Blogging Ottinger (tim)Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording | CNET News.com
A new CNET article, Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording, steams me. I suppose they consider that listening to their products is too easy, and people may want to listen more than once. They refer to it as “fair competition” but I consider it “poor customer relations.” I hope that either a) they don’t do something this stupid, or that b) they do this, and nobody ever uses their products so that they fold.
The whole point of radio, from a consumer’s point of view, is that you can hear new things without paying for them. Recording radio is only so useful, but if someone leaves a recorder running then I think that’s the natural result of making the material available at no cost (like recording TV shows). If they are just time-shifting, format-shifting, and replaying then I don’t see the least bit of harm and no profit to the person recording (only utility). There are already laws to deal with illegal reselling. I don’t think we need to erode our fair use in order to support some crazy new business model that the broadcasters want to put in place.
There is no legal right or ethical imperative that one should pay money to be entertained, or that one should pay more money each time a particular artifact entertains them. We don’t rent our childrens’ toys by the hour for playtime, and no moral issues are raised. We paid for it once, and we play as we choose.
This is silly, and it can’t work, and it’s going to waste a lot of time and money and make a lot of people unhappy. DRM is not a service to the consumer, and so consumers don’t want it. It’s not good marketing.
