Windows of opportunity

Now that iPods and the like have moved well beyond geek gadgetry and even octagenarian senators can experience the benefits of being able to carry your music around with you, perhaps Tim Bray is right and the window of opportunity for the music industry to buy new laws to protect its business model is about to slam shut.

Danny O’Brien posted an account of a recent Senate hearing on the broadcast flag proposal:

[…]

The second revelation, dropped into the later discussion of the RIAA’s audio flag, was that Senator Stevens’ daughter bought him an iPod.

This is unhappy news for the RIAA. Once again, their representative was forced to burst into praises of MP3 players (a technology his organization attempted to sue out of existence in 1998).

And when Stevens asked whether with the audio flag in place he would be able to record from the radio and put the shows onto his iPod: that’s when the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol really began to sweat.

With that simple question, the octogenarian Senator encapsulated arguments about place-shifting, interoperability, and fair use that would have taken whole federal dockets to explain a few years ago.

Even more damning was Senator Sununu’s follow-up question, in which he asked if, post-flag, the Senator might record three songs from the radio today, and listen to only one of them again tomorrow. Of course, under the RIAA’s proposed controls, you may not: this is “disaggregation” in their language. This flag, which was sold to Congress to impede piracy, appeared to be designed primarily to control and inconvenience law-abiding, ripping, mixing, modern-day Senators.

[…]

As the hearing showed, the holes in these flags are large, and its complex consequences are dawning on both houses.

And God help the broadcast flag-makers if someone buys Senator Stevens a video iPod.

I wonder if the Open Rights Group will be able to afford to buy every MEP an iPod once it’s cashed all those standing orders.

(Actually, that strategy probably wouldn’t work. The problem isn’t simply that legislators are unfamiliar with the technology, it’s that they’re expected to deal with so many different technological and scientific issues that on any topic that’s not obviously a priority for their electorate they generally have no choice but to rely on the advice of ‘expert’ advisors. Which means that one important aspect of the ORG’s job once it’s up and running must surely be to ensure that MPs understand that DRM does affect their voters, right here and right now.)

[Via Ongoing]