Digital Home Thoughts: CEA: RIAA Refuses to Cooperate, Carries Out "thinly veiled attack" on Fair Use

"Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro is frustrated with the music industry. While the consumer electronics industry works to find a middle ground between the interests of electronics manufacturers and rights holders, the RIAA has failed to participate. To make matters worse, despite their lack of participation, the RIAA is currently lobbying members of Congress to push through the controversial audio broadcast flag; its passage would trump the efforts of the Copy Protection Technical Working Group. The RIAA is a late-comer to the "flag"-method of content control, which can be generically described as follows: mandate all broadcasters to use technology to embed mandated "flags" that are then "respected" by hardware designed under mandate to obey the mandatory behavior. That's a lot of mandates, but that's what the broadcast flag is all about: using the law to first re-define and then enforce a new copyright regime under the guise of digital rights management."

We have talked about this a lot here on DMT but Shapiro and the Consumer Electronics Association are not enemies of DRM from what all of us can tell. While generally approving of its use, they are routinely critical of its effects on innovation. They have been claiming for a long time that the RIAA has not been co-operating with them to come up with a middle-ground solution. Read this article to get caught up in this crazy and seemingly never-ending battle.