"AudioFile" staffers recently attended the
Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit 2002. Attendees came from every walk of life, but shared the same level of passion about music.
We were surprised at their reactions to new copy protection technologies for CDs. We're sure you will be, too.
Mark Cuban, founder of
Broadcast.com, owner of the Dallas Mavericks:
"You gotta be a dumbass to [use copy protection]. Rule number one with any sort of business I've ever been associated with is, you don't abuse your customers. You try to make life easier for them. Copy protection doesn't do that."
Sen. Kevin Murray, California state senator, chair of Senate Select Committee on the Entertainment Industry:
"I really think you've got to come up with what is fair use -- come up with a definition. What is fair use? Is it two copies? Is it copies for your immediate family, copies for your friends? Is it something you can give someone as a gift? This is what we need to figure out. I think logical people can sit down and figure out, 'OK, [this is] what is fair.'"
Fred Von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney,
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
"I think at a minimum record labels, like any company that sells a product to the public, has an ethical duty, a moral duty -- even if not a legal one -- to honestly tell you what it is you're buying. For the last 20-odd years consumers have understood CDs to function a certain way. In the last few years they've realized that one of the ways that you can make a copy of your CD is to make a copy in your MP3 player. Now suddenly CDs are changing -- and the companies that are selling us the CDs appear to be unwilling to tell us which CDs that they are changing."
Edward Felton, professor of computer science,
Princeton University:
"The consumers have to be able to get a variety of music and to be able to play it and listen to it and experience it the way they want. And there's a risk that copy protection and other technology like this will make it more difficult for consumers to experience the music they legitimately bought in the way they want to experience it. And anytime that you make the consumer's experience worse, you have to worry. Not only about whether it's fair, but whether it's a good idea for the industry doing it in the first place."
Ted Cohen, vice president of new media for
EMI:
"My life is made up of gadgets. I've got my iPod in my pocket. I've got five other portables in my bag. I love being able to move my music around, and you know, no one should stop you from doing that -- as long as you are using intelligent behavior. So that's what we are trying to do: get to a balance where we can offer you a good experience, where the consumer does not feel constrained, but that we are doing something to try and rein things back in a little bit. Because right now, things are just too out of control. It's really just out of control."
Jim Burger, attorney for
Dow, Lohnes, and Albertson:
"Music throughout the millennium has been a service -- it only became a product when Thomas Edison figured out how to put voices on wax cylinders. What the Internet appears to do is to turn that product back into a service, which means a whole new concept of distribution and added value. It's alien to most people, and that's what makes this debate very interesting."
Johnny Temple, bass player,
Girls Against Boys:
"To me, designing a product like that is a sign of desperation. Because in this day and age, if you design something like that, there is always a way around it. It's like the floodgates have been opened up. These big record companies, if they want to try and control everything, they'd be better off to try and just buy out all the companies like Napster than try to put protections on these CDs. There are just too many brilliant young kids out there that are either going to break the protection or go out of the stereo [analog out] and make a new digital copy."
Copy-protection related links
What's your opinion?
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