Fight Anti-American US Corporations

My, I have been on a militant kick of late haven't I?

Oh well. The problem is that this crap is all coming to a head lately, and it keeps coming back to the same damn point every time -- evil corporations are not only suck, they are rapidly becoming un-American. Sure, every big business you can think of was wrapped all over the flag post-9/11, but more than a few have used that tragic day to advance a seriously anti-Constitutional agenda.

At the moment, the worst offenders (though by no means the only offenders) are the RIAA and the MPAA. Together and separately, they have launched a full-scale assault on one of the most basic tenets of copyright law (which is seriously underrated as a law that helps our economy function smoothly), Fair Use.

Now, I know some of you are thinking "there's no guarantee of Fair Use in the Constitution" and you are right. It ain't there. But maybe it's time it was, along with a serious strengthening of the right to privacy, now large eviscerated by these same corporations. I maintain that the erosion of the Fair Use protection, like the serious dismantling of our rights to privacy and protections against unreasonable search and seizure, are direct attacks on a key phrase of the Constitution, and the very bedrock of our society -- "the right of all people to be secure in their persons" and "the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Fair Use largely came into it's own in the mid 70s with the advent of cassette tape. Suddenly it was easy for people to make copies of the music they heard on the radio, or that they had bought, and trade it among friends. Sound familiar?

I know that for me and my friends, tape trading was rampant. It wasn't just a local thing, either ... we'd mail "cassette letters" to each other, full of home-grown humour and "what's playing on local radio" (with comments) and songs we'd bought that we particularly liked and wanted to share. It was really important to us, it kept us connected to each other, and for me in particular it was a salve on an isolated and lonely point in my young life. Those tape letters saved my life, man, to say nothing of opening my eyes to a very wide world of music beyond Top 40 tripe.

Despite the incredible popularity of cassettes (cheap, easy to carry and mail, ubiquitous), the music industry completely failed to collapse. Indeed, it thrived. Even though we tape-traded like fiends, each and every one of us had (and continues to have) a sizable collection of legally-purchased music, most of it stemming directly or indirectly from those tapes.

Of particular concern to the moneygrubbing record companies were illegal recordings known as "bootlegs". What they didn't tell people was that bootlegs actually helped them figure out who was really "connecting" with their audience, and who wasn't. The record companies also had no answer to the charge that they had no intention of ever releasing most of the music on bootleg records (ie mostly live performances) anyway. Further, bootlegs helped bands that were not radio-friendly find an audience. As the music mag Goldmine figured out years ago, bootlegs are primarily bought only by people who had already bought every legitimate release available.

When CDs appeared, people started making tapes of those, mainly to listen to in the car ... though many "compilations" started appearing in everyone's tape collection. The record companies again did not do much other than complain at length about the "lost revenue" (ha!) of "piracy." They were mostly stymied by the 1983 Home Recording Act, passed in late 1983 and bolstered by a January 1984 Supreme Court decision that said, to the emerging home video industry's surprise, that making a copy -- for personal use -- of things you have paid for is perfectly okay. This was incorporated into later revisions of the copyright law as "Fair Use." Tape compilations you passed out to your friends were still technically illegal, but were overlooked since it usually resulted in sales of full CDs/records/tapes to people who got "hooked" on the tunes provided on this "homebrew" compilations. A small levy on blank tapes was agreed on by all parties as way to compensate record companies for their largely-imaginary "losses due to home taping."

Then, along came DAT. The RIAA and the Electronic Industries Association swung into full gear, and with the help of Al Gore (yes, that Al Gore), passed legislation barring tape-copying on DAT machines, which the RIAA saw as a major threat. Unfortunately for them, the technology was shown to be a fraud that protected nothing, and so the Copy-Code system (as it was called) was dropped. In 1989, the US Office of Technology Assessment released a report that showed the RIAA and their ilk were over-reacting buffoons. Home taping, they showed, had no detrimental effect on sales, but rather a positive one.

Oops.

The existing rules of thumb were then codified into law in 1992 as the Audio Home Recording Act, signed by George Bush. It screwed DAT fans to the point where it pretty much killed the future of the format, but at least home tapers knew their rights were secure.

Oops again.

In late 1998, a completely industry-written wet dream of anti-consumer propaganda, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, is passed by Congress. Like the RICO act, which subsequently got much abused, the DMCA has since been discovered to be a catbox full of stinky little anti-consumer pellets, and will -- I have confidence -- ultimately be dismantled. It is another in Congress' long history of over-reactive bills, compensating for minor infractions by completely selling out the public to the corporations.

It took a while, but the effect of the DMCA are now being fully felt.

First it was DVDs. For the first time, the industry asked for and got an absolutely-no-copying encryption method approved. The DMCA said that even if you paid for this DVD, even if you just wanted to copy a still shot for your computer wallpaper or to use as an illustration for an article, or just wanted to "rip" the audio so you could listen to it in the car -- all previously a-ok under the Fair Use provision -- you no longer could. Not only that, but even attempting to defeat the "region encoding" or the encryption of the DVD -- or even possessing the software to do so -- was illegal.

There are two issues there -- region encoding and encryption -- and that's an important distinction to make. There's lots to say about that, but this article is long enough already, so I'll just entreat you to Slashdot's "Your Rights Online" pages for a depressing, nay terrifying look at where we're headed.

Emboldened by the (mostly) successful effort to prevent people from copying DVDs in any way whatsoever (legal or otherwise), it was just a matter of time before the RIAA tried the same stunt. So now we have what they call "copy protected CDs" (which are not, in fact, Compact Discs at all!) that not only claim to be "un-rippable", but are actually unplayable on a wide variety of equipment. That's right, you can't even play these discs on a computer ... or a DVD player ... or most car stereo players ... or some home CD players ... or many portable CD players.

Wow, I want to spend gouging amounts of money on CDs that don't actually work on many types of equipment! But wait, there's more!! It turns out that on some computers, these copy-protected pieces of crap actually damage the machine, rendering it useless! (most reports of this have been from owners of slot-loading iMacs, but there have been reports of irreversible damage on PCs as well.)

Luckily, so far the only audio discs that have this incredibly stupid and dangerous copy-protection are pure shit, and therefore easily avoided. I'm almost tempted to say that anyone moronic enough to actually pay retail for Celine Dion's new album or Jennifer Lopez's new remix collection deserves what they get, but it's really not a joking matter.

Naturally, computer manufacturers are hopping mad about this, and are forced to engage in very bad public relations by not covering this rape of their systems in their warranties. Hopefully the accidental destruction of thousands of computer systems by ignorant consumers will force Apple and others to take the RIAA to court and stop this madness.

In the meantime, you the poor consumer (or "assumed criminal" as the RIAA would have it) will just have to be extremely cautious in what you stick into your computer, or better yet actively boycott titles and companies that engage in this highly-deceptive and dangerous practice. Sue the bastards if they ruin your machine, write nasty letters to record stores that carry copy-protected audio disks (and be sure to point out that they are neither technically nor legally "CDs"), let the artists and record companies know via their "fan sites" that you will not stand for this and will simply steal the copy-protected music via services such as AudioGalaxy rather than risk your expensive personal computers (that oughta annoy em!) and most importantly write your congressperson and tell them to act NOW.

There are other things you can do as well -- support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the few large organisations going to bat for consumers, and thank Philips, the one electronics maker (and inventor of the CD format, by the way) who is willing to stand up to the MegaCorp Mafia.

Oooh, I love it when I invent a turn of phrase! :)