Fights to the Death for DRM - Your Death

The ever-perceptive Ed Felten has an amazing story about the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its friends-in-copyright fighting to keep DRM on people's systems in all circumstances - even those that might be life-threatening. From his post:

In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.

In fact, it's enough to gaze (not too long, mind) at the RIAA's home page: it is a cacophony of "lawsuits", "penalties", "pirates", "theft" and "parental advisories" - a truly sorry example of narrow-minded negativity. Whatever happened to music as one of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit?

Why Openness Will Prevail

A telling story here. A US Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Broadcast Flag - which threatens to close down various kinds of content fair use - left the tracks when one of the committee suddenly got it.

He realised that the proposal that was being glibly presented to them by the RIAA representative would stop him using his shiny new iPod in the way he had quickly become accustomed to - things like recording from the radio and listening on the road. The RIAA is now in big trouble, at least as far as this committee is concerned, because they have been rumbled.

The key lesson to learn from this is the importance of getting people - especially politicians - to understand, viscerally, what is at stake. Once they do, those pushing to close down our options don't stand a chance.

This is why openness will prevail: it is its own best weapon.

Update: As a result of this incident, there is now a project to give an iPod to all US Senators. Fighting ignorance with education: now there's an idea....