FCC Commissioner Wants To Push For DRM 337
RareButSeriousSideEffects writes "Techdirt reports that 'Newest Commissioner Deborah Tate has apparently announced that while she knows its outside the FCC's authority, she's a huge fan of copy protection and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic.'"
Not really news (fortunately) (Score:5, Informative)
Deb can preach the myriad benefits of DRM from her 'bully pulpit' as much as she likes...the fact is that the FCC has no authority on this matter, so her preaching won't go beyond establishing her personal views on the issue. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals made the limits of the FCC on this issue quite clear when they struck down the Broadcast Flag [uscourts.gov] (PDF warning).
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:2, Informative)
Antiquated technologies? (Score:5, Informative)
You have no idea how much the airwaves actually are used by mission critical systems, do you? Wireless is the future, not the past. Analog TV is still in full force in many areas where cable still isn't available (including my childhood home). HAM and CB are far from antiquated and are still used in full force. I'm sorry if you don't use them. HAM's pay for licenses which goes to the FCC and CB's are low power transmitters operating on a very small frequency range.
The point is there needs to be designated ranges, otherwise you will have Joe Ham who will stick his 1KW transmitter too close to the operating range of something important - say the transponder of a cell tower (900 MHz) and disrupt cell service. For example. There needs to be regulated bandwidths.
You have it all wrong anyways - they are actually generating money for the government. About 1 penny of your taxes goes to fund them, but then they turn around and generate multi-billion dollars of revenue. reference [broadcastengineering.com]. Their budget for 2006 is $304M, all but $4.8M comes from regulatory fees. And they generate $26.8B for uncle Sam through auctioning off freed up frequencies.
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:3, Informative)
Of course it's legal. If you own the track, you are able to make personal copies of it under the Fair Use clause. The only hindrance to that would be if you had to defeat some sort of DRM to get it to MP3 (hence violating the DMCA), but iTunes itself provides a way to burn a CDA, stripping the DRM. Once it's on CD, you can convert it to whatever format you'd like.
The problem, as you hinted at, is that you're compressing the audio twice--once into the iTunes
Howto contact her... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/tate/mail.html [fcc.gov]
Feel free to do the same
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, that's incorrect. There are a number of people in history (Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, George Washington, etc) who have gained "power" but have not abused it the way some people are abusing it now. This lady is just a petty political figure that is sticking her nose were it doesn't belong. Will her advocation of DRM have an effect? Probably not.
Re:time for the FCC to get a D I V O R C E! (Score:3, Informative)
You could try finding fans of Van Zant, I suppose since their CD was one of the XCP rootkit CDs. Then again, I don't listen to country music, so I'm not sure if that's a hard or easy task to find Van Zant fans, but given all the other artists affected by the root kit, I'm leaning towards hard.
Re:I know (Score:3, Informative)
Whether or not they choose to exercise the right to duplicate is up to them (just as it would be up to you for your hidden work). If they ever gave someone a copy though, then they would have no way of preventing that person from further copying the work.
There is no "intellectual property". You can't "own" a creative work(because property is inheritly tangible in nature).
lucky us (Score:2, Informative)
there should be at least 5 incompatable standards for DRM, so the consumer can choose how they get maximumly screwed out of what they bought.