From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The new Congress has barely begun, but the major record labels are already up to their old tricks.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has re-introduced the PERFORM Act, a backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio. Satellite and digital radio stations as well as Internet webcasters would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year — take action now to block it again.
This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. Such devices would be allowed to include “reasonable recording” features, but that excludes choosing and playing back selections based on song title, artist, or genre. Want to freely move recordings around your home network or copy them to the portable player of your choice? You’ll be out of luck if PERFORM passes.
This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later.
Tell your representatives to oppose the PERFORM Act now.
Please visit the EFF site and join the campaign to stop this.
What a stupid joke. SONY/BMG has made a fotune hawking tape recorders, VCRs and CD burners. They’ll sell blank media to anybody who wants it in volume too.
Anybody can buy a machine from this RIAA/MPAA member company, which copies 6 CDs or DVDs at a time. Dianne Frankenstein hasn’t suggested that these be restricted, for purchase by people with a legitimate need for them. A musician who sells original music might need one. Most of us don’t.
The RIAA’s credibility is no better than a corrupt drug dealing cop as long as they insist upon providing us with the means to steal their own music.
Thieves were raided in your own bakyard less than a year ago. Oakland police seized several of those SONY duplicators and thousands of bootleg CDs and DVDs. Wanna bet that SONY’s ($1500.00 each) hardware had already paid for itself, before this raid?
I might take Feinstein seriously if she freaked out over this corruption, with the same kind passion we hear about those ugly guns! We need to abolish the Hollywood entertainment industry and get rid of politicians who take their dirty money.
Maybe that Deadhead committee chairmasn can bottle up her piece of crap? Patrick Leahy’s own access to his beloved music will suffer the same kind of punishment.